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

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.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  First, we gotta talk about Josh Kushner, Bob Iger. They bought the L.A. Lakers. They're buying

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  He's done it again.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  He's done it again. They said he couldn't do it. They

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  In the sauna this morning,

• 0:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  I was thinking about the name Thrive Eternal. I think it's one of the best names for a fund ever.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  Like Eternal is such a powerful statement and it fits the strategy so well.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Doesn't he look great? Look at this guy. It's incredible.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  I cleaned it up.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  I cleaned it up.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  Super clean, looking amazing. Uh, yeah.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  Finally, truth be told, when we started the show, I went from, we started hitting the gym.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  We did a little bulking season. It was bulking season.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  And I added, I added some weight and I basically over

• 1:04John Coogan?

  You added 45 pounds of lean muscle. You don't need to undersell it, Jordy. And you lost 20 pounds of fat.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so. I added a little weight and I basically grew out of my suit slowly, about two pounds a month.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  For 18 months.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  It went exponential.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  And

• 1:21John Coogan?

  It was a fast take off.

• 1:22Jordi Hays?

  It became extremely uncomfortable to sit here, even though all these, the suits

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Suits are beautiful.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  That, uh, that we had gotten made. I love them.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  Got a little tight.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna have to save them for when I'm an elderly man.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 1:33Jordi Hays?

  Because at some point, we'll shed, we'll shed the muscle.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, cutting season's coming.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  We'll be lean maxing.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  Summer's only

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  Cutting season is coming.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Nine months away.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  Forty years. Forty years.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  But it's good to be back.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  It's good to be back.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, looks good. Uh, let me take you through the story so everyone has the facts straight about this uh, 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

• 2:32John Coogan?

  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. Uh, they're not some, uh, random businessman coming in from out of town who

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  And the seller's under federal investigation.

• 2:53John Coogan?

  Yes, uh, for some very complicated deals where some private credit transactions were put into an insurance firm that they own. Uh, those affiliated transactions, if you originate the deal and then you put it in your insurance company's, uh, on your insurance company's books, you need, you need to disclose this. Uh, now, you can actually do this. Berkshire Hathaway, about 46% of their, uh, 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, uh, 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.

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  Capital allocator, bit of a bad, bit of a, bit of a bad boy.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Even the bad boy thing. Yeah, maybe. Um, but you know, innocent until proven guilty. Obviously, these are just allegations. He's just being investigated and

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  And a nice, nice little 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, uh, 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 minority stake in the Miami Heat, which he will have to sell to complete the Lakers deal and was previously a minority, uh, owner of the Memphis Grizzlies. Iger, well, meanwhile, stepped down as Disney CEO earlier this year and has already made a major investment in the Los, in Los Angeles sports. He and his wife Willow Bay become controlling,

• 4:30John Coogan?

  became controlling owners of the National Women's Soccer League's Angel City FC in 2024. Uh, the prospective new owners are already getting a warm reception from some of the biggest names associated with the franchise. Uh, 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. 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

• 5:14John Coogan?

  championships back to L.A." So Magic Johnson is optimistic about this deal.

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  Weirdly, this is making me optimistic on L.A. overall.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:22Jordi Hays?

  I've had a generally bad outlook. I have had extreme confidence that the weather is gonna be very nice for a long time.

• 5:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but that's really been the only thing I'm willing to really lean on.

• 5:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:33Jordi Hays?

  But this is giving me a slightly more positive outlook.

• 5:36John Coogan?

  And, and you've been pitching Thrive on your new incubation, uh, the pothole company of Los Angeles, the pothole filling company of Los Angeles.

• 5:44Jordi Hays?

  Huge opportunity. It's really balanced here for potholes.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Hiring the best AI researcher.

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  No, I want somebody, I want somebody to do this. Figure out how to fix potholes.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  Quickly.

• 5:55John Coogan?

  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

• 6:03Jordi Hays?

  Small, small, effectively missiles.

• 6:06John Coogan?

  Oh, missiles.

• 6:06Jordi Hays?

  Fired at potholes.

• 6:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 6:08Jordi Hays?

  And then a laser that sort of like melts the debris down to fill in the hole.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, it just kind of sort of, you, you bring the molten asphalt up to space. It comes down, warms up and as it travels through the atmosphere, lands directly in the pothole and smushes in, fills it in perfectly.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  But, 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.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:36Jordi Hays?

  Otherwise, you're gonna have a bad time. I was talking to, I was talking to, uh, to a, to a Maybach owner, uh, 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.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  We have a moment of silence.

• 6:52Jordi Hays?

  The pothole company of Los Angeles?

• 6:56John Coogan?

