Mark Cuban
Appearances
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And I think that carries on to this day because you can't look at things he says and say, that's really an in-depth response or that's a nuanced response. And so that's what I said on CNN. And that led to the image that you guys posted. So that was the falling out. That was the falling out, yeah. Or maybe... But it wasn't a complete fallout.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
If you want me to continue, so it's not a complete falling out because after that, he gets elected. I send him a congratulatory message and I say congrats. You know, if I can ever help, I'm happy to. And so... When they were starting to look at replacing the ACA, I was starting to get into health care and being excited about health care.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And so they invited me to the White House and I spoke to Jared. I spoke to this woman named Brooke Rollins, I think her name is. And I spoke to a whole group of people. I went to CMS and I spoke to the head of the agency. I spoke to the head of CMS, all talking about this thing I created called the 10 plan, which is a means tested ability to support. Anyways.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
um and so they brought me back in and then when the pandemic hit i sent him some ideas on you know backstopping um bank accounts and credit card accounts so everybody doesn't just default and he had minutiae call me and then when they had with the pandemic he connected with peter navarro and i worked with him and actually found a company here in it actually outside of fort worth that
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I put together with them and I helped that company increase their output. And Peter Navarro worked with them closely and we really made a dent in all the PPE issues. And he invited me to the White House. And then I went to the White House one time, went into the Oval Office and there's pictures of me talking. And again, I tried to explain the healthcare stuff.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
he just wasn't having any type of in-depth conversation. He wanted to tell me about how much money he saved on, um, on, from Boeing, you know, how many billions and this and that. And then it was a short conversation. And then I was leaving and he goes, look, are you still on that show? And he goes, I'm like, yeah, shark tank. He goes, yeah, that's Barron's favorite show.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
It's just Donald Trump is not a Republican. Republicans are Donald Trump. You know, the Republican Party is now the family business for Donald Trump. And to me, I just think Kamala Harris is a better choice for the country. Thank you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And then as I'm leaving further, he goes, wait a minute, I really liked that suit. So, you know, and, and, you know, he's called me since, um, since he left the White House, but later in his tenure at the White House, and invited me to dinner. I mean, and so it's not like we left as foes, and it's not like I don't like him. I just don't think he's the best person to be president.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I don't think he was a good person.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I think the way he dealt with the zeitgeist isn't the right word, just the vibe of the country was really, really, really bad. I think the hate that he conveyed, I think the fact that what he tweeted negatively, you know, so companies didn't know what was coming next. You know, he tweeted negatively about me. He tweeted negatively about other people. I thought that was a real bad thing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
When the BLM protests happened and turned into riots, When they went into Minnesota, he was like, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Who the fuck says that as a president? And so we had more people die during riots during his term than Biden by a long shot. And I think he misrepresented where he stood in terms of being anti-war. If you go back to 2019 and look at the war in Yemen,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
there were hundreds, at least 100,000 people plus died. And there was a bipartisan resolution to say, we're not selling any more to the Saudis. We're not selling any more weapons to the Saudis. And a bipartisan resolution, including Mark Meadows and Rand Paul and others,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
said, you know, passed it, and it went to his desk, and he said, we're still going to sell these munitions and these weapons to Saudi Arabia, even though these people continue to die. So when we talk about, you know, it's not all that much different than Ukraine in some respects, only Saudi Arabia got the Glengarry leads, and Ukraine got our old stuff, and we replaced it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And so when he comes out now and says, look, You know, I'm against all wars. There were no wars. That's bullshit, right? The mainstream media.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I didn't blame him for the riots. What I said was how he dealt with it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
No, don't diminish it, David. Don't diminish it as just mean tweets. People pay attention to what happens.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I'm not saying he's at fault that the riots happened.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Presidential, probably. I voted for George W. twice. Then I voted for Obama twice. And then I voted for Clinton and Biden. But before that, I voted for Ross Perot Jr. My first vote was for a guy named something, John Anderson. So, I mean, I literally worked on Ross Perot Jr. 's campaign way back when.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Well, I'm not done with the wrong stuff. But wait, there's more.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Well, he inherited some for sure.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And there wasn't really a war that happened in Turkey. And then when we got shut down, he didn't know there wasn't really a war. I'll agree with that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And what I'm saying is the corollary of that, the analogy to that is what happened in Yemen.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
and that we had a chance to get out of yemen and reduce the deaths in yemen much like they're talking about getting us out of the out of ukraine now and we had the opportunity to stop selling um weapons but he looked the best i could tell he looked at that as a sales opportunity to sell to mbs all these weapons and he thought that was a positive so
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
A lot of people died and we're still in there today. So it's not he had a chance to get us out and he did not. So I'm not arguing that he's perfect and Biden's perfect and it's tit for tat. It just is what it is. I'm just saying state making this statement of fact, you know, and that's it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So let me give you the one last thing and then we'll keep going. So then I'll go to some positives. So the next thing you can actually trace that Yemen war. I can't say you actually I'm a little bit of hyperbole, but I can trace that from that Yemen war to the start of inflation. And here's how I explain that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And so in Yemen, he did a deal for his boy in Saudi Arabia and sent them all the weapons in 2019. Fast forward one year and you're in May, April, let's say of 2020. And you're looking at the price of gas, the lowest it's ever been, the price of oil just collapsing. At one point, people were paying you to take their oil. And so there was an opportunity.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
He made a decision because there was a situation that came up. The oil companies came in and said, this price of oil being so low is killing us, right? We're losing a lot of money. We anticipate losing more because with the pandemic now starting, demand is dropping like a rock. And that was coming from the oil companies. And so what he did, he said, OK, MBS owes me a favor over in Saudi Arabia.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
That's the connection. And Putin's my boy. I'm going to go to them and ask them to reduce production. Now, what happens to the price of gas when the largest producers of oil and energy decrease their production? The price starts going up and up and up.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
What's up, guys? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. Of course, of course. Good to have you here. Thank you. I've been practicing my virtue signaling, so I'm ready.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And so you can track the increase in the price of gas and how that impacted the price of goods the entire time that the production from the 10% reduction until they increase it like 300,000 barrels a day for two years. What is your argument here?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Yes. And I'm explaining to you, I'm getting the mainstream media.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
That's fine. But he had a chance. He was asked to end it by Congress. He was that he we were sending he was selling six hundred sixty billion dollars. I don't know the number. I can't remember exactly in weapons to Saudi Arabia.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I'm so glad you asked that because the mainstream media never talks about this stuff. And so she had a little dig there. So Trump goes in and says, we're going to cut the production by 10%. Demand is still relatively low. But in April, May, June, as people start venturing outside their house and to the end of 2020, the end of this term, there's an increase in demand. But the increase in demand
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
The increase in production doesn't match the increase in demand. They limited as part of this deal that Trump put together between Russia and Saudi Arabia, and that led to other people in OPEC Plus participating. They only increased the production of oil by 300,000 barrels a day, which didn't keep up with the amount of demand that was happening. That started increasing the price of gas.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Yeah, I was living out in LA and this was 92. And this is when computers were relatively new. I sold my company and I was taking acting classes and just living by Manhattan Beach and just loving life. And, you know, being from Texas, I knew people there and they were like, look, we need somebody who understands PCs and computers and software. Can you help us? And I was like, definitely.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
That price of gas continued to increase for the two years this program was in place. This program wasn't like, let's just cut it for 60 days and go back at it. It wasn't, let's just do this for 90 days. Let's just do this during the Trump administration. No, no, no, no, no. This deal went before they got, it took two years before they got back to pre-pandemic levels of production.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And so listen to what Trump says about drill, baby, drill. Why does he say drill, baby, drill will lead to lower costs? Because oil and energy costs are part of everything. And you know what matches up perfectly? What matches up perfectly is that 9.1% in 2022 and the day that that agreement ended. where MBS and Russia limited production, that agreement ended like this.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
If you did your little Venn diagram that like, and increased production, decreased production, bam.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
friendship with him or whatever there's a long list of people who don't who work with him who think he's an idiot and don't like him now you're on that list yeah i mean i don't think he's i'm not saying that's my position i'm just summarizing it look i don't think he's in your position no i haven't worked with one of the greatest sales people ever he's one of the greatest you know um motivators in terms of crowd motivation ever
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
But can I? He's Roy Cohn Jr. He's Roy Cohn Jr. That is who he is. If you read books about Roy Cohn, everything Roy Cohn says to do, tracing back to the McCarthy hearings in 54, everything Roy Cohn says to do, that is exactly what Donald Trump does.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
They initiated against. So Saudi Arabia initiated against Russia.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I mean, I wasn't to the point where I was involved in his decisions, but I actually had met him. My first company was a company called Micro Solutions, where we did systems integrations, local and wide area network. I wrote software for single and multi-user app, wide area network apps. And we literally helped Perot Systems get into local and wide area networking.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
No, what I'm saying is MBS, oh, Trump won. MBS owed Trump one. So MBS starts the price war with Russia one year later. And the oil companies come to Donald and say, look, we're getting destroyed. Demand is dropping. They've increased because of this price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia. Saudi Arabia decides to take it to Putin and increases their production significantly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So in order to keep their revenues up, Russia's got to do the same thing. Meanwhile, all the demand is dropping because of the pandemic. And so Donald gets asked by the oil companies to go to MBS and to Putin and say, we need to stop this price war. We need to reduce production. And to his credit, if you think that's a positive, to Trump's credit, He did it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And so by reducing production over a plan of two years, and you can go look at the production numbers, right? And when that stopped, by doing that, that increased the price of gas, the price of oil, the price of energy. And that was bad for American consumers who utilized gas, who paid for gas for their cars, really bad for them.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
But he decided to work with his oil company buddies and protect them. You can say that's a good decision or bad decision. Maybe it's strategic. He really felt they could go out of business and he wasn't willing to give them money to help them. But the bottom line was that decision that matches up exactly to that 9.1% that David Sachs mentions.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
It also matches up to, okay, does he fully support the oil companies over the price of gas? And will that influence what he will do as president again? So when he says, I'll just get out of Ukraine, Depends on who's making the money and where it is. When he says, I'm going to get people to drill, baby, drill. Well, we already learned a lesson.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So you're dropping a whole, hold on a second.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
It's not nonsense, David. Okay, I'll wait.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
40 minutes in. Let me ask a question. Freeberg talks. Go chat GPT it. Go Google it. Go look it up however you want.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Yeah, but it wasn't on the price... It wasn't on the price of gas because the price of gas is a global phenomenon, right? The price of oil, rather, is a global phenomenon. We are the largest producer of energy in the world, but we're still only about 13%, I think it is. Don't quote me on that, but that's a range. And so the other 87% has more of an impact.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And even to that, there was still an unlimited amount of drilling available on public lands and leases available that weren't fully used. Now, that said, I think Biden did mistakes, did make mistakes.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And so, one of my favorite stories from back then is, I'm terrified, I'm a 26 year old kid, I'm in Dallas. I'm going into pro systems. I get to meet Ross Perot Sr., the man, right? And I'm walking through and he's got the original, the model for the, no, he had the original Magna Carta, one of like the 13 Magna Cartas. And he had the original model for the Iwo Jima statue, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
David, I didn't say it was the only cause. I didn't say it was the exclusive cause.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
But they're not mutually exclusive.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I agree 100%. But even if you go back to the first two charts you put up, it matches up with exactly what I said. Production went down, demand went up, and the net result was that price of gas went up. and price of gases and everything. Is it the only cost?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I agree 100% with you. All I'm saying, you can try to trace it back to maybe it's 1% of the price. Maybe it's 3% of the price.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Maybe whatever the percentage is, I'm not saying it's exclusive, but you can trace it back to the decision being made to support the energy companies and say, we are going to reduce production rather than just letting the market play out and saying, we'll let gas prices stay as low as they are based off of supply and demand. Now, do I agree with you that supply chain disruption, transitory?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
With the flag up and everything. And I'm just terrified. I'm going to trip and just wipe out American history. And I walk up to him and I said, hi, Mr. Cuban, I'm Ross Perot Sr.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I agree with Freedberg 100%.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Just look at the data and look at the numbers and they match up. The Freedberg's point, the Freedberg's point, is that the only thing that caused inflation? Of course not. When you spend too much money, when you inflate the economy, when you have supply chain disruption, all those things contribute.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
But we're also not having the conversation to say, okay, how much of the supply chain disruption contributed to inflation? Was it 3% of that 20%? Was it 5%? Was it 7%? Was it 1%? We don't know. It's impossible.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I mean, I think there was good elements of the tax cut. I think he went too far, but I think they needed to come down from 35 percent. Whatever the corporate rate, 35 percent, I think, was corporate. That was too expensive. It made it difficult for us to compete globally. I thought 20 and I thought.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Bringing down cap gains, again, I forget exactly what they were, maybe 29%, I forget, was also smart. But I think he went too far. But you can argue that. There's no right answer on what that is going to be. It's a guess, right? You just put it out there and you hope what you plan and what you propose and what is implemented works. And you don't know until it does.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So I didn't have a problem with him trying that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Well, I'll acknowledge that it's not real and you're making it up, that you've never heard her say that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Yeah, you know, I was so nervous. And he like made fun of it and, you know, got to be friends and did a lot of business, helped those guys a lot. I made them a lot of money. They made me a lot of money.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Yeah, you made up her saying it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
It was the Biden platform at the DMC. You have never heard her talk about it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
But you're reaching, David, you're reaching, right? You've never heard her talk about it at all. She's been very specific that cap gains goes to 28%, that corporate tax- So Mark, what has Biden done well and what has he not done well?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I don't know. But then again, if Donald Trump participated in the debates on the Republican primary and the Republican primary, would you have voted for Donald Trump?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
No, I was just a little plebe, just trying to do little plebe stuff in L.A.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Look what happened to Joe Biden. For all we know, Vivek would have destroyed Trump as much as Trump destroyed Joe Biden. Nikki Haley would have destroyed Trump as much as Donald Trump destroyed Joe Biden.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And I think DeSantis would have crushed him too, right? They were allowed to compete.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I mean, Trump... Thank you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Okay, so here's my answer, right? First, going back to the problem, it wasn't a competitive primary if the contender doesn't participate. And yes, he did well against 15 other candidates in 2016, but I'd be willing to bet that he's also had cognitive decline. Everything he says and does is reflective of that. If Joe Biden had said the same thing, we would be having a lot of... We would...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
This was after I sold Micro Solutions. I bought a lifetime pass on American Airlines, moved to LA, got a place right on Manhattan Beach, right on the beach, get two flight attendants as roommates. And I was just loving life. And I was like, how else can I meet women? I'm going to take acting classes. And it was like one of the best things I've...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
we don't judge donald trump and his cognitive ability the way we did joe biden okay so we'll put that behind now let's go to joe biden do you think democrats lied about biden's condition let's just i'm going to tell you my personal experiences with joe biden right i didn't talk to him a lot twice during that period and i can tell you from the first time i saw him a year before the last time i saw him which was you know probably in march or april i forget
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
there was a decline. But the decline was in his sharpness, right? His quickness of response. If you sat down and you listened to him speak about something, which I did, he wasn't forceful. He looked like a walking corpse. He looked awful, right? But in terms of content, it was there. And so I understand why they positioned him the way they did. It's just to sell it was impossible.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So that's part one. So I don't think the decline is nearly what you're saying it is, but I do agree that- Why did they get rid of him?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Okay, so now we're moving forward, right? His ability to respond in real time, you slow down. We all slow down, right? I'm 66 years old and I've slowed down versus where I was at 45. So you know at 81 and at 78, you are going to be slower. Joe Biden just was not as quick. That was a real problem.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
He got destroyed in the debate by Trump because of that, not because he didn't know the materials and the content, but he just couldn't respond and think fast enough. So I think that's where the misunderstanding is. It's not that he had cognitive decline in the pure sense, it's that his ability to respond quickly was gone. And he looked like he had cognitive decline.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So now let's go forward to the Democratic National Convention. And right before that, where they replaced it. I was curious about just the mechanics of the whole thing. So being the curious person I am, I went and pulled up the bylaws and the rules of the Democratic Party and the Democratic National Convention. And they reset those every four years prior to them pulling out.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And it's very, very clear that the only mission and the only task, and it's pretty much the same in the Republicans. I look that there's two. The only mission is to win. You want to win the presidency. You want to have control of Congress. That's all they care about. And they give themselves every bit of flexibility to do whatever they damn well please to put themselves in that position.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Stop it. Double the virtue signal. I promise you I don't virtue signal. I'll say f*** you to anybody.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So now you're trying to play branding games, right? No, I'm just saying that their rhetoric is at odds with what they actually did.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
That's the mainstream media discussion of this, right? They said there's 14 million voters. I say Trump didn't debate at all. There was zero debates with Donald Trump.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Yeah, but it's not an open primary because it's Donald Trump's family business. He controlled what happened. What? Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
One of the best things I've ever done because, you know, being a business guy, it's always right brain, right brain, right brain. And acting is like, don't think, just be, don't think, just be, just let it go. So it was a totally different experience. And that's why you see me do all these cameos and stuff.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Were you ever in a fraternity? Were you ever in a fraternity?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
In a fraternity, they get to vote on all kinds of shit. But at the end of the day, if the national organization says no, right, it doesn't matter who won the election.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Let me regain control here.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
David, you're just talking branding. You can brand it however you want. No, the Democrats said they're the party of democracy.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I'm not a Democrat. I don't care what they do. I don't care. But you're supporting them. You're supporting them.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I don't care what the rhetoric is. I don't pay attention. I don't pay attention to their rhetoric.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I went once Donald Trump was the candidate. I wanted the best person to beat Donald Trump. That's what I cared about.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And warp speed and Operation Warp Speed.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And actually, the negative wasn't so much that. Sorry, Chamath. The negative wasn't so much he continued it. The negative is the hypocrisy in his approach.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So I'll start with the negatives first. So just so you know that there's a lot of them. One, the way they handled the border was horrific. There's no way to say it any differently. Now, I understand why they took the approach they did. Literally, if I were in a Central American country and my family was at risk of getting shotgunned because there's a drug war,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Because I like to do it because it's the one place where you just have to completely let go and it's a completely different approach to life. So, you know, little backstory.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I'm doing everything I can, and I recognize that if I just set foot on American soil, I have a chance for asylum, and I get that. And I get why Biden and his administration might say, just for humanitarian reasons, we're going to increase the number of people that we allow to do that. I understand why he would do it. But at the same time, he opened the door too wide.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And he made it so that there were too many people that came through, and that created cascading problems. Now, to his credit, back in June, I think it was, he signed an executive order, which he now has made permanent, or as permanent as you can as president, that changed, that there's no longer the option to just set foot on American soil and be eligible for a hearing for asylum.