  It's a banger idea, right?

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  It's a banger idea.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  I might become the Batman of potholes.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  Sneaking out late at night.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:06Jordi Hays?

  It might, it might, look, I could go out in this suit.

• 7:08John Coogan?

  You could, you could. Yeah, like that guy who was cleaning up the FDNY, uh, corner call box, like same thing.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  Potholes in L.A. 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, uh, disaster for the last six months. Anyway, uh, 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 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.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  Of potholes.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  I think he got something.

• 7:59Jordi Hays?

  DT and Tyler says he's gonna film the, the missions. This would just be absolutely riveting content. You're out on the 4:05, 2:00 a.m., just you and a nasty pothole and a little bit of traffic.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  And a little bit of asphalt slathered in there, right? Is that what you're doing?

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, my big issue is when they, they, when they fill in, they just do a really bad job.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  And so it basically creates a bunch of mini speed bump.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  And you get a sinkhole. So then you just start a sinkhole company in Los Angeles.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  That's a whole other problem.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was crazy. Oh, whatever happened with that in L.A.? It was really bad for a while. I guess they fixed it?

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  I would like to, um, get somebody to throw on a tinfoil hat and figure out why a bunch of pipes started exploding everywhere around the city.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  Somebody's gotta 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, uh, it's a trophy asset. It's just because you like the team, um, 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 gonna be around forever, no matter how many robots there are, makes a lot of sense. And so that, that balancing effect seems to be a new thing that's driving demand in, uh, in sports investing. Do you agree with that?

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  I do. Fits the strategy.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  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. Uh, and we've seen, uh, hints and rumors of this for a while. Uh, anything else on the Lakers? We're gonna talk to Darren in just, uh, 13 minutes about it. Get him to explain.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna walk us through the, the whole rule set.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Jordi Hays?

  Very excited about that.

• 9:51John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, there's a solar eclipse going on right now.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  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?

• 10:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so it's in Europe right now, full solar eclipse.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  Full solar eclipse?

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Wow, should've gone. I missed this one. When's the next one?

• 10:22Jordi Hays?

  What does it mean? What's the meaning, Tyler?

• 10:25John Coogan?

  What does it mean? Uh, it's a great omen for high beta AI stocks.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  That's what I choose to read into it. Lever up. That's what the 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. 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.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  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. There's already some games that have hit the timeline. There'll be a whole bunch more on benchmarks.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so so seems incredibly impressive. Excited to get reactions and get people's lived experiences with the model. Price wars have definitely begun.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  You know, 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.

• 12:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:02Jordi Hays?

  Right? There's been enough, you know, moments, releases so far where the benchmarks looked amazing, but then the actual lived experience is, is, you know, less, less significant. They also had a great launch yesterday, so they're building momentum.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  Sure. SpaceX is up almost 40% just in the last five days. That's a pretty

• 12:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I'm so curious, I wish, I wish you could figure out a way to parse out what what's driving that. Is it the semi-analysis?

• 12:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  Semi-analysis.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  That felt like Friday.

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  Friday, well, yeah, that was Friday at the close.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  It popped during the day, though, right? So

• 12:35Jordi Hays?

  But then up 10% today.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it was leaking out.

• 12:39Jordi Hays?

  CNBC says SpaceX short sellers are running out of bullets as stock rebounds more than 30% off. We're running out of ammo.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  I'm tired, boss. I can't keep buying at these prices. Like, I'm buying, you gotta 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.

• 13:31John Coogan?

  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. 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 Grok Bot. 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 Grok Bot, which actually it has a nice little rhythm to it. I like, I like Grok Bot. Also, very good results on the artificial intelligence index, joining the frontier.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  It's 61, strong agentic performance, lower cost, obviously, and the model wars are upon us. Nvidia is also joining the model wars, selling, selling weapons to both sides potentially. Nematron 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.

• 14:37Jordi Hays?

  Switchyard.

• 14:38John Coogan?

  Switchyard's a good name.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  Good name.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  Kind of railroad connotations, which

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. You gotta 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, if you're a 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. Like, it's a logical place for it to live. And 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 racked for the lowest possible cost. If you're cost optimizing, you'll probably eventually have your own racks and your own

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Nvidia work, you know, data center, basically. Anyway, should we debate Anthropic's watermarking?

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, dive into this. I don't, I don't know that I have a strong take yet.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Ben Thompson has a strong take on Anthropic's 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. Anthropic 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

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Bill Gurley was making the point that traditional watermark on an image is very visible.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:11Jordi Hays?

  Just like immediately visible.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:13Jordi Hays?

  And so it's not actually, it's more like, basically, we're going to leave evidence that this was generated.