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You can't do that any longer. And to her credit, she worked with the head of the Mexican government, and they have taken steps to reduce the flow of people to the border. And so now the number of encounters at the border is about the same as what it was right before the pandemic under the Trump administration. So while he was too long to do it, while he...
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Handled it incorrectly overall and messaging was horrible. I think they got to the right place. But now we have a problem that he created where we have too many non-citizens, illegal aliens, however you want to call them, however you want to brand them. And we have to understand how to deal with them. I think that they have talked about, Kamala has talked about first, and even J.D.
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Vance said this, first we're going to get rid of the criminals, which makes sense. But Donald Trump says, we're just going to deport everybody. Any illegal, we're just going to deport them. Now, Obama was the deporter-in-chief. He deported more people than Trump or Biden, over 3 million people, but he had a specific process in place that everybody could understand.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Seven episodes plus the movie.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And I think with Trump, remember that Or Orion Gonzalez kid, the six-year-old kid in Miami, Elion Gonzalez, right? Where all of a sudden you had these cops with, you know, riot gear on and machine, you know, and AR-15s or whatever they use, pointing them at a six-year-old kid cowering in a closet.
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If Donald Trump does that, and that's not contrary to how he approaches things, we could have another series of riots and protests that go really, really bad. And so while I think Biden handled things completely wrong at the beginning, I think with Harris, And she's saying she'll support the immigration bill that was bipartisan, et cetera, et cetera. You guys know that.
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I think she has a more common sense approach to dealing with deportations and getting people through the asylum system. And the asylum, that bill, I think, said that it would reduce the amount of time to adjudicate asylum to 90 days, which means that there's a chance to get control of this before it turns into a riot.
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I think the spending was bad. I think that we overspent. And I think we went through a period where, and I'm not trying to make excuses for him. I just think, you know, you guys mentioned this before, he did overspend. And I think the infrastructure bill was good. I think the broadband bill was good. And everybody says we spent $42 billion on broadband and got nothing.
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We should have gone to Starlink. But the reality is the money went to the states and they could buy Starlink from Elon all they want. So that's just kind of the mainstream media poo-pooing something they shouldn't poo-poo. But the EV stuff, the EV chargers, that's a clusterf**k, you know, and there's no way around that. And so I think that was bad.
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Yeah, no, I think, you know, what they did in healthcare, you know, you can take Lena Kahn and say what she's doing for the mergers, you know, Albertsons and Kroger's, I think is too much. I think, you know, and I even told her this, I sat on a panel sitting right next to her and I said, the most important thing from a technological perspective in this country today is that we win AI.
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That is going to find everything militarily for us and economically for us. And that when you try to break up companies like Google and Facebook, you diminish our ability to compete globally with AI. And she told me now that she didn't impact her at all, that she understands that and she's heard that before. I think their approach to that is wrong.
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I think that what she's done with the FTC against pharmacy benefit managers has been good, right? Pharmacy benefit managers are ripping off more companies and increasing the cost of medications more than anything else that's happening in healthcare. And she's called them on the carpet with a recent report and just sued them. I think that's good.
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I think in terms of other negatives, like Kamala Harris now, I think the... I think that's a mistake to try to get rid of the filibuster because then somebody else gets rid of it for something else and it's just cascading problems. On spending, we talked about, I think he spent too much there. And what have they done well? I think he changed the tone of the country.
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I think that was really, really important. No one woke up, you know, David calls it mean tweets, but not waking up concerned about mean tweets is important. Not waking up concerned about there being some random tariff on your company that you didn't expect. Not waking up being accused of doing something. I think those were all huge positives. I think supporting workers.
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We may go live. We may go live. We go live. No, no, no. Obviously, I truly believe in it. And look, it's always relative. It's always relative to the other candidate. And so, obviously, as you guys know, I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump. I gave him a shot eight years ago. It didn't work out.
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I think, you know, just having just a sensibility of, OK, we're not in the middle of everything. There just wasn't this uncertainty like every single day that every business woke up with with Trump. Just removing that was the biggest positive of all.
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But how it's been defined, I'll use the Yemen example again. I'll use the price example on oil again. We have... Trump-nesia, right? We presume that what he did in terms of the economy and everything and no wars, you know, no, everything was just rosy under Donald Trump. And I think that's another thing that's negative.
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No, I don't. And I'll tell you why. I'm assuming all you guys have had a boss at one point or another. Yes. Yeah. And do you all agree with everything that that boss did all the time? No, no, no. But you had to do what the boss told you to do. Yeah. And that's Kamala's job.
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Well, but at the same time, you get credit for doing it, but it doesn't matter. You know, if it turns out to be wrong, it's still the boss that's on the hook for it.
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Yeah, again, that's branding. I mean, we play branding games with politics all the time. If you look at what her specific responsibility was, I alluded to it earlier, her job was to go to Central America and talk to the heads of the countries there and try to reduce the reasons why people were leaving their countries to go to the United States.
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Yeah, and I get the logic there. I don't think there's... I think maybe they might have thought of that earlier. And that's why they let too many people in. But I think they realize now that they screwed up.
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No, I prefer that Congress does it. Unfortunately, that's just not what works. Look at the SEC with Gary Gensler. The guy's a moron. Here we go. We can agree on that, actually.
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David, you're really good at trying to position things so you have talking points to go out with.
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You are the king of virtue signaling, David.
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I don't know. She's doing what she was told. Which one is it? There's no, you're creating false choices, David. So David, if you do the job, your boss told you to do, does that, do you make a declaration before you do it?
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I see what she's doing now. Because she changed the policy, right?
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If he was running for president and we all got together and just shot the shit like we are now, he's a blast. He's fun to talk to. He's got charisma. He's got personality. He's easy to like. I mean... He's used to schmoozing. He's one of the world's best schmoozers. And so he's easy to get along with. It's not personal. But that doesn't mean you guys f*** with each other.
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Maybe she talked to J.D. Vance back then and was taking his positions. People change their mind. For whatever reason, people learn.
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You know, the thing about caravans, David, all those caravans never made it to the border. How many caravans did we hear about?
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I agree they screwed up on the border. This is more than a screw-up. No, fine. They screwed up. But now we are back where Trump was. But Kamala Harris defended it. Yeah, but she changed, just like Donald, just like J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance called him Hitler. J.D. Vance in 2020 and after diminished Donald Trump.
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Right, and that's fine. So he talked to people. So did she, representing the state of...
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No, no, no, no, no, no. You're virtue signaling like a mother****, right? You're trying to brand anything that you disagree with, that you think is a negative, and just put it on her, which is politics 101, right? But you're not looking at what she's actually doing.
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It doesn't matter if she was in charge and she said, you know what? What you want her to do is like J.D. Vance said about abortion, right? I talked to somebody and, you know, they proved it. Great. That was a smart move by him. Would it be smart for her to say I was wrong? Now I've learned more and I've picked up more information.
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It doesn't mean you can't, as different things happen over time, you can't go back and forth. And he did the same thing. So the whole history of it was... Back right when we went public at Broadcast.com – no, right after we announced the sale in 2000 – was it 2000? Yeah, after we announced the sale in January 2000, he threw a Super Bowl party at Mar-a-Lago. And one of my buddies –
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No, those are the questions that you want so that you think you can put her on the defensive and get... I think it's what the country wants to know. No, look, you want to know. But let me just tell you what's important. Put yourself in the shoes, let's just call this a business, right? And the business of this business is getting votes and winning this election.
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And you came in and the product that you originally had, New Coke, failed, right? Biden's New Coke in this example. And you come in and you say, I'm bringing it back. This is the new New Coke. And we're going to test to see if that's working. Well, when you brought in Kamala Harris, she had no favorable ratings whatsoever. She was behind in all polling right where Joe Biden was.
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And now she's either even or ahead or a little bit behind in every single poll. And why do I bring it up? Because it means what she's doing is working.
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You can say the same thing about J.D.
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honestly i don't have enough information to give you a qualified response i'm pro-israel to the core because i'm jewish um i'm anti-hamas to the core i think you know they're terrorists they are terrorists um i want to see israel to succeed i want to see israel succeed i want to see the united states support them and help them in that um but
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you know, when Israel was going into Gaza, I thought it was too blunt an instrument. But when they went after Hezbollah, I thought they did it the exact right way. And so, you know, I'm I'm always only going to respond to what I see.
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Yeah. Ukraine, I don't want to see American blood spilled. And as long as there's a NATO, and I agree there should be a NATO, I'd rather see us spend money than put soldiers in harm's way.
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who knew him, invited me. And I was like, cool, I'll go. Mar-a-Lago, hadn't seen it, Donald Trump, maybe I'll meet him. And so, you know, you guys have seen Mar-a-Lago in a beautiful pool, beautiful view. There's a brand up there. And he had like a bunch of Hooters and what's the suntan lotion that always had girls, whatever. Oh, Tropicana? Tropicana? No, no.
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I haven't had that conversation. I haven't had that conversation with them. I don't know.
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Again, I can't speak for them. I can only tell you the conversations I've had and what they've said to me. Whether or not they take these directions is completely up to them, and I don't know. But I've said the exact same thing. They know that the deficit's a problem. It won't be a Biden budget. There's no Biden administration to happen.
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The tax rates are completely different than the Biden budget proposals where there's no unrealized capital gains, etc. They went to 28% and 28%. So it's not going to be what was proposed by Biden.
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Yeah, there's a point of diminishing returns and raising taxes, and they realize it, right? So when we talked about unrealized capital gains, and I gave them a thousand reasons why not, they're like, we already know this, yada, yada. Now, to David's point, why don't they just come out and say it?
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Because the 1% of high information voters don't know the difference of unrealized capital gains or not and don't care. The 99% want to hear about the things that they're talking about. So that's why people like me can go out there and talk about it. But to your point and the bigger point, David, that they've realized that there's only a couple of ways to reduce the deficit.
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One, you get inflation under control and that reduces interest rates and that's going to work in our favor. And I think that's happening now. If it's one point six trillion dollars, If interest rates go below 4%, that saves a lot of money and probably the most you can save. They realized efficiency is an important element. In her last speech in Pittsburgh, she talked about how long it took.
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It only took one year to build the Empire State Building. That is crazy. There's too much friction in the government to be able to do building the right way. They're going to reduce friction. I've had conversations with them about AI as a service and being able to optimize integrating
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artificial intelligence into all these processes so that they don't have to keep on hiring people i don't think their mindset again i'm speaking for myself and my perspective of my conversations with them i don't think their mindset is to just go out there and just cut a ton of people but i do think the mindset is how can we implement technology to become more efficient so that we can provide more value to the citizens of this country at less cost i think that's important to them i think um you're going to see a lot of reduction
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I'm trying to think of the best way to say it. She knows that technology is the ultimate driver of success. And if she supports new technologies, and you heard that again in Pittsburgh, she mentioned blockchain, but more importantly, she mentioned AI and how AI is key to us being a dominant military organization.
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And so they were all dressed in orange and they were walking around and it was just like a big deal. And it was funny as hell. And so not that that's a bad thing. It was actually kind of entertaining. And, um, So he comes up to me, and I'm with the VP of Visa, my buddy, and Jerry Yang, I think it was. Maybe it wasn't Jerry. Co-founder of Yahoo. Yeah, co-founder of Yahoo.
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having our military be dominant and to have our economy grow because the other way to get results isn't just a slash and burn like Vivek wants to do, but to grow the economy and that there truly are ways to grow the economy without just more spending.
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First of all, When you just cut, when you do a Vivek type, just cut the Department of Education, right? Whatever it is, we don't know what Elon would actually do.
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Yeah, exactly right. And there's contracts. And so that means the United States of America is violating all these contracts with small businesses and medium-sized businesses. And maybe Elon put Doge in the treasury. Who knows? And that's how we make it all up. But... But you can't just crack and slash and burn, to your point, Dave. I mean, it just won't work.
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And so what you can do, though, is introduce technology. We have yet to have a president that fully understands technology. I'm not here to tell you that Kamala Harris is a geek. She's not. But- She understands the impact and she has a lot of people who truly are geeks around her. And she truly believes that implementing technology is a way to improve efficiency.
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But the whole idea is you can't take the libertarian approach. That's ideologic. You have to take a problem-solving approach. How do you look at any... specific problem we're trying to solve. How can you apply technology to that? I think you will get that from the Harris administration as opposed to Donald just talking about the AI and how much energy it consumes.
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I was just trolling Gary Gensler because it's fun to do.
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Yeah, I mean, I'm not a fan of Elizabeth Warren's. I've talked to her about crypto. I mean, I understand her position. Her basic position is, you know, bad nation states use crypto to fund their operations, the bad stuff. And she just wants to throw the baby out with the bathwater as opposed to using, you know, like I proposed a blacklist from OFAC that can be implemented in all kinds of shit.
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I need to get into the details. Right. But it just it wasn't going to happen. And so when John, not just being pro crypto, but, you know, his background, his character, I thought really was a positive. And so even before he got through his hat and his ring, I was talking to him, supporting him, giving him feedback and helping him. So, again, I'm not a Democrat. I have no problem.
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And I think John Deaton will be better for the country, better for the citizens of Massachusetts than Elizabeth Warren would be.
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And he was like, hey, guys, nice to meet you. And I'm like, hey, I'm Mark Donald, da-da-da. And he just, you know, not to be mean, just in a flipping way, he was like, hey, someday you'll be able to sit up there with the rich people pointing to the veranda and walked away. And I'm like, okay, fine, you know, whatever.
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Right. So I've got a company called Lazy.com. And if you go to Lazy.com slash mcubin, you'll see all my NFTs. And all it is, is a way to display your NFTs. It hardly makes any money. But I wanted to see if we could release a token. So first thing I did was I had one of our people call the SEC and say, hey, what steps do we have to take to release the token?
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They went through this whole rigmarole about getting securities lawyers and this and that. There's no way a company with $100,000 in revenue is going to be able to afford to do that. So then I said, OK, I'm going to go right to the SEC.gov and see about Reg A and see if I can just fill out the forms myself and just see what.
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So you start filling in name, address, and then you get to the type of business. And the only category is other. And once you follow that other connection, there's just no way to make it work. You can't make it work. And I actually said that directly to Gary Gensler. And so to answer your question, you have to make it easy to follow the rules. And in terms of everything being a security,
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Gensler says everything applies to Howey, right? There's a Howey rule and everything. But the reality is there's also a ruling that came after called Reeves, Reeves versus Ernst & Young, that had to do with interest. And if you think about it, have you guys ever shorted stocks or done stock loan where you can make some money off a stock loan? A borrower, yeah.
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Yeah, so you can make one of your shares of stocks available to the borrower and get paid a VIG, right? You might get 10% or 12%. And so doing that is the exact same thing as loaning out Bitcoin for somebody else to borrow. And they don't call that a security. So I asked Gary Gensler, if it's not a security to loan out a share of stock...
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And why is it a security to loan out a Bitcoin to somebody else? That didn't have an answer. And the point there is he has an approach that is regulation through litigation. He's going to sue you first, ask questions later, and hope that the result of that litigation becomes a rule that everybody else has to follow. I literally said, what's that?
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If you're able to register with the securities and exchange commission for your company for the release of your token, then depending on how many people you're trying to sell it to, you would only be able to do that with qualified investors. But what happens is Gary Gensler is making it so difficult to register. And what he should be doing is saying, here's the bright line regulations.
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And so then not long after that, through my friend, he got back in touch with me. And, you know, this is the early days of the Internet, early 2000s and still, I guess, still 2000. And I get an invitation to go to his office in Trump Towers. And I'm like, this is cool, of course. And, you know, he wants to talk to me about business. And I'm like, you know what, Donald, I'll help you all I can.
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If FTX wants to loan out all their Ethereum, you have to do what they did in Japan. You have to have 95% collateral and 95% of anything needs to be put in cold storage. If he had followed the same rules for crypto that Japan did, FTX would still be in business. Sam Bankman-Fried might still be in jail, but FTX, three hours capital, they'd still be in business. Because he did the wrong thing.
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Now, I've literally talked to Kamala Harris at lunch about this specific topic of litigation through litigation. And as a lawyer, she got it immediately. And she knows it's a problem. And she's even mentioned it in one of her speeches that that's something that they're going to deal with.
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I haven't asked her about any position at all, but what I was told, and look, talking to people who are like, always in the same room with her. The response to me about Gary Gensler was, have you heard anybody say anything positive? That's intentional.
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So here's the way I look at Kamala, right? She is open-minded. She's smart. She does the work. She digs in and learns. She's ethical. She's honest. She cares. She wants to bring the country to the middle. She knows that when she was far left, that might have been great for the state of California, but it doesn't solve the problems of the United States of America today.
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And that's why you've seen her go to the middle. And that is truly... I know, David, you might not believe this. It is truly honest and... Through and through her. When she gives speeches now, she says, I'll take ideas from independents. I'll take them from Republicans. I don't care. We have a lot of problems to solve in this country. I would be shocked if she wins. She talks to Elon Musk.
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If Elon would talk to her. She doesn't care where the ideas come from.
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We've had Trump here. We've had J.D. Vance here. Let the characteristics shine. I don't disagree. Look, it is not... Why does she hide, do you think? I don't think she's hiding. There's two elements there. One, I think she understands the assignment, which is to win the election.
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And the best way to reach the most number of people and get them to change their mind is not the 1% of people who are high information voters. It's all the people who are showing up at rallies and screaming and yelling. Those are the people whose mind... She has changed so far, and that's how she's caught up and who she wants to change. And that's where she's putting her focus.
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And two, and this is brutally honest, she has too long a windup in answering every single question. And that makes the interviews difficult. She wants to inspire everybody with everything that she answers and tries to get people all excited about what she's going to do. And so she takes too long to get to that. If you cut out the windups, her answers aren't so bad.
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Her answers are absolutely legit. But that windup makes it seem like the whole word salad thing.
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She's got to drop that.
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But on the flip side, I mean, if you listen, I literally, because I knew I'd be talking to you guys, I listened to Donald Trump's speech in Milwaukee. Did any of you guys listen to that?
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Okay. You were there, Sachs?
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No, no, not Milwaukee. No, no, no, not the RNC. He's saying this week.
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So Kamala might have a long windup. Donald Trump has an eternal windup where all he does is get to his slogans and talking points and then talks gibberish the rest of the time. Let me fill you in on some of the gibberish.
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You know, he's getting DonaldTrump.com and he wants to sell tchotchkes and merchandise. I guess some things never change. And so, you know, so I'm in there trying to tell him about what you can and can't sell online and what works. And that was all fine and good. Medivanka, it was all really cool. But the one thing that left with me, if you've ever been or seen pictures of his office,
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Yeah, but what he says shouldn't matter.
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Okay, well, tell me what issues he stands for when he diminishes Jimmy Carter, who just has his 100th birthday. Tell me what issues he stands for.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Okay, so let's put that aside. Let's just say it is what it is, even though it's... we'll put that under the character. He started talking about apartments with no windows, that builders under Kamala Harris are being forced to build apartments with no windows.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Yeah. Oh, I listened to this today.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Okay, so you're assigning whatever to Joe Biden.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Every inch of his office is covered with pictures of him. Every single inch of the office.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
We sent them our old s**t, David. We didn't give them anything new. We sent them our old s**t. Israel gets the Gary leads.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
They get the Glengarry lead. Israel gets the Glengarry leads. And look, on top of that, Zelensky still has the finals.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
We don't make enough of that. Do you agree that Zelensky could have said yes to that deal?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Well, no, the guy from Norway, the guy who just took over NATO says otherwise.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
The good news is Biden is not running in this election.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I'm giving you reality. She's the incumbent. When I've had people who worked for me and went out and started their own companies, like Shamath and Facebook, right? People have different opinions. The people who work for me do what I say. Period. End of story.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Yeah, yeah. Or whatever covers he was on and just whatever, right? And I just remember walking through there and afterwards... It was a nice meeting and we had some follow-up calls and everything, but it never went anywhere in terms of the online stuff.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Do you think J.D. Vance is going to do anything contrary to Donald Trump if he wins?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Would J.D. Vance ever go against Donald Trump?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
That's it in a nutshell. That's it, period, end of story. Now we can cut half the episode out. Now moving on.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
No, you're doing the exact thing you're saying that I'm doing. You're trying to position her so that everything from the Biden administration, she has ownership of it. And what I'm saying is just look at what she's doing. Look at what she's saying. See, here's the antithesis of the Trump derangement syndrome, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
You tell whenever Donald Trump says something stupid, everybody explains it for him. When Kamala Harris says something smart, everybody tries to explain why it's stupid and not true.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Anyway, Trump can't ever explain it himself. Why is it that the guy that you like can never come out and say, hey, you know, this is crazy. This is the most ridiculous thing Eric Adams suggested. Everybody else has got to do the research and explain what Trump really means because he is losing it. He is cognitively incapable.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
But I just remember thinking to myself, if I ever become visible or famous to that level, don't let me get so caught up in just having pictures of myself. And I'd had conversations with my buddies about it, just like you guys would. And so then in 2004, I got a chance to do a show called The Benefactor. ABC called me and said-
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So I sold three quarters of them, not the whole thing. I still own 27.7% for a couple of reasons. One, when I first bought in in 2000, I was the tech guy in the NBA. I was the media guy. Broadcast.com just sold it. HDNet just created the very first ever high-definition television network. I had every edge in every angle.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Now, fast forward 24 years later, in order to sustain growth, to be able to compete with the new collective bargaining agreement, you have to have other sources of revenue. And so you see other teams and all sports for that matter, you know, talking about casinos, talking about creating, doing real estate development, hotel. That's just not me.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I wasn't going to put up $2 billion to, you know, to get an education on building. So that was one. That's part one. Part two is my kids are now 15, 18 and 21. And over the next 10 years, that's a lot of pressure on them to have to take over the team or deal with the trust. You know, God forbid something happens to me, deal with the trust fund issues.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And so by selling three quarters of it, I took all that pressure off of them because you guys see the hate. I mean, Jason can tell you all day long about Jimmy Dolan, you know.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I don't think they've peaked yet because for the reasons I just mentioned, if we're able to build a Venetian type casino in Dallas with an American Airlines center in the middle of it, the valuation is $20 billion. But I own 27% of that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
No, I did it for fun. So, you know, it's a great question, David. From 2000 to 2010, the actual valuations went down. Wow. And in 2010, we were not even able to sell the New Orleans Hornets. The league had to buy it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And it was right around then that the Sixers got purchased for 200 for the same price I paid. And, you know, the... The cap, the NBA salary cap is a reflection of the total revenues of the NBA. There were multiple years when the salary cap went down, meaning our overall revenues went down, which was great for me competitively because I would buy first round picks for $3 million.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I would buy players from other teams that couldn't afford to run their teams. And that's why we went on this 15 year streak of never having a losing season and winning 50 games in a row for 10 years in a row. So, you know, it worked against me, worked for me competitively, but that just shows you that things can change. And so I did do what's that?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So when when cable and satellite and over the air became very competitive and they started to grow and subscriptions grew to one hundred and thirty million people or subscriptions, that's a lot of money. And they had to compete for content so that there would be less churn.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And I literally remember in 2001, when we first signed our first cable deal, NBC had the deal and they were going back to David Stern saying, we need fewer games. And I sat there in one of our board of governors meetings, and I'm like, look, TBS just signed a deal to pay a billion dollars per episode for repeats of Seinfeld. If you do that on evaluation per hour, ours is fresher.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Our ratings are actually better. Don't think of it as less product will lead to more demand. It's the exact opposite. We're so inexpensive, we can charge more. And that led to the next TV deal, and that led to the explosion.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
The number one's family, obviously, but beyond that is costplustrugs.com. We're f***ing up the health industry like you wouldn't believe. If you've seen- Just explain it for the folks that don't understand it. So let's just say guys our age, or you guys are close enough to my age, we use a drug called Tadilafil, right? For those of you who know what it is. And you, it's generic Cialis. Cialis.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Yeah, Cialis is great. Viagra sucks. Cialis is way better.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
This is all online. This is all on, on X. People try to fuck with me on Twitter. They throw this up. So anyway, so when I got the gig, um, he was like, congratulations, good luck and everything. I was like, thank you. And whatever. And then when I got canceled, he sent me that letter basically saying you suck. And so, um,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
He's turning red, actually. So if you go to costplusdrugs.com and you put in Tadilafil, when it comes up, we show you our actual cost. And then we mark it up by 15%. And if you buy it via mail order, then we add $5 for a pharmacy fee to review everything and $5 for shipping and handling. The net result of that is, you guys have a general idea of what the price is now from all the ads.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
You can buy a 90-pack of Tadilafil for about $9.90 plus shipping and handling. So for less than the price of a bag of M&Ms, you could put up a little cup or jar next to your bed of either M&Ms or Tadilafil.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
be right back nine dollars for 90 days right we're like let's go that seems free it's an incredible deal so but you apply that to the 2500 drugs that we have and now all of a sudden you see what's wrong with these things called pharmacy benefit managers and the problem of an industry that's opaque and i'll give you another example There are drugs that are called specialty generics.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And the only thing special about them, they're actually just pills, is that they were traditionally more expensive. So there's a drug called imatinib, which is a chemotherapy drug. If you just walk into a CVS, as an example, a big, big pharmacy, and you're a cash payer or a high deductible payer and you just needed it, They'll charge you anywhere from $200 to $2,000.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
You have no idea what you're going to pay. If you get it from Cost Plus Drugs, depending on the number and the strength, it might be $21 to $30. There's another drug, Droxodopa. One of my buddies came to me and said, I'm losing my insurance. They want to charge me, the pharmacy wants to charge me $10,000 a quarter for this medication called Droxodopa. All right, Landon, let me check.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Then initially it was $64 a month. Now it's in the $20 per month because as our cost goes down, we pass it on. And That's just changed the industry because think about what happens when you get a prescription.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So it's the innovator's dilemma. They can't just give up all of this margin. So most of the business of pharmacy benefit management, not most, a big chunk of the businesses comes from corporations and self-insured companies. And they go to them and they put together the thing called the formulary, which is all the drugs that's available to them. And
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
They say, we're going to price this so that we get rebates and we'll pass on the rebates we get from the manufacturers to you. Now, they say they're going to pass on 100% of that rebate. They don't. They create all these subsidiaries and everything that skim 10% or whatever off the top.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
But they know that they can continue working with these companies because the core competency of a CEO is not to know their health care costs. And literally for any CEOs that are out there, audit your PBM contract. Audit it right now. I promise you that that PBM is going to tell you you don't need to audit. And then you can say, we want to add cost plus drugs to our pharmacy supply contract.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And they're going to say, no, you're not allowed to do it because they know our prices are so much lower that is disrupting their industry.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Right now, I'm losing money. And most of that was because we built a factory, a whole robotics driven factory that manufactures sterile injectables that are in short supply.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So now, like with the hurricane, you know, we're using our robotics to switch over to sterile water of all things and some other things so that we can manufacture it and get it to them at a reasonable price as opposed to price gouging. which Kamala has talked often about. So, you know, because there will be price gouging in pharmacy and we're here to be an alternative.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Yeah, it was not a beef, but it was just like... That's what it was. And so it was just like, okay, whatever.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So to answer your question, I've spent a whole lot of money on these robotics and putting this together. But our path is hockey stick, double, triple hockey stick. And so we're taking business from them. And I think the traditional legacy companies in the insurance.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So both. What happened was I got an email from my partner, co-founder, Dr. Alex Oshmayansky. And he wanted to create a compounding pharmacy in Denver that made drugs that were in short supply. Because there's always, for whatever reason, some generic drug that is on a shortage list. And I'm like, you're thinking too small. And this was right around the time that the pharma bro was going to jail.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And I asked him, how is it that this dude buys up a one-year supply of Daraprim, the drug he bought, and just jacks it up? And how does that happen? And he goes, it just happened. I'm like, well, let me do some homework and dig in. And the reason was obvious. The industry was completely opaque.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
The first line in every single pharmacy contract and health care contract for that matter is you're not allowed to talk about it. You are restricted from talking about this to anybody, anybody at all. So we had a completely opaque market. So we put together the website called costplusdrugs.com.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
But really the smartest thing that we did, and it was unintentional in terms of impact, we created a full price list. So you can get our 2,500 drugs, the actual price list, and we release it every week because we're on a roll now where we've had since last a year ago, more than a year ago, every weekday we've lowered a price on a drug. And so we just put that out.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And what's happened as a result is now companies can just get the price list
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
There's a lot more in between. Okay. So that's 2004. 2007, Eric reaches out to me and goes, hey, there's no hard feelings with my dad or anything. And I'm like, no, I don't care. He goes, we're working with these Russian MMA fighters, this guy named Fedor Emelianenko, who was like one of the best ever at that point in time, and Josh Barrett.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So we put out this price list and all of a sudden Harvard Medical and Vanderbilt and all these research institutes took our pricing and compared it to what Medicare was paying for the same drugs.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
and this is sort of maybe ties together with the governmental efficiency and just do the obvious right thing but shouldn't they just work with you as an example and and why don't they they are and it's just starting they are right so here's again i can't speak for her to say what she's going to do but here was the conversation i've had with her team when it comes to reducing out-of-pocket costs to deal with inflation what i've told them is
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
One key area that impacts most families at some level, nobody dies healthy, is the cost of health care and pharmaceuticals. And by requiring transparency in all contracts signed by anybody, anywhere in terms of pricing, you are going to see the same impact on across-the-board pricing of a decrease of 30%, 40%. And so...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
All that is going to reduce out-of-pocket spending for everybody, reduce government spending for everybody, and have a net positive impact. They see that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I had a similar conversation, as I mentioned to you, in the White House when I went there, and it just didn't resonate. Boys, any final questions for Mark here as we wrap up? You're not going to ask me about Elon and why I trolled Elon and any of that good stuff?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So now I've kind of slowed down. I invested in Grok with Schmatz, right? Schmatz is, yeah, let's go. And he can tell you all the reasons.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Okay, well, good. So you guys know the whole story, right? And so I think that's great. Picks and shovels, I think, are important. I think the problem, and this happens with all new technologies, is we're seeing the gold rush right now where everybody calls everything AI, particularly with agents. And I think...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
You can put all these vertical agents together to do all these different things, but agents are just going to be a feature, not a product. Because inherently in AI, as it advances and gets smarter, then it's going to be able to create its own agents for its users and go forward from there. So I've been really hesitant now because, you know, You're not going to invest in the foundational models.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I mean, through a fund, I have part of OpenAI and some others, but that's just so expensive. You don't know who the winners are going to be, but yet everything that happens is going to be a derivative.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I think there are going to be tens of millions of models. Everybody's going to have a model. Your kids are going to have models. Their little invisible friend is going to be a model that's in a teddy bear that they grow up with. So there's going to be an unlimited number of models. But we don't know who the winners are going to be to host those models. I have no idea.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And kind of the irony of all this is we were competing with Dana, Dana White, and the UFC in some respects because a lot of fighters felt like they weren't getting paid enough. There was no health care. There was no nothing, right? And so I had a TV network.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And if you go back over the history of technology... That's always the case. There's always a race to be the winner for the foundation, whether it was broadband, whether it was networking, whatever it's streaming, and everybody battles it out. And so it's okay. And for me now, I'm just like, let me just wait.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I think it's the exact opposite. So I think that... In order to train a model, you need access to information. And the internet ain't what it used to be in terms of being a source of information. And so IP is becoming more valuable. You're not... I think everybody by this time expected all the foundational models to have all this healthcare information.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
But if I'm Mayo Clinic, I'm not giving Microsoft or Google or OpenAI my IP because that's what brands me. And so there's going to be a lot of money available there. And I think... that there's got to be a way to figure that out, right? First, how does IP work and how is it distributed? And then how are we using it just in general?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
We really don't know how we're going to implement it or use it or what the interface is going to be. And all that will be figured out by some kid somewhere.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
You know, when I'm gone, I wanted to say, motherfucker, he did it. It was expensive when we were sick. It ain't expensive no more. And to me, that's the ultimate mission. Now, it's fun to learn AI and build models and do all that stuff, right? But when it's all said and done, to me, that's what I want.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
We had started the first all-high-definition TV network called HDNet back in 2000, back when TVs cost $20,000 and everybody thought we were idiots. But slowly but surely, it was taking off. And so they came to me and said, we're partnering with these guys who are putting on this MMA fight with Fedor and Josh Barrett and some other folks, and we'd like to broadcast it on HDNet.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
My kids hated the idea. My wife hated the idea. They want, you know, it's hard enough for them to have a normal life as it is. And that just takes it to a whole nother level.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Yeah, but that's a shame.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
But let me just tell you this, and we don't have to talk more about politics. Parties don't exist anymore. They don't. There's fundraising vehicles and they have procedures in place. But this is Donald Trump. He took over the Republican Party. They do what he says. And Kamala Harris has learned from Donald Trump. Give him credit. She has learned what worked for him. They're not stupid.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
She has learned that she has got to be that personality that takes over, and they have got to do what she says. You haven't heard a word from Bernie or Elizabeth Warren, and that's not unintentional. She is doing it her way. Now, whether or not you agree what she's doing or her approach to win... Everybody can argue, and that's what makes a market. But there are no political parties anymore.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And the idea of the ideology of a party on the Democratic side is no more in place than on the Republican side.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
You think the trade was great? Yeah, the trade was great. I think- That's great.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
But with KP, right, that's what they're doing. How do they match up with Boston? And so KP and Kat match up, and that's why- So we got a shot.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I'm saying you and Jim Carrey have a lot in common.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Mark, thank you. This was fun. Thanks, guys. I really enjoyed it. Good times.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
They'll give you instructions on how to upload, and I'll see you at a game soon. Appreciate it. You guys were awesome. Cheers. And I don't mind arguing, David. I love to argue this stuff, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Yeah, I don't get that. But you know what? If you were when you were poor, you're up when you're rich, right? And it just doesn't change anything. I was hoping we talked about Elon.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So two things. One, as an entrepreneur, Elon's like the shit of the shit of the shit, right? Yeah. I'm a huge fan. What he's been able to accomplish is insane. It's incredible. I would never diminish anything he's done as an entrepreneur. As a Twitter user, he's a troll. And, I mean, he just trolls to troll to troll. And every good troll deserves a foil, right? Somebody to troll back.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And it's just so easy and so much fun. Now, you know, I get some of the underlying principles, I think, at least in my mind.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I think that's a fear of losing users. So I think that within the conservative community, they are more joiners and heavier social media users. Participants, yeah. Yeah, participants. So they subscribe to more things. They listen to more podcasts. They're more active. And I think he recognized that. And that was a fundamental underpinning of why he kind of
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Because we had a show called This Week in MMA. So we were promoting. We had fights that we were already putting on every Friday night. So it actually was a good fit. So you'll see pictures of me sitting with him. And actually, I couldn't find it. I was so pissed because I was going to with him some more.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
connected to them on the free speech thing because he still has his limits obviously it's his platform and what he doesn't want doesn't get shown so i think that's why and i can't blame him um i wish he would call me i'd help him on on his his revenue and all that and then i think on the immigration side here's my theory you guys can tell me if you agree or disagree
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I don't think he's anti-immigration like he says, anti-illegal immigration, where anybody who's in the country should be deported. I think as an immigrant himself, and I'm second generation, you guys are immigrants at some level, we all are. But I think as an immigrant himself, he thinks that the number of illegal immigrants in this country and the hate that's pushed towards them is
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
carries over to legal immigrants, including himself. And I think he believes that by diminishing the illegal or the non-citizens in this country and asking for their removal, it improves the standing of the legal immigrants, including himself. And so that's kind of my theory on both of those things.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Here's why I disagree. You don't take other people's money to do that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Yeah, but he knew that I think he went in, opened eyes, carried the sink in the door to run it with some improvements operationally, which he did a great job of.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So I've heard from a lot of those folks. And it's not so much... When you talk about free speech, free speech applies to advertisers as well. They get to associate with whoever they want to, no matter what. So there are repercussions.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
What he said during the time we were sitting at that podium was everything Mark Cuban touches turns to gold. And so I was like, that would have been so great to have out there. And so, and anyway, so we're friends again.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I have no problem with free speech. Look, I've always said people like get rid of the anti-Semitic people. You get anti-Semitic tropes. I get, you know, zillions of anti-Semitic tropes, you know, in my replies. Just they're nonstop. I mean, I'm not white. You know, my grandparents changed their name from Chubinsky to Cuban, not even intentionally.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And so it's always your real name is Chubinsky White. It's just the hate there is insane. And my attitude has always been I want to know who the morons are. I have no problem with them still being allowed on the platform. But the trade-off is for advertisers. They don't want to be associated with that. There is no upside for being on Twitter right now or Exxon right now.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And you add to that the porn. Kids 13 years old can go on that site and you can find any insane thing you want on X right now. And that also is a problem for advertisers. That's part of free speech. But you got to pay the bill when you're willing to accept that. I don't think he realized just how deep users will go in order to use their free speech. And I think that really surprised him.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Because I'm proud to be an American. Okay. That's exactly why. I mean, you know, we all make choices and think what's best for the country and show our patriotism in different ways. And, you know, I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a Republican. I'm an independent through and through. Oh, my God. Like J. Cal. He's an independent, too.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And so that's why I don't think that he bought it specifically for free speech, because I think he's always one of the things I really admire.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And so it's 2007 and we're friends and nothing happens between then until whenever he started going crazy on Twitter and all the Obama stuff and everything and the birth certificate and the birth stuff. So he's on Twitter and He started with me. I say that. So let me just preface this by saying I golfed once in my life in 1989 and I hated it so bad.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Yeah, and that's fine. Obviously, it's his choice. That's free speech by definition.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Yep, $10 billion. I mean, what do you think about this? I mean, look, it's their company. They get to do what they want.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I mean, He didn't invest. He gave him a donation. Which leads to something I want to say very positive about Elon. Put aside his genius in coming up and running these companies. The one thing I respect the most about Elon Musk, and he does more than anybody I've ever seen, and that is he goes all in.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
he doesn't just you know he takes every cent he has and he believes in it and he goes all mother in he never hedges his bet at all until twitter right that's why i say you know he brought in investors you know he brought investors to tesla and everything but initially he went all in himself you know i think with twitter i think he was kind of surprised but going back to open ai
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I wouldn't do business with people like that. And there are people who just look for what they think is the next big thing. And I certainly could have given them money, didn't give them money. I said one of our funds that I'm in did give them money originally, didn't give them money another time. To me, that's just wrong. And that catches up to you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
When people f*** over investors and whatever, it always comes back. Karma's a bitch in business too. Now, Gemini with Google, I've done a lot of stuff with them. Notebook is insanely good. Gemini 1.5 is insanely good. Meta as open source and what they're doing is getting better and better. There's nothing that says that open AI is going to win, nothing at all.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I was throwing clubs because I'm one of those really super competitive guys. I'm like, never again. But I went and worked. I auctioned off myself to be a caddy at a golf tournament that he also was at. But he starts tweeting that I saw Mark Cuban and he swings like your girl and this and that. His swing is like your girl. Like, nobody saw me swing because I don't golf.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I don't feel bad about what they're doing. To me, it tells me they're more scared than anything by trying to restrict what people are doing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I heard 40 of the 44 co-founders left.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Oh yeah. It's an existential risk to them.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And the crazy, I mean, look what Microsoft did. They bought Three Mile Island. The nuclear reactor. They bought it. Everybody is looking for the angle. And the crazy part is there used to be Moore's law that everything followed, right? The price performance curve always went like this, you know, and power goes up. Now, because you don't know.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
You don't know what you don't know and what you need to do next. That's part of the challenge that Elon has with Tesla in terms of full service driving. You don't know what you need to do next to get there to solve every problem.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I do. And I also have a Kia EV. I have a Tesla EV and I have a Kia EV.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I have, but I stopped using it just because it terrified me. Because it doesn't know what adversarial things it doesn't know. Because anything that's adversarial, it has to train on something it's seen, and it's not smart enough to figure out what it hasn't seen and whether or not it's a risk. And I've said this before, my four-year-old mini Australian shepherd, I can put it
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And so I started back with him. And so we went back and forth on Twitter for years, for years. And then he comes down the escalator in 2015. And I'm like, all right, this guy's got no chance to win. But I think it's great because I don't like traditional politicians. I'm not, you know, there's nothing about me that thinks that the way we do politics or the way the government is run is a good thing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
in a risky situation to cross the street and trust it'll get across the street no matter what it is. It doesn't have to be pre-trained. You can't do that with full service driving yet. And so until that gets to where it needs to be, where adversarial issues aren't an issue, I'm not going to fully trust it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Not at all. I mean, I... My heart is libertarian, but I realize you can't... Libertarians are not problem solvers. They're ideologues. You know, like you look at Rand Paul, everything's only one way. He doesn't try to solve problems. So anyways, I digress. So he comes down there. I'm like, that's cool, right? He doesn't have a chance to win. But I'm like, he's the best thing ever. You know how...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I forget where I was, but I was like, he's the best thing that ever happened to politics. He's not a politician. He's not going to be a Stepford candidate. I may not agree with his positions, but just the fact that he's not a politician is a good thing. And so from there, he called me and we talked a lot.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
probably 10 to 15 times on the phone he would call me you know and he tweeted one time mark cuban was trying to come i never had a number there was no way for me to call him right he would you know and you know the way he emails he refuses to send an email because he doesn't want any proof of anything he's done right and so you know he would write it up like you had one of those pictures so bring up the one on the cnn where he says what happened so right there
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
CNN, nasty. What happened? See what he does there. His email, he writes on a piece of paper and then someone scans it and sends it as an image via email.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
This is one of many emails that we went back and forth on.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
No, his assistant emailed it back. Right. So he writes on the piece, system prints it out. He reads it. He writes on it. She scans it. She scans it, sends the image to me. Now the big question there, you can't just let that slide. Why do you think he does that?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
No, absolutely not. Nope. I'm with Mark. He don't want paper trails or anything.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
No, no, you can't search for it, and it's not his. You know, yes, to your point, I'm just telling you, he won't send emails at all.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
So he has said it out loud, David. He has literally said it out loud that he doesn't want a paper trail. But anyway, so let's go back. So now we're talking back and forth, and we're having legit conversations. I remember asking him, you know, you realize as president, you're going to have to make decisions where people can die. And he really wouldn't respond. Yeah, I get it. I get it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
Well, look, I've said this many, many times. If it wasn't Donald Trump running, if it was a non-MAGA candidate, particularly if it was Joe Biden still, I'd vote Republican. I've voted Republican before. If it was a non-MAGA candidate versus Kamala Harris, it would be, you know, let's look at the policies. Let's look at the character of the people involved and let's make a decision.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
I'm like, Donald, you don't have a ground game. What are you going to do? How are you going to get through this? Yeah, I got the evangelicals doing all that. I'm not worried about it. I'm like, Donald, you know, and I would bring up things about, there was this one thing where the FBI used this device to break into an iPhone. And there was a big thing about, you know, privacy.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And I tried to engage him on a conversation on it. And it's just like, I don't know, you know, just didn't want to talk about that at all. And that would happen multiple times where I would try to engage in conversations about some type of policy. And they're just it never got anywhere. And there was never a conversation.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Mark Cuban
And I said to him, I'm saying there's another email where I said, Donald, at some point, you have to learn these things. You literally have to learn these things in order to be president. And he didn't respond to that. And that's when I went on CNN. And I said, basically, look, I like the guy, but. He's not learning. He doesn't make any effort to learn anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Because I was more of a yeller. I was, you know, I didn't have- No, really? Yeah. What you see on the sidelines, you know, with me at a Mavs game, maybe a little bit, but I also didn't have any patience for somebody I thought-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
wasn't using my kind of common sense right because i was always on the go go go go go when i particularly when i was younger just trying to be successful trying to get to the point where i had independence and i would tell this to people you know either you're speeding up and getting on the train or you know we'll stop and drop you off at the next station but let's go where you go
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Did you have trouble with the hire fast, fire fast part of running a business? Yeah, always. Because I hated firing people. Because it meant, one, it was an admission of a mistake in the hiring. And two, the salesperson in me always wanted to come out ahead. And I was always horrible at firing. But I always partnered with people who had no problem with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, for sure. Because it's obviously a failure somewhere in the process. What did we do wrong? And when I would interview people for jobs... I think 99% of the people I've ever interviewed, I've wanted to hire because in my mind, it was like, okay, I can figure out how to make this person work, right? And then they wouldn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And then, you know, people at the company would be like, Mark, you suck at this, you know? And so I always delegated the hiring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's different. And you got to know what you're good at and what you're bad at, right? I was good at, I was a ready, fire, aim guy, and I always partnered with people who were very anal and perfectionist because where I could just go, go, go, go, go, go, they would keep me inside the baselines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, or just, yeah, the detail work, the dot the I's and the cross the T's. What does it take to take that first leap into starting a business? That's the hardest part. It really depends on your personal circumstances. Like I got fired. I mean, I was sleeping on the floor, six guys in a three bedroom apartment, so I couldn't go any lower. So there was no downside.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, there was no downside for me starting a business. And it was just like, you know, I was 25 when we started MicroSolutions and, you know, I just gotten fired. And it was like, look, I'm a lousy employee. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I'm going to just start going to some of my prospects that I had in my job and ask them to front the money that I needed to install some software and found this company, Architectural Lighting, who put up $500 for me. That allowed me to buy software and have 50% margins and You know, that's how I started my company. But like by way of advice, would you say, I mean, it's a terrifying thing. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I mean, you've got to be in a position where you're confident. You know, I get emails and approached by people all the time. You know, what kind of business should I start? That tells me you're not ready to start a business, right? Either you're prepared and you know what you don't. You know, in the United States with the American dream, everybody kind of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
always looks at themselves and say, okay, you know, I have this idea, right? And then you go through this process of saying, okay, you know, you talk to your friends or family, what do you think? And then almost always, oh, it's a great idea, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Then you go on Google and you say, oh my God, no one else is doing it without thinking, you know, 10 companies had gone out of business trying the same thing, but okay, it's on Google. And then people stop. right? Because that next step means, okay, I have to change what I'm doing in my life. And that's not easy for 99% of the people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Some people look at that as an opportunity to get excited about it. Some people get terrified because it's, okay, maybe I'm comfortable, maybe I have responsibilities. And so whatever your circumstances are, if you want to take that next step, You have to be able to deal with the consequences of changing your circumstances. And that's the first thing, you know, do you save money?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You know, so you have, you know, if you have a job, do you have a mortgage? Do you have a family? You've got to save money. You can't just walk. I mean, they've got to eat and they've got to have shelter. But on the other side of the coin, if you've got nothing, it's the perfect time to start a business. Yeah, desperation is a good catalyst for starting a business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's really easy, right? Particularly when you get fired and you don't have a job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
you know and you're looking at bartending at night to try to pay the bills and so um it wasn't hard for me but to your point it really comes down to preparation you know if it's important enough to you you'll save the money you'll give up you know whatever it is you need to give up to put the money aside um if you have obligations um you'll put in the work to learn as much as you can about that industry so that when you start your business you're prepared
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And you can always, you know, at night, on weekends, whenever you find time, lunch, start making the calls to find out if people will write you a check, you know, transfer you money to buy whatever it is you're selling. And by doing those things, you can put yourself in a position to succeed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's where people just think, okay, you know, Geronimo, I'm leafing off the edge of a cliff and I'm starting a business. That's tough. But sometimes that's like the way you do it though. There's always examples of any situation or scenario, right? But I mean- Yeah, but if you're going into a new business, you're going to have competition unless you're really, really, really, really, really lucky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And that competition is not going to just say, okay, let Lex or Mark just kick our ass. And so you've got to be prepared to how you're going to deal with that competition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You know, I think we've just got a culture of consumption and more. And to get more, you've got to, creating a business gives you the greatest potential upside and the greatest leverage on your time, but it also creates the most risk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Hopefully that's still the case. Yeah. Well, yeah, there's always, uh, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So us versus other countries, like Joe Biden, of all people said to me, um, it was at an entrepreneurship conference that when he was vice president, he had put together and, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
we had gone up there from a bunch of us from shark tank to talk to young entrepreneurs from around the world and he said to me mark you know the one thing that separate i've been to every country around the world and the one thing that separates us is entrepreneurship we're the most entrepreneurial country in the world and there's no one else who's even close and when you look at the origin of our big you know the biggest companies in the world for the most part
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
There's an American origin story somewhere behind there. And I think that just gets perpetuated on itself. We see those Horatio Alger stories. We see examples of the Jeff Bezos of the world, the Steve Jobs of the world. And those are the types of people we want to copy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, it's changing for sure because you can go back just 12 years, right? Traditional media dominated, let's just say, through 2012. That was the peak of linear television. Newspapers weren't as strong, but they still had some breadth and depth to them. And then social media comes along and everybody gets to play in their own sandbox and share opinions with people who think just like them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And it also gives them the opportunity to amplify those feelings. And I think that's where celebrating entrepreneurs really started to subside some. There were always people who were progressive that were like, billionaires are bad or millionaires are bad, depending on the time period. But you didn't really see it on an ongoing basis, right? It wasn't gonna be on the evening news.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It wasn't going to be in the front page of the newspaper. It was going to be if you read a book and someone talked about it, or you read a magazine and there was an article talking about this progressive movement or that progressive movement, whatever it may be, or political parties. But now... All of that is front and center on social media.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
That's true. That show celebrates the entrepreneur. It's the only place where every single minute of every single episode, we celebrate the American dream. And the reason I do it is we tell the entire country and it's shown around the world even.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
We're amazing advertising for the American dream and I don't even know how many countries, but every time somebody walks onto that carpet from Dubuque, Iowa or Ketchum, Idaho, that sends a message to every kid who's watching, seven, eight, nine, 10, 12 year old kid, that if they can do it from Ketchum, Idaho, you can do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
If they can have this idea and get a deal or even present to the sharks and have all of America see it, you can do it. And that, I mean, I'm proud of that. The 15 years of that is just, it's just been insane. You know, now kids walk up to me and go, yeah, I started watching you when I was five or 10 and I started a business because I learned about it from Shark Tank. And so, you know, I think
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It celebrates it, and we convey it, and I don't think it's going away, but there are different battles we have to fight to support it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
uh maybe even you and shark tank will laugh at oh for sure you know without question the good ones we're not going to recognize every good one and then sometimes we'll just motivate people to work even harder to get it done because of what we say to them and that's fine too you know there's been great success stories that we said no to
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
There's no best one, right? They're all different. They're all best in their own way, I guess. The stupid ones. And, you know, we haven't had any, you know, world-changing, earth-shattering ones, right? Because those... aren't gonna apply to Shark Tank. They don't need us, right? So we typically get businesses that need some help at some level or another.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But there's ones I've passed that I wish, like Spikeball, do you know what Spikeball is? So it's this rebounding net that you can put on the beach and you have these yellow balls and you play a game of, it's just a competitive game, but they're killing it. To beaches in New York or LA, you'll see kids playing it all the time. And it was a fun game that I wish I had done a deal with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And there's been others. And you passed. And I passed. They were getting some traction and they wanted to create leagues, spike ball leagues. And they wanted me to be the commissioner. And I don't want to be a commissioner of a new spike ball league.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Will this click with people? Of course. Yeah. Can it be protected? Is it differentiated? Is it something that makes me think, why didn't I think of that? Or is it just a good, solid business that's going to pay a return to the founder and may not be enough of a business to return to an investor? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Well, see, I don't even care if it's going to be a big thing, right? Because it's all relative to the entrepreneur. We had a 19-year-old from Pittsburgh, Laney, who came on with this simple sugar scrub. And there was nothing outrageously special about it. I didn't see it becoming a $100 million business. I thought it could become a $2, $3, $5 million business that paid the bills for her.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And that was good enough. And six months after the show aired, she called me up. She goes, Mark, I've got a million dollars in the bank. What am I going to do? I'm like, enjoy it. Put aside money for your taxes and go back to work. Mm-hmm. And so it doesn't have to be a huge business. It's just gotta be one that makes the entrepreneur happy. But then there's the valuation piece.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, I mean, that's the nature of it, right? I mean, and that's really where the biggest conflicts in Shark Tank happen. That's in the valuation. They think this is the best business ever. We had one lady, a couple that came on, and they had this scraper for cat's tongues, right? Nice. Bizarre. The most bizarre pitch ever. I love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And they had this insane valuation, and it was on because it was corny and fun TV, not because it was a good business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, none.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
They'll go do very well without me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So if you take, just to use an example, a business that's valued at $1 million, and I want to buy 10% of that company for $100,000, right? then in order for me to get my money back, they've got to be able to generate $100,000 in after-tax cashflow that they're able to distribute. Can they do it or can they not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And if it's a $2 million valuation, whatever the valuation is, that's how much cash, after-tax cash, they have to generate to return that money to investors. Or the other option is, do I see this as business potentially having an exit? Do they have some unique technology or do they have something specific about them that some other company would want to acquire?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
then the cash flow isn't as, I don't want to say important, but isn't going to guide the valuation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, it could be any of the above, right? It could be a super products company that I think is going to take off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, I mean, can the person sell? And if not them, can I do it? Or someone on my team do it for them? So you're looking at the person? Yeah, for sure, yeah. That's where Barbara Corcoran's the best. She can look at a person and hear them talk for 20 minutes and know, can that person do the job and do the work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
or misleading at another level i'm gonna i'm gonna call them on it you know so you get people trying to sell supplements that come on there and it's a cure for cancer or whatever it may be or there's this latest fad that you know increases your core strength without doing any exercises you know shit like that i'm just gonna bounce i'm gonna pound on them right i still love that i still love the trying
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You know, give them credit, right? Because they know all of America is going to see it. And they're deluded themselves to believe this story so strongly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
See, that's a great question. Do you have to be ambitious and set aside reality at some level to think that you can create a company that could be worth $10, $100, $1 billion, right? Yeah, at some level, because you don't know. It's all uncertainty. But I think if you're delusional, that works against you. Yeah. Because everything's grounded in reality. You've got to execute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You've got to produce. You can have a vision, right? And you can say, this is where I want to get to, and that's my mission, or this is my driving principle. But you still got to execute on the business plan, and that's where most people fail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, I mean, because if you can't do the basics, you're not going to be able to do the bigger things. And at the same time, you've got to be able... One of the things that entrepreneurs do that I always try to remind any that I work with on is we all tend to lie to ourselves. Our product is bigger, faster, cheaper, this or that, as if that is a finite...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
situation that's never going to change right and there's always somebody i call them leapfrog businesses there's whoever's competing against you you know if you do a b or c they're going to try to do c d and e right and you better be prepared for that to come because otherwise they're out of business too so you're never in a vacuum you're always competing against sometimes an unlimited number of entrepreneurs that you don't even know exist who are trying to kick your ass
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Because I mean, that's, that's your riskiest point in time. Right. And so if you've done your homework, which includes going out there and testing product market fit, um, you should have confidence that you're gonna be able to sell it. Now, if you didn't do your homework and you go out there and you sell whatever it is, and you've raised money or whatever,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And just to pivot, you've already shown that you haven't been able to read the market. And so it's not that pivots can't work and always don't work. They can, but more often than not, they don't. You pivot for a reason. That's because you made a huge mistake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Oh, yeah. Just iterations. Yeah. Yeah. You know, entrepreneurship being, having any business is just continuous iteration, continuous. Your product, your sales pitch, your advertising, you know, introducing new technology. How do you use AI or not use AI? Where do you use it? What person is the right person?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
There's just a million touch points, you know, that you're always reevaluating in real time that you have to be agile and adapt and change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Like how are you going to make money on this? Software for sure. Because, you know, anything digital. Because it can change in a millisecond.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So my partner, Todd Wagner, and I would get together for lunches. And we were at California Pizza Kitchen in Preston Hollow in Dallas. And he was talking about how we could – used this new thing called the internet, this is late 94, early 95, to be able to listen to Indiana University basketball games, because that's where we went to school.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And he was like, look, when we would listen to games, we would have somebody in Bloomington, Indiana, have a speakerphone next to a radio, and then we would have a speakerphone in Dallas, and a six-pack or 12-pack of beer, and we'd sit around listening to the game, because there was no other way to listen to it. So I was like, okay, my first company, Micro Solutions, I'd written software,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
done network integration. And so I was comfortable digging into it. And so I'm like, okay, let's give it a try. So we started this company called AudioNet and effectively became the first streaming content company on the internet. And we're like, okay, we're not sure how we're going to make this work, but we were able to make it work. And we started going to radio stations and TV stations and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
music labels and everything, and evolved Audionet.com, which was only audio at the beginning, to Broadcast.com in 1998, which was audio and video, and became the largest multimedia site on the internet, took it public in July of 1998. It had the largest first day jump in the history of the stock market at the time. And then a year later, we sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in Yahoo stock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
and I owned right around 30% of the company, give or take. And so after taxes, that's what got me there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
A lot of iterations, right, like you talked about. We started in the second bedroom of my house, set up a server, I got an ISDN line, which was 128K line, and set up, downloaded Netscape server
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And then started using different file formats that were progressive loading and allowing people to connect to the server and do a progressive download so that the audio, you can listen to the audio while it was downloading onto your PC. Yeah, was it super choppy? So you were trying to figure out how to do it? Oh yeah, for sure, for sure. It would buffer. It wasn't good, but it was a start.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
There was nobody else doing it. And so it was like, okay, I can get access to this, this, or this. And then there were some third-party software companies, Zing and Progressive Networks and others that took it a little bit further. So we partnered with them and I started going to local radio stations where literally we would... set up a server right next to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I had a $49 radio, the highest FM radio that I could find. And we take the output of the audio signal from the radio with these two analog cables, plug it into the server, encode it, and make it available from audionet.com. Then I would go on UUNet bulletin boards. I would go on CompuServe. I would go on Prodigy. I would go on AOL. I'd go wherever I could find bodies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And I'd say, okay, we've got this radio station, KLIF in Dallas. It's got Dallas sports and Dallas news and politics. And if you're in an office or you're outside of Dallas, connect to audionet.com, and now you can listen to these things on demand. And that's how we started. And it started with one radio station, and then it was five, then it was 10, then it was video content.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
The laws were different then, so we could literally go out and buy CDs and host them and just let people listen to whatever music. And we went from 10 users a day to 100 to 1,000 to hundreds of thousands to a million over those next four years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Didn't spend a penny on advertising.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Wherever I could, like everything that was public domain, I'd go out and buy a video or a cassette, whatever it was, you know? And this was before the DMs, the Digital Minimum Copyright Act of 97, whenever it kicked in. So literally anything that was audio- We would put online so people could listen to it. And if you think about somebody at work, they didn't have a radio most likely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And if you did, you couldn't get reception. Definitely didn't have a TV, but you had a PC and you had bandwidth available to you. And the companies weren't up on firewalls or anything at that point in time. So our in-office listening during the day just exploded. Because whoever's sitting next to you, what are you listening to, right? And that was the start of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And then in early 98, we started adding video and just other things. And we ended up with thousands of servers. There was no cloud back then. And just pulling together all those pieces to make it work. But where we really made our money was by taking...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
that network that we had built, and then going to corporations and saying, look, it's 1996, 97, 98, and to communicate with your worldwide employees, what they would do is they would go to an auditorium that had a satellite uplink, and then they would have people go to theaters or ballrooms and hotels that had satellite downlinks, and they would broadcast the product introductions, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And so we said to them, look, you're paying millions of dollars to reach all your employees when you can do it. Pay us a half a million dollars and we'll do it just on their PCs at work. So we did, you know, when Intel announced the P90 PC, we, you know, charged them $2 million or whatever to do that. When Motorola announced a new phone or a new product, we would charge them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And so we used the consumer side to do a proof of concept for the network. And then we would take that product knowledge and go to corporations, and that's how we made our revenue. And there was some selling there with the corporations. Yeah, a lot of selling there, but we were saving them so much money, and they were technology companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
They wanted to be perceived as being leading edge, and so it was win-win.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I did all the technology, and then we hired engineer after engineer after engineer to implement it. Wow. Yeah. From putting together a multicast network to software to... just all these different things. Was this like a scary thing? It's terrifying, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Because as we were growing, trying to keep up the scale and literally we're buying off the shelf PCs and then, you know, server cards as the technology advanced and hard drives and things would fail. And we would have to, you know, we didn't have machine learning back then to do an analysis of, you know, how to distribute server resources. So, you know, like there was...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
There was a time when Bill Clinton and all the Monica Lewinsky stuff happened. They released the audio of their interviews of him or something like that, right? And we literally, I knew at that point in time when that was released, everybody at work was going to want to listen to it, right? So we had to take down servers that were doing Chicago Cubs baseball, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And just make all these on-the-fly decisions because we didn't have the tools to analyze or be predictive. But yeah, it was all technology-driven and marketing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah. So on the acquisition side, we were the largest media site on the internet, and it wasn't close. There was nobody close. We were YouTube, and relatively speaking, we would be 10x YouTube relative to the competition, because there was nobody there. And so it became obvious to Yahoo, AOL, and others that they needed a multimedia component. And we had the infrastructure, sales, all that stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And so Yahoo, when we went public in 98, or right before I think it was, they made an investment of like $2 million, which gave us a connection to them. And then after we went public, they decided they needed to have multimedia. And so in April of 99, we made a deal. And then July of 2000 is when it closed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Oh, the collar? Yeah. Okay. So when we sold to Yahoo, we sold for $5.7 billion in stock, not cash. And so I looked at...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
after microsolutions um when i sold that um i took that money and initially i told my broker i wanted to invest like a 60 year old man because i wanted to protect it um but then he started asking me all kinds of questions about all these technologies that i understood like networks i had installed we had become one of the top 20 let's say um systems integrators in the country at one point in time we're the largest ibm token ring um installer in the country it was crazy right
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Banyan. Wow. Blast from the past. I mean, so anyway, so these Wall Street bankers or analysts rather that were the big analysts of the time would call me up because they would ask my broker, what does he know about this product? And I knew them all, what was working and not working, right? And so the ones that worked... you know, I say that it's working.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I'd see the stock, they say something, the stock would go up 20 bucks. Right. So I'm like, well, and my broker was like, you need to, you know, this better than they do. You need to invest. So I started buying and selling stocks and this was in 1990 and was just killing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I was making 80, 90, a hundred percent a year over those next four years to the point where guy came in and asked to use my trading history to start a hedge fund. which we did, and I sold within nine months. It was great, right? But the point being, as it goes forward, so when we sold to Yahoo, I already had a lot of experience trading stocks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And I had seen different bubbles come and go, a bubble for PC manufacturers, a bubble for networking manufacturers. They went up, up, up, up, up, and then they came straight down after the hype, or somebody just leapfrogged them. And so when we sold to Yahoo, I was like, I've got to be next to my name. That's all I need or all I want. I don't want to be greedy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And I'd seen this story before where stocks get really frothy and go straight down. And I knew that because all of what I had was in stock, I needed to find a way to color it and protect it. So understanding stocks and trading and options and all that, my broker and I, we went and shorted an index that had Yahoo in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And so the law at the time was you couldn't short any indexes that had more than 5% of that stock in it, right? Of the Yahoo stock. And so I took pretty much 20 some million dollars, everything I had at the time, and I shorted the index.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah. I mean, how much money do I need, right? Where other people were saying, oh, I think you can go up higher, higher, higher. I went on CNBC and I told them what I had done And they were like, and Yahoo stock had gone up significantly from the time I had collared. And one of the guys, Joe Kernan was on there. Don't you feel stupid now that Yahoo stock has gone up, you know, X percent more?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I'm like, yeah, I feel real stupid sitting on my jet. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Oh, for sure, for sure. Yeah, and I'd seen it before, right? Like I just said. And so what I did was we put together a collar where I sold calls and bought puts. And as it turned out, when the market just cratered, I was protected. And, you know, over the next two, three years, whatever it was, it converted to cash, paid my taxes, et cetera. But it protected me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And as it turns out, it was called one of the top 10 trades of all time. And what was even more interesting out of that period, my broker at that time was at Goldman Sachs. And I had asked him to see if there was a way to trade VIX, the VIX, right? The volatility index. And there wasn't, right? And so...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
one of the people that Goldman that we were working with to try to create this actually left Goldman and created indexes that allowed you to trade the VIX.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
your insight into all of this by saying you just didn't want to be greedy but you still have to see that it's a bubble yeah i mean yeah obviously if i thought it was going to keep on going up and it was there was intrinsic value there i would have stayed in it but it wasn't so much yahoo it was just the entire industry you would back then you know like we're looking at the the magic seven or whatever it is stocks now and people are asking is in a bubble and when you
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I would get into cabs and people would just start talking about internet stocks. There were people creating companies with just a website and going public. That's a bubble, right? Where there's no intrinsic value at all. And people aren't even trying to make operating cap profits. They're just trying to leverage the frothiness of the stock market. That's a bubble. You don't see that right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
There's not companies, you don't see any IPOs right now for that matter. So I don't think we're in a bubble now, but back then, yes, I thought we were in a bubble, but that wasn't really the motivating factor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
do you think it's possible we're in a bit of an ai bubble right now no because we're not seeing funky ai companies just go public if all of a sudden we see a rush of companies who are skins on other people's models or or just creating models to create models that are going public then yeah that's probably the start of a bubble
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
um but that said my my 14 year old was bragging about buying nvidia you know with me and in his robin hood account he tells me the order i placed it and he was like oh yeah it's going up up up you know and i'm like yeah we're not quite there yet but that's you know that's one thing to pay attention yeah we're flirting with it yeah um you said that becoming a billionaire requires luck yeah can you explain yeah i mean there's no business plan where you can just start it and say yeah i'm definitely going to be a billionaire
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
you can, you know, if I had to start all over, could I start a company that made me a millionaire? Yeah. Cause I know how to sell and I know technology and I've learned enough over the years to do that. Um, could I make 10 million, probably a hundred million? I hope so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Um, but a billion, just something good has got to happen, you know, timing, timing, you know, internet stock market was going nuts right when we started, you know, and that certainly I couldn't predict or control. Um, You know, it's like AI right now. AI has been around a long, long, long, long time. And the Nvidia processors, or GPUs rather,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You couldn't predict that now's the time that they were going to get to that cost-effectiveness where you could create models and train them, and although it's expensive, it's still doable. We had ASICs for custom applications, and we had CPUs that were leading the way, but GPUs were more for gaming and then crypto mining. And then all of a sudden, they were the foundation for AI models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But he was really able to raise money, right? A lot of money. And people were really dismissive of him because they weren't profitable. And we were in an environment where it was possible to raise all that money. It was possible to raise that money. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Look, Zuck was just trying to get laid, right? And it took off and you wrote some good stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But yeah, so more power to him, right? You can't take anything away from him. But yeah, Snapchat, same thing, took off. Apps didn't take off in 2007 when the iPhone came out. Apps took off in 2011, 2012.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And if you were there with the right app at the right time, and even Facebook, you know, in 2004, the bubble had burst and, you know, the price for computers had fallen enough and kids in school all needed computers or laptops. If he had tried to do something like that, you know, five years earlier, I mean, it was too young, but, you know, five years earlier or five years later,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You know, or Friendster might've been the ultimate, or MySpace.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Or MySpace. I had a MySpace account and that was before Facebook.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
That's what allows you to take advantage of that opportunity and the kismet of it all, right? You've gotta be, because it wasn't like any of the people I mentioned, there weren't others trying the same thing, right? You had to be able to see it. You had to be able to visualize and put together a plan of some sort, or at least have a path. And then you had to execute on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
and do all those things at the same time, and have the money available to you. Because it wasn't like, whether it was Google or Facebook, they raised a shitload of money. It wasn't bootstrapping it that got them there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
If Chuck wasn't at Harvard and he was at Miami of Ohio University or he was at Richland Community College, same idea, same person, same execution and nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I agree, I agree 100% with that, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, I mean, scale is, the only delta is scale, right? We're not all blessed with the access to the tools that you need to... to hit that grand slam.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Waking up every day with a smile, excited about the day. People always say, well, when you get that kind of money, does it make you happy? And my answer always is, if you were happy when you were broke, you're gonna be really, really, really happy when you're rich. But you got to work on being happy when you're broke, I guess. Well, you're just being happy, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
If you were miserable in your job before, there's a good chance you're still going to be miserable if that's just who you are. That's a pretty good definition of success, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You know, we talked about my dad, my parents. I never looked at my dad and said, okay, you're not successful. He busted his ass. And when he came home, you know, we enjoyed our time together, right? There was nothing at any point in time where I felt like, oh, this is miserable, we're awful, we don't have this, we don't have that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
We celebrated the things we did have and never knew about the things we didn't have. And so I think you have to be able to find your way to whatever it is that puts a smile on your face every day. Some people can do it and some people can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, whatever it is, right? Whatever makes you feel good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Exactly right. Because that was my dad's grand slam, right? Seeing three kids go to college, be successful, you know. spend, be able to spend time with him. And that was the other thing, you know, he really made me realize is the most valuable asset isn't the money. It's your time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
That's why, you know, from a young age, I wanted to retire because I wanted to experience everything that I possibly could in this life. And, you know, he got joy from us. I get joy from my kids. And that's the most special thing you ever can have. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, a lot of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, we call that not doing something. Yeah, it wasn't a mistake. It was just, I mean, it was a mistake. I like how you tried to. Yeah. I always try to look at mistakes, the things you did that didn't turn out as opposed to things you did to, you know, the negative. But can you tell the story of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So the backstory of that is Bill Gurley came to me and said, Mark, there's this guy, Travis, that has this company, Red Swoosh, which is a peer-to-peer networking company that I think you can help. And so I invested and would spend a lot of time with Travis. And it's funny because back then, that was like 2006, I was an investor at Box.net with Aaron Levy. And, oh, there's one other company there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But there were three of them where there'd be emails between, you know, where I'd introduce them and we'd all talk in these emails and they'd all gone to be, have astronomical success, right? But so Red Swoosh had its issues, you know, because I was looking at peer-to-peer as kind of stealing bandwidth from the internet providers when bandwidth was a scarce commodity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And so, you know, what Travis did with that, though, was great. You know, he convinced gaming companies who wanted to do downloads of the clients for those games to use his peer-to-peer and Red Swoosh. And, you know, he busted his ass, and I think he sold it for $18 million. So he did well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And so it was natural for him to come to me, and I still have the emails, you know, and ask me about Uber Cab. And I thought, okay, this is a great idea. I really, really like it. I said, you're going to, and he showed me his budgets and I think they were raising money at 10 or $15 million or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And I'm like, your biggest challenge is going to be, you're going to have to fight all the incumbent taxi commissions. They're going to want to put you out of business. That's going to be a challenge. And I think you don't have enough money designated for marketing to get all that done. And I said, I'd invest, but not quite at that valuation, right? Never came back to me. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, for sure, right? They were dominated by an insulated few. They were not very transparent. You didn't know the intricacies there. They were very politically driven and old boy, incestuous network. And like I told him, Travis, the best thing about you is you'll run through walls and break down barriers. The bad thing about you is you'll run through walls even if you don't have to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I think he tried to go too big. He had too big an ambition, which cost him in the end, not financially and personally, but just in terms of being able to stick it out with them. Yeah. But that's what makes him a great entrepreneur.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And change it all. Just change it all. Yeah, Belinda Johnson, who worked as our general counsel at Broadcast.com, was Brian's GC and chief operating officer. So yeah, they had a smart, smart, smart, smart team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I probably would have said no like a lot of people did to Airbnb because I'm like, I don't want people sleeping in my bed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
To monetize it, yeah, but he did. More power to him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
How did you help turn it around? I had this big tall guy named Dirk Nowitzki and I let him be Dirk Nowitzki, right? And I got out of the way. But I think more than anything else, there was the turnaround on the business side. And then there was the turnaround on the basketball side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And on the basketball side, I just went in there immediately said, whatever it takes to win, that's what we're going to do. Back then, they had three or four coaches that were responsible for everything. And I was like, okay, we spend more money training people on PC software than we do developing the most important assets of the business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So I made the decision to go out there and hire like 15 different development coaches, one for each player. And everybody thought I was just insane. But it sent the message that we were gonna do whatever it took to win. And once the guys believed that winning was the goal, as opposed to just making money, attitudes changed, effort went up, and the rest is history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So the assets of the business here are the- The players. The players. Yeah, for sure. And then on the business side, The first question I asked myself is, what business are we in? And I really didn't know the answer immediately, but within the first few months, it was obvious that the entire NBA thought we were in the business of basketball. We were not. We were in the experience business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
When you think about sporting events that you've been to, you don't remember the score. You don't remember the home runs or the dunks. You remember who you're with. And you remember why you went. It was my first day with a girl who's now my wife, or I went with my buddies and he threw up on the person in front of us. You know, my dad took me, my aunt, my uncle took me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Those are the experiences you remember. And once I conveyed to our people that this is what we were selling, that what happened in the arena off the court was just as important as what happened on the court, if not more so. Because if mom or dad are bringing the 10-year-old, you have to keep them occupied because they have short attention spans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And so I would get into fights with the NBA, put aside the refs, but getting inside and fights in the NBA, I would say NBA, nothing but attorneys, right? Because they had no marketing skills whatsoever. And to their credit, they realized that was a problem and started bringing in better and better and better marketing people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So have you ever been to an NBA game? Miami Heat. Do you remember walking into the arena and you feel the energy, right? That's what makes it special. Yeah, the energy is everything, especially playoff games. Right, for sure, right? And even a regular season game, right? Even against the worst team, you know, that's where we get, you know,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Because the tickets tend to be a little bit cheaper on the resale market, that's where parents will bring their kids. And so you hear kids screaming the entire game. And the parents are thrilled to death, right? They got to do something with their kids. The kids are thrilled to death because they got to see basketball, an NBA game, and scream at the top of their lungs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And, you know, if it turns out to be a close game and that ball's in the air, and if it goes in, you know, everybody's hugging and high-fiving people you've never seen before in your life. And if it misses, you're commiserating with people you've never seen before. That's such a unique experience that's unique to sports. And we never sold that. And that's exactly what we started selling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, the energy in a stadium is completely different than the energy in an arena. You know, in a stadium, particularly if it doesn't have a roof, it's hard to bottle that energy. You feel it and you see, like I'm from Pittsburgh, so there's the terrible towels and people screaming defense and everything at Steelers games. But in an arena, the energy level is just...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
indescribable so how much of it is the selling the tickets in person but also versus what you see on tv so when you're owning a team do you get any of the cut for the what's shown on tv yeah yeah we yeah so that there's a tv deal that's done with either a local tv broadcaster and we get all that or um a network broadcaster like abcc um espn tnt whatever and then we get 1 30th of that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
so what role does the tv play in like turning it keeps fans connected look when the team is doing really well it's easy right there's more viewers everybody's more excited um and when you're not it's you know there's still gonna be hardcore fans and and you know general fans and kids that like to watch the game what about like the personality of the people in the in the stands like i mean clearly you're part of the legend of the team
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, screaming, yeah, the whole game, right? Yeah, it's funny, you know, the way I am here is how I am, you know, 24 hours a day, unless there's a Mavs game, you know, and for whatever reason, that's where I let out all that stress and frustration. But yeah, I mean, it's not so, the fans, you know, the sixth man, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
We need fans to bring that energy and, you know, amplifying that as much as we can is important. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I wouldn't call it a beef, right? It's just... It's a bit of fun? Yeah, it's fun for me, right? I just, you know... It's his platform. He gets to run it any way he please. He pays for that right. And so I have total respect for whatever choices he makes, even if I don't agree with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But because it's his platform, people are less likely to disagree with him, particularly somebody who's got a platform themselves. And so when we start talking about DEI and it's just de facto racist and this stuff, stuff that I just think is nonsense. I have no problem sharing my opinion. And if he disagrees, okay, he can disagree, I don't care.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And it's fun to engage, but he doesn't really engage. He just comes back with snark comments, which is his choice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Really simple, right? D is diversity, and that means you just expand your pool of potential applicants to people who you might not otherwise have access to. To look where you didn't look before, to look where other people aren't looking for quality employees. That simple. And the E in equity means when you hire somebody, you put them in a position to succeed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
The I inclusion is when you've hired somebody and they may not be typical, if you will, right? You show them some love and give them support they need so they can do their job as best they can and feel comfortable and confident going to work. It's that simple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
There's a lot to unpack there, right? So first, you can't do quotas. They're illegal unless you're, and I'm not the lawyer on this subject, but unless you're trying to repair something that's happened in the past, like some discrimination that's happened in the past. So it's not quota-based. And I think that's really just kind of a straw man that people put out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Now, does that mean that there aren't DEI programs that are implemented poorly? Of course not. There are everything that's implemented poorly in one company to another, right? Sales, marketing, human resources. You can pick any element of business and find companies that implement it poorly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Um, but that's the beauty of capitalism in a free market or mostly free market where if you make these choices and they are the wrong choices, you're going to lose your best people. You're not going to be able to hire the best people. You're not going to execute on your business plans in the way that we discussed, regardless of the size of the company. And it also, I think,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Depends on where you're having the discussion. So when I'm in a different group of people off of X, the feedback's completely different, right? But to your question of reverse racism, yes, it happens. I mean, because people are people. There's no human being that is 100% objective. And it's also... There's very, very, very few jobs that can be determined on a purely quantitative basis, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
How do you tell one janitor from the other who's the best, right? How do you tell one salesperson that you're hiring versus another you're hiring? Because they haven't sold your product yet, so you don't know. We talked earlier about firing people because you made mistakes. And, you know... Yes, there's discrimination against any group, white, Asian, black, green, orange, whatever it may be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But I truly believe that there's far more discrimination against people of color than there are people who are white. And I think it's become a straw man that reverse discrimination because of DEI is prevalent or near ubiquitous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So you're getting into the culture of organizations, right? And leadership within organizations and accepting any type of criticism, put aside DEI. When I criticize the referees in the NBA, I got fined, right? That was their option. I knew what I was getting into, right? Not that they're completely analogous, but it's cause and effect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
If I'm in a major company and I'm publicly criticizing or even internally criticizing a sales plan or a product, our product sucks, right? Where like there was a Google engineer that got fired for saying, you know, Google had AGI, right? And nobody believed they did and they knew that created problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It wasn't DEI related, but it was, you know, saying something publicly that was to the, in the CEO's eyes, to the detriment of the company, right? So I think those are all analogous. If you're trying to accomplish something within an organization because you think there's a problem and there's people speaking out saying, look, We're getting it wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I think I'm a victim of all this and the company... Right then, you know, leadership has got to make a decision. Do they agree or not agree? Are they right or are they wrong? Is it to the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
positive is a positive or negative to the company and you decide so you know this conversation that conservatives are being um silenced in organizations now um i just i haven't seen it you know i've talked to and then the other side of the your question i think i'm packing it is um What's driving all this? Put aside universities, for one, in corporate America.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
When I talk to people in corporate America about DEI, they always start talking about ideology, right? And like I've talked to Bill Ackman, who you've had on, right? And when I asked him, well, Bill, you run your own companies. Who's telling you what to do? They are. Who's they? Well, it's the universities, you know, the people who have this ideology of DEI. I'm like, did they force you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Did they coerce you? Did you lose control of your company? No, it's not me, it happens to other people. Then I talk to other people, same thing. So I get, you know, try not to go one-on-one and tip Twitter conversations on this topic. So in the DMs, I'll talk to people who are really conservative And I'll ask the same question. And I'll be like, well, who's forcing you to do this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Well, it's the ideology that's everywhere. Didn't you see the Harvard thing in University of North Carolina? I'm like, I've never had anybody try to push me in this direction to do this. This was my business choice. I'm not trying to tell other people you have to do this. You make your own business choices.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And so where companies have made their business choices, and if somebody doesn't feel confident or comfortable with it, they may feel they're being discriminated against. There was something I just read in the Wall Street Journal where the Wall Street Journal had a company interview two million people, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And the difficulty in firing and how people, when they were fired, 40% of the people who were fired felt like it was wrong that they were doing a great job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yet, then I talked about the HR person going through the hassle of trying to explain to this person through performance reviews that they weren't doing a good job, yet the people still thought they were doing a great job despite being told they're not doing a good job, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So I see that as being an analogous to all this, you know, this huffing and puffing about reverse discriminations and conservatives not being able to speak up because they're 40% of people who have been fired don't believe they should have been fired. There's a disconnect somewhere in how you think you're doing your job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And if you just feel like I can't speak up because of it, because you're white and that doesn't comport well with DEI programs, a lot of things are going to happen, right? Either that's going to come up in your performance review, HR or your boss is going to have to address it in some way. It's going to get to HR at some level, and then decisions are going to have to be made.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And you can't just fire somebody because they spoke up, right? Somebody's going to have to communicate with you. And so I think a lot of... I just don't trust the supposed volume that... people say it's happening at versus everything I've read and seen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And when I talk to people in positions of authority within organizations and ask them who's forcing them to implement these ideologies, nobody says yes, that there is somebody. But on Twitter, it sounds great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So where have you criticized it and been condemned? Academic or? Academic, yeah. Academics, let's, two different worlds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's just like- Well, maybe it's because I'm an entrepreneur when I see an ideal that you try to implement it and support it and get to that point. But universities and companies are night and day different, right? I can see an argument for the ideology in a university. I can see, you look at the amount of money spent on it. And so while the goal is right-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
the way they implement it in universities, the way they implement most things in universities is wrong, right? There's a reason why tuition has gone up, you know, a multitude of, or a multiple of inflation, they're not well-run organizations across the board. So I'm not gonna argue with that at all. So when you've seen me argue with DEI, I haven't waded into DEI and universities at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So it's mostly focused on companies. 100%, right, because that's where I exist. But at the same time, like I read Christopher Rufro's book where he talks about the genealogy of wokeism and ideology, but then he gets to the point, and I hope I'm remembering this right, where he says that the response to it is decentralized activism, if you will.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
That's not the word he used to try to counter that DEI. And that seems to me to be counter to the whole conservative movement right now, right? Other than school boards. Where it's centralized and the Republican candidate is all about centralized power in him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And to me, that's just a conflict and a lot of the underpinning of the whole DEI conversation, a lot of which goes through Christopher Rufro right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So... It says it all, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Damn it. Because I'm not going to argue that universities implement DEI well, right? And I'm not going to tell you that... They need to be spending 20-some million dollars a year on DEI positions. To me, that's insane. Do I look at the Harvard and North Carolina decision and say it was a great decision?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
No, because I think having a diverse student body helps make for kids who are better prepared for the real world. Mm-hmm. But I'm not running a university, so it's not my choice. Maybe at some point in the future I will, but not now. And in terms of the corporate side of it, who's telling anybody what to do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Everybody was black or whatever, people of color.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So why is it when that came out, it was a big uproar, but when somebody, so who was it? One of the people who were trying to fuck with me. I forget which one. There's so many. Yeah, but he pointed out to Elon that Grok, Elon's AI, was woke when it answered certain questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And other people have pointed out other things to Elon about Grok, Grok, Grok, whatever, however it's pronounced, that was leaning left or woke, right? And Elon's response was, oh, it'll change. It's a mistake. We're fixing it. When it happens to Gemini and Google, it's the end of the world. Look how woke they are, and it's a reflection of all their culture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Now, Google comes out and says it's a mistake, and then they dox the guy who is the product manager or whatever of AI of that product, and then they go back and look at his old tweets and show that he's very left-leaning and very DEI supportive, and that's the end of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, so you're giving them too much power. And maybe I'm not recognizing the power, right? So I'll tell you a personal experience. Up until... a month ago maybe, if you put in keto gummies, Shark Tank keto gummies into Google, it would show up with scammy ads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Scam ad after scam ad, and I would get emails up until a month ago from elderly people asking me why the gummies weren't working and why the companies were charging all this money on a month-by-month basis when they tried to cancel. And they said it was the number one deal on Shark Tank of all time, right? Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
The distance didn't happen once over one week, over two weeks, right? And because it was hard to fix. Yeah. As it turns out, I was working with them to try to find a fix. And we would both look at the same page and... If you were inside of Google within the Google.com domain, it would show one page. If you were outside of Google, it would show another.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And it took us looking at it at the same time for anybody to realize it, meaning that there's a lot of technology problems that are hard to fix.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, but they've got billions of customers who are not going to... So what you're saying is the free market stops with artificial intelligence, that people don't pay attention and respond, that Google doesn't listen to the responses, that people inside of Google will ignore their own best financial interest, and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And even their own best personal interest, because they know they're going to get doxxed now by Elon and others. And so I just don't see that. And Elon's not allowed to make those same mistakes, but Google isn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It just takes time, yeah, it's fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
That's the way neural networks work though, right? That's why there'll be millions of models because weights and biases putting together a neural network.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And they do it on the front end with prompts and they try to do it on the back end with the neural networks that are underneath them, right? And it doesn't always work. And that's why there's going to be millions of models rather than just four foundational models or five that everybody uses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But that's the beauty of... The free market. Yeah, that's where the market corrects it, right? And not only from the outside, because everybody you know is going to test it. Like when YouTube first came out, well, not first came out, after Google bought them, there used to be... different commands you could give it, right? There were prompt commands that you could give it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And you could find all the nasty porn that got loaded before they kicked it off, right? And it was just the nastiest shit ever. And even now, to this day, if there's some horrific, tragic event, somebody's loading it up, right? I know that's not direct to your point of internal influence to the output, right? But people on the outside are gonna check for that now. Right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's almost like the new bug contest, right, to try to find bugs in software. And then on the inside, if it's all left-leaning and all you have is left-leaning employees because, you know, most conservatives won't want to work there then, again, that's self-correcting as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So where does this go is the question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Right? What happens next? And- I mean, going back, I mean, I've been in so many PC revolutions, right, or evolutions where porn was the big issue, right? Now we don't even talk about porn being an issue, even though, you know, every post on Twitter now has, you know, Lincoln Bios. for a porn post, right? We don't even think that's a negative anymore. That's just an accepted thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And now it's become very, where are your politics on Twitter? But again, as you extend that and things grow, But as AI models become more efficient and trainable for a lot less money or even locally on a PC or a phone, we're all going to have our own models. And there's going to be millions and millions and millions of models and not just foundational models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Now, maybe they'll build some on open source. Maybe it'll be copy-pasta where you can just cut and paste and create your own model and train it yourself. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Maybe it'll be a mixture of experts where, you know, maybe it'll be a meta front end, like we're working on a project where we take 30 different AI models and there's just a meta search engine where it searches all of them and you can compare all the outputs and see what you think is the best, kind of like a search engine, right? Because you might get, is DEI good, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You know, is the COVID vaccine good, right? You're going to get a variety of outputs and you have to make that decision yourself, right? That's what I think is going to happen with AI as well, because I think brands, there's no way the Mayo Clinic and the Harvard Medical School are just going to contribute all their IP to chat GPT or Gemini or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's going to have to be licensed or they're going to do their own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And that's fair and that's right, you know, as opposed to Pravda telling you everything you want to know, right? And everybody believing it because there's control of everything, right? And so going back to what you said earlier, people in Russia don't think, you know, invading Ukraine, it's, you know, a lot of them see it as a positive, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I'm sure you have relatives and friends who think, you know, it's the best thing that ever happened, right? Because they believe in Putin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Right, right, because that's exactly what Putin said. And, you know, we don't have... one uniform media outlet. That's the difference. Even though people like to talk about mainstream media as being the source of a lot of the friction, there is no such thing as mainstream media anymore. Fox is the biggest cable news channel with the biggest audience. And they call everybody else mainstream media.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's insane the things that we accept from our sources of information. To me, that's the bigger problem. The bigger problem is trying to figure out what is free speech and what is the line of tolerance for free speech. And at what point does hateful free speech crowd out other people? Putin's the master of that. You're going to jail or you're going to be dead if you disagree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
God help us if we ever get to that point here. But The person who controls the algorithm controls the world, right? And if you are committed to one specific platform as your singular source of information or affiliated platforms, then whoever controls the algorithm or the programming there controls you. in a lot of respects. And I think that's where our biggest problem has been.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
We get people attached to specific platforms and apps and media outlets, and they become part of that team. And they identify as such, and either you're part of the team or you're not. And that to me is the fundamental problem. It's not woke ideology because I never felt any pressure to make the choices that I've chosen, including diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And I've never forced anybody or told anybody to do it. I just said, here's my experiences. Whenever I've talked to people who talk about the woke ideology, no one ever got forced. I
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
If there was a way to gauge the number of impressions that she had, right, and where they source from, I'd be willing to bet any amount of money that 90% plus of the impressions and discussions of Dylan McDermott were on right-leaning media.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
That's the guy whose name I couldn't think of, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, just the point is that if you looked at impressions, like when you run an ad, you're curious about impressions and who sees them, right? But if you look at the impressions related to Dylan McDermott... I would, like I just said, I bet 90% or more were in conservative media. And, you know, I don't know how many followers she had, 250,000 followers or whatever when the Bud Light ad came out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And if it weren't for Kid Rock shooting, you know, shooting at Dylan McDermott Bud Light cans, She'd be long forgotten.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But my point still holds. I don't know how many kids were following. And you can look at the followers list. It's not like it's hidden, right? Back then, if they had 250,000 followers, and now we're on TikTok, where he might get 50-some thousand views or likes, right? I don't know how many views, but likes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I've never seen any evidence that Dylan McDermott influenced people to transition their gender. As he transitioned to her, it was documented on TikTok over the course of a year. And again, when you go back and look at the views on those TikToks, it wasn't enormous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, but that is a big stretch, right? To think that all the things that have to happen before you transition gender, right? And I'm not saying kids might identify, find it cool or in the moment expedient, if you will, to dress up as the other gender. Great, who cares, right? But to go through the actual physical transition,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I don't remember what the numbers were that I read, but I do remember that the latest numbers that came out in terms of transitioning were from JAMA, which is a medical association that said from 2021 to 2022, the numbers went down. But the bigger point is there are no numbers for 2023 when post Dylan McDermott. So there's no way to know if the assertion is true, even marginally true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Now, you can easily suggest it, right? But you can say that about any social media influencer, right? Kids are dying because... I mean, it's just like when people accuse Trump of potentially influencing people to inject bleach into their veins.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
That's a big old leap to say that because Trump says it, that people are going to start injecting, and then they find somebody who actually did, and it's like, oh, it must be true. This is a trend now. I'm just not buying it that there aren't enough roadblocks in the way. Now, I'm not saying it never happens, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And for me, to me, you should have to wait until you're 18 to actually have any surgery to transition. And if your parents approve it earlier, then you can have a conversation with your doctor. But you're suggesting that everybody in that process— to transition a minor is corrupt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
That the doctor, the sociologist, the psychologist, all the people involved, the hospital where the surgery is happening, the insurance company that's paying for it, they all have been corrupted by this trend. I just don't see that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So think about all the people who have to be complicit to do an operation. It's not complicit like evil complicit. No, it is evil complicit, right? Because somebody... In hospitals right now, they won't perform abortions because of state law. In Alabama, they stopped IVF treatment immediately after that ruling by that judge, right, the QAnon judge. Does the state think that—
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
They're not going to pay attention to the possible consequences of being the hospital that does transgender, that gives doctors operating rights there and not be aware of the risks associated with it and double check. To me, that's just insane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
They're risking their entire business and livelihood and personal relationships for not checking that this 14-year-old boy who wants to be a girl or vice versa is there waiting for surgery. I just don't see that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But that is in a time of war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
When you feel like there's nationalism, patriotism, everything that comes up. Russia, right? The moms of the kids sent to Ukraine who didn't come back in Russia feel certainly different than the everyday Russian who's just taking whatever information that's available from a unified, controlled media.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's interesting. I'm not dismissing human nature at all, but there's a difference. I think that human nature, self-preservation influences those decisions. There's nothing about self-preservation involved in DEI, wokeness, transgenderism to compare it to Auschwitz. That's insane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Look at the basics, right? If you look at the people he's hired,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
um there hasn't been any turnover in his cabinet at all if you look at the people he's hired um over the course of his career or while he was vice president in particular there's nobody who turned on him and came out and written books and made public statements about how he's bad for the country now compare that to trump the people closest to him
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
almost all of them turn unless there's a financial relationship involved. And to me, that says everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
If you're going to be the most powerful person in the world, you better know how to manage and lead. And that's not to say Biden hasn't made a lot of mistakes. I mean, immigration, the border is a horrific mistake. Um, and hopefully he recognizes that. And I don't like the fact that he doesn't admit his mistakes and just say, okay, I got to fix it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Or I made a mistake in Afghanistan, whatever it may be. Right. The, the position of commander in chief and, um, president, you're going to make mistakes. Then I look at the other guy, never miss a mistake. And the list is long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
For Biden. Yeah, you can't be an illegal immigrant and vote. And now in a lot of states, because of the conservatives, they've passed laws saying you have to show identification. When I voted in Texas, you had to show state identification. They can't vote. You can't register as an illegal alien that I'm aware of to vote.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I remember going to the debate with Trump in 2016, and he was debating Clinton, and one of the things he said was, we don't even know if this election will be legitimate if I lose. This was in 2016 before he was even elected, and that was where he was going. That's just what he does. He's never admitted a mistake. The guy's failed a zillion times. Most people say, okay, I learned from him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You know, I read a book about Roy Cohen and, you know, Roy Cohen was the ultimate deny, deny, deny. And that was one of Trump's mentors. And you can see almost everything Roy Cohen ever did in the same way that Donald Trump approaches things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, of course it does, right? But the facts are still the facts, right? And in red states, they're going to be checking every ID. They're going to be making sure that's not the case. And, you know, you can also make the argument, well, in a blue state, it doesn't matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
In the swing states, they're still going to be checking because they know Trump is going to sue the shit out of them when he loses, you know? And so, again, that's where... people will take those self-preservation steps to keep their job and do the right thing. There's still enough people who believe in this country and how amazing it is to do the right thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And a lot of the premise of what some conservatives are saying and doing, the underpinning of it is that their fellow citizens will not do anything, not something, anything that serves the best interest of this country. And to me, that's just wrong. That is just misleading and wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But it's just, it's very functional, right? Either they get across... There's a thousand different ways, an unlimited number of ways to enter the United States of America undetected, right? And the South border where it's the easiest and the worst. And Biden needs to take steps to reduce that. Remember, when Biden was vice president and Obama was president, they called Obama the deporter-in-chief.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
He had no problem deporting people. And I think if I had to guess, and this is just a guess, that when they looked at the initial statistics for immigration when Biden took over, they thought there was room for more immigrants, not because they would vote, but you can make a fiscal argument that in a world where the birth rate is flat to declining, we need immigrants, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And immigrants typically don't... don't have a higher crime rate or anything, then indigenous American citizens, indigenous isn't the right word, but American citizens. And so they made a calculated mistake. They made a decision that was wrong and now they have to fix it or it's gonna hurt them severely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But I don't buy, like what Elon's pushing that the whole reason is they are voters and will become voters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
That's not what Donald Trump wants though. He wants to ship them all out, right? There's just a whole lot of hyperbole when it comes to talking to all, about talking about all of these things we're talking about. When it's right versus left, my team versus your team, my tribe versus your tribe, the only way to stand out is hyperbole.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
The hard part, and why I like this conversation, is how do you distinguish hyperbole versus reality? And I get where you're going, Lex, where it's like, what... The smallest spark sometimes can cause people to change, and then that spark becomes bigger, and then it becomes more widespread. And then all of a sudden, your country has changed. It's not what you thought it was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I get that completely, right? And yes, you always have to be on top of that to make sure. But a lot of that comes from lack of leadership, right? And lack of trust. Because there's nobody who's saying, all right, Republicans... That's all hyperbole and you're wrong for that. Democrats, you fucked up on immigration, right? You fucked up in Afghanistan, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Here's where you made these mistakes, own it. There's nobody who says, right, we're not going to just bring in Republicans if the Republicans win. And then, you know, and there's nobody who says, we're not going to just bring in Democrats. We're going to bring in a mix, right? We're going to try to get balanced on the Supreme Court. There's just, there's no leadership that's doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
That's the fundamental problem. It's not about the ideology of woke. No leadership.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Right. Everybody gets labeled, right? Because that works on social media. Look, if Elon changed the algorithm... Just by taking himself out of it? Seriously, I'm not saying don't post, right? Post all you want. But if you look at his followers... they're almost all right-leaning. If you look at the people he engages with positively, they're almost all right-leaning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And if you look at the people he engages with negatively, like me, right, I consider myself an independent, but I lean left on the DEI topic, right? That influences the algorithm. And so you see what you see because of what he says.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
grabbing thing or the lower lizard version of that where like people just want the drama they want to turn it out when i last read through all the stuff on on their algorithm right maybe it's changed whoever has the biggest account and gets engagement on that account influences what people see the most
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Somebody who's curious. They want to keep on learning because business is ever-changing. It's never static. Somebody who's agile because as you learn new things and the environment around you changes, you have to be able to adapt and make the changes. And somebody who can sell. Because no business has ever survived without sales.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Right, but I think they call it the nearest neighbor approach, and I think that's what they do. And so whoever has the biggest account has the most neighbors who in turn have their neighbors who in turn have their neighbors, and that's how they discern what comes next.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
When you get a break, just create a burner account on Twitter and see who they recommend to you. Elon. And not just Elon. I mean, the people that Elon likes. And I'm saying that's not Elon saying, add this person, add this person, and suggest this person, this person, this person. I'm saying that's what the algorithm is. Yeah, there should be transparency around that for sure. There is. There is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And that's the whole point, right? He knows there's transparency and he knows the impact. That's why when I say take yourself out of the algorithm, right? don't include his account, that changes, I think, the output of the algorithm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
He wasn't, but still, even like the Kim Kardashian accounts, whatever, right? Yeah. I don't, it wasn't open source to Elon's credit. It is now, so I couldn't see it to know, right? So I didn't get the sense one way or the other of one element being dominant over the other. But obviously conservatives felt that left-leaning was more dominant back then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, you and me both.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
There's something to be gained from seeing them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And when the lack of transparency leads to lack of trust. And when you can't trust the healthcare system, other than maybe your doctor, that's a broken system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So the thing we're trying to solve for is trust. And the way we feel we get there is through complete transparency. So when you go to costplusdrugs.com and you put in the name of the medication, if it's one of the 2,500 and growing that we carry, we will first show you our cost, what we actually pay for it. Then we'll show you our 15% markup. Then we'll show the pharmacy fill fee and shipping.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And that's your total price. And that alone, that transparency alone is completely revolutionizing how drugs are priced in America today. And it's led to, you know, Research being done comparing our pricing to CMS and ours being cheaper than even the government is negotiating, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so just that transparency alone has had an impact and saved millions of people lives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And as an entrepreneur who's creating a company, whatever your product or service is, if that's not the most important thing and you're just dying and excited to tell people about it, then you're not going to succeed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
hundreds of millions of dollars or more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
They put profits over everything, right? And they know in an... In an industry that's completely opaque, they can pretty much do what they want and nobody gets to see what they're doing in detail. And so, you know, the first thing when you sign a contract with one of those big PBMs is says you can't disclose any of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And the fact that you can't be disclosed means they could tell Lex's company that they're getting a great price and they're only being charged X. And they can tell Mark's company, oh, you're getting a great price and we're charging Mark X plus, right? But Mark doesn't know any better because there's no way to know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
The cost isn't transparent. The markup isn't transparent. And there's different things. I was just talking to a company in a presentation a couple of days ago. And they took the step to leave the big three PBMs to go to a rebate-free PBM that was smaller. And what they said led to the decision. They had a contract with the PBM for these things called rebates, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Where depending on the volume of medications you buy, they'll kick back to you a percentage of them. And as it turns out, when they compared what was contracted for to what they actually got, they were getting underpaid every single year. Right. They just don't care, right? They'll take products. There's a drug called Humira, right? And it is the number one revenue drug in the country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And there's also a biosimilar, multiple biosimilars, but one we carry called Usimri. And Humira, the pre-rebate price is about $8,000 per month. And after rebates, depending on the size of the company, it'll be anywhere from $3,000 to $6,000 a month. You can go to get your doctor to prescribe that biosimilar, USIMRI, and you pay $594.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
What do you mean by selling? Selling is just helping. I've always looked at it about putting myself in the shoes of another person and asking a simple question. Can I help this person? Can my product help them? From the time I was 12 years old, selling garbage bags door to door and just asking a simple question. Do you use garbage bags? Do you need garbage bags? Well, let me save you some time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But those big three PBMs won't allow their clients to get USIMRI because they don't get a rebate on USIMRI. So they'd rather keep a drug on their formulary, even though... their patients would save, their customers would save a lot of money, they'd rather keep a drug and exclude another because they'll make a lot more money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
No, call them up. You go to Cost Plus Drugs. We'll give you our price list of all 2,500 plus drugs. The actual cost. The actual cost and what we sell it for because it's just a plus 15%. Call up any of the big three companies and ask them for the same thing. They're going to laugh at you. It's so bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
In fact, if you do business with them right now and you just ask for your claims data, meaning how many people use Humira that we're paying, what are we paying for it? They won't even give it to you unless you really, really scream and yell at them. And then they'll charge you and take six months to get it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So like when we moved away from them, we wanted to get what our claims data was to understand what we were going to be facing. They wouldn't give it to us until like six months later. I forget the exact month. And then they charge us for it as well. Our own data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So I can speak for my own companies and this applies to all companies, bigger companies that self-insure because we self-insured. When we started Cost Plus, I finally said, okay, it's time for me to understand how I'm paying for my healthcare, for my employees and their families. And the first thing I looked at was a lot of these companies use employee benefits consultants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And it turns out I was paying $30 per employee per month. which was millions of dollars a year, and they were just sending us to the companies that paid them the biggest commissions. I'm like, how fucking dumb am I, right? So I'm like, okay, we're cutting that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And then I looked at our medication, our prescription deal that goes through the PBMs that we were using and that the consultant connected us with. And I took a list of, this was early on in Cost Plus Drugs, list of the generic drugs that we sold that cost more than $30 that the Mavericks also had purchased, right? We were able to get that claims data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And it turns out we spent $169,000 with that PBM, one of the big three PBMs, and it would have cost us buying from Cost Plus Drugs $19,000. And that's just a simple example. Then I looked at the insurance side of things, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I'll bring them to your house and drop them off to streaming platforms. Why do we need streaming when we have TV and radio? Well, you can't get access to your TV and radio everywhere you go. So we kind of break down geographic and physical barriers and cost plus drugs. What's the product that we actually sell? We sell trust.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
We self-insure, so there weren't premiums per se, but we were getting charged $17.15 per employee per month just to use the network that they put together for us, providers, hospitals, whatever. And I'm like, all right, are there companies that won't charge us to put together these networks? Turns out there's a lot of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And those insurance companies and those PBMs are also responsible for determining what claims, what... what to authorize and what to deny, right? So for a drug, it may be, all right, this is an expensive drug, but before they'll say they'll pay for the drug that your doctor wants to prescribe for you, you have to try these three other drugs in what's called step-up therapy, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
To see if these other cheaper drugs work, or they're not even necessarily cheaper, they may be being pushed because they're getting a higher rebate. And so I'm like, that's insane. I want my employees to get the medication that the doctors say is best. And so I didn't realize those were the intricacies of where my healthcare dollars went.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
There's not a single CEO who does because that's not a core competency that they need. And the CFOs, that's not their core competency. And the HR people, they contribute and they understand it some because they're dealing with the claims, but they spend most of their time prescription drug related time or healthcare related times, trying to get pre-authorizations approved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So, you know, your kid breaks their arm or you get sick and you go to the doctor and before the doctor will do a surgery or do whatever, they have to go to the insurance company and get pre-authorized. And then they always say no, right? And then you have to go back and somebody has to argue for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And that just eats up employee time because I'm sick or my kid's sick and you're wasting my time, eats up HR time. The CEOs don't know any of this, right? So what I'm saying is, one, the smartest thing to do is to get a healthcare CEO at every company with over, let's say, 500 employees that focuses on all these things. You'd save a shitload of money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And two, healthcare is your second largest line item expense after payroll. And in some companies, it's hundreds, billions of dollars, right? And you don't understand it, and you're letting these guys rip you off. And it's because these big CEOs don't understand it and are getting ripped off that they're The industry is the way it is because that allows the opacity to continue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
That's fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yes, because it's the wellness of your employees and their families. And it costs a lot of money. Yeah, but if your employees aren't healthy or if they're worried about their kids, and what is more worrisome and detrimental to the performance of a company, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
A DEI program or having to go to HR and scream and yell and explain and your doctor wasting their time doing the same thing to get authorization for a surgery or a medication. It's insane. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
In a simplistic approach, we buy drugs and sell drugs, but we add transparency to it. And bringing transparency to an industry is a differentiation and it helps people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So I got a cold email from a Dr. Alex Oshmayansky, who's my co-founder. He's a radiologist by trade and a physicist and a smart motherfucker. And he had a pharmacy that he wanted to create a compounding pharmacy that would manufacture generic drugs that were in short supply because it happens all the time that things aren't available. I'm like, you're thinking too small.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
We should do something on a much bigger scale. And then it was right around the time they were sending the pharmacy bro, Martin Shkreli, to jail. And so I was reading up on that, and he increased the price of this drug, Daraprim. I think it was like 7,500% or increased a low-cost drug to $7,500, one of those.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And I'm like, well, if he can just jack up the price of this drug and charge more and get away with it, this has to be an incredibly inefficient market. And so the question is, why is he able to do it? And it was immediately apparent that it was a lack of transparency. And so can we start a company that is fully transparent with our costs, our markup, and our selling price and see if it works?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And so we went for it and it took off immediately. I mean, you read a press release from a company saying they were creating a cost advantage program, basically pretending to replicate us. We haven't been in business two years. How insane is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It does. I mean, and the whole industry is an arbitrage, but we don't work inside the system. We work outside the system. And so we don't work with those biggest companies. The biggest companies with the most dominant control are You know, it's very insulated and very controlled, like you said. We work outside them. We won't work with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And so because of that, we don't have access to every medication because they've told a lot of the big brand manufacturers that if they work with us, they'll take them off their formularies or change the rebate structure so that they won't be prescribed as much. Yeah, it is dark, but we'll get past that, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Because there's a downstream impact of all this in the rebates and the greediness of those big three PBMs. When you go to a local pharmacy here in Austin, right? And let's just say you have a friend here, right? That is on Medicare or Medicare Advantage. And they go to a local pharmacy and they get a drug that costs $600. Well, an insurance company, That's $600.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
The pharmacy first buys that drug for probably that price minus 5%, so