• 16:17John Coogan?

  Bread crumbs. Yeah, breadcrumbs. And so in theory, a LinkedIn could, or an X could integrate with an Anthropic API to check the watermark. 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 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

• 16:59John Coogan?

  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.

• 17:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's so, it's so interesting, like, how much of their revenue is coming from Europe?

• 17:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:18Jordi Hays?

  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 gonna, if you're gonna go forward with something like this.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:28Jordi Hays?

  We're just gonna exit the market entirely.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  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 codebase. 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? What's wrong with this? Did I make any grammatical errors? Did I make any spelling errors?

• 18:16John Coogan?

  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 ChatGPT to, to, 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 I was like, well, like, the last step, but it's like, but does that matter?

• 18:58John Coogan?

  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, 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

• 19:43John Coogan?

  only using it at one certain step and then doing an editing pass yourself. People have been Going back and forth these all 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 do you think, Tyler?

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so I don't think the actual like, underlying the way they watermark it is like, public, but presumably, it's like, basically during the sampling process, when you're like, generating tokens, 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. 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.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  If you look at the new Pangram, or whatever, it doesn't like, say the whole document is AI. It says like, this sentence is AI.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  These tokens are like, very similar.

• 20:54John 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.

• 20:59Jordi Hays?

  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. Like, if somebody puts out even an Instagram caption, they'll get dunked on, even if it's one sentence, right?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Like, if you look at the Google Synth ID, so Gemini has done this for like, a few years. 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 piece of text. It's like, okay, this is probably AI written. It's not saying the whole thing is, is like, yeah, zero, one. So I think this is kind of like, blowing it out of proportion.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think that many people will have a problem with it.

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  How long till someone ships the Claude Watermark Remover app?

• 21:40John Coogan?

  I mean, somebody shipped a Pangram fighter, like, 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.

• 21:59Jordi Hays?

  Let's head over to the timeline. Alfred Wallforce, over at Listen Labs, been on the show before, coming in with one of the hottest takes.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, got some pushback.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  Said, founders, only send investor updates.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, give me the boat horn.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  When you're winning, Listen has sent to we its history, all fundraise announcements. Nobody reads a bad update and helps. They just mark you as dying.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  I think your crazy voice sounds crazier than mine.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  Let me check. Oh, it sounds about the same. It sounds about the same.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  Yes, I, I, I do think-

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  No, it's just like, it's, 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, 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?

• 23:30Jordi Hays?

  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?

• 23:51John Coogan?

  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, you're purely in the idea maze, very early stage, the revenue's zero every month, you're just sort of like, you know, out figuring out the first product?

• 24:16Jordi Hays?

  I mean, at that, at that stage, it depends. Hopefully, you only have like, one or two investors. And, but, 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 bearish. But it's still better to just have, like, even quick bullet points. Hey, here's what we're working on. We'll come, we'll, we'll have another update in a month.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Okay. So, because Listen Labs is only a three-year-old company. And they raised 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 2026, 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, if, 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

• 25:25John Coogan?

  money every 18 months, realistically, every 24 months, it's a harder industry. And so, I, as an investor with a Series A check, I want to know, okay, how much runway is actually left? Because, but that's not the equation here. So, little bit of a, of a, 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 of your investors every six months. So there's a little bit of that.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, and a lot of this 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 like, just really, really bad, just really, really bad advice.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  It's not one-size-fits-all advice. I completely agree. The other-

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the other, the other thing I would say is like, how do you know a company that's building in public is struggling? They stopped building in public. They haven't, like, I've 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, I'm sharing our investor updates publicly.

• 26:38John Coogan?

  Because they're just proud of it.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  And they usually will string together like, six months of that. And then they go dark. It's like, oh, what, what, you don't want to build in public, when you're not growing anymore, and revenue is declining, or, or you were, you were a thin wrapper, whatever it is. If you're not updating somebody, like, I had one of the 70-odd angel investments that I've made, hadn't heard from them in a year. And then they, they, they texted and said, hey, like, are you free to catch up? And the ask was basically like, will you, will you like, do a bridge round? 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

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  it's so much different to be getting like, those updates in real time, seeing how they're dealing with adversity, seeing how, how they're building momentum as a company. And, yeah. So anyways, don't do this. Just don't do it.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  Don't do it in every, in every case.

• 27:45Jordi Hays?

  Don't listen to Alfred, the founder of-

• 27:48John Coogan?

  I'm sure it applies to some companies. I'm sure it applies to some companies.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor and a privilege.

• 27:53John Coogan?

  And have the best Wednesday ever.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  Please do.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 27:57Jordi Hays?

  We love you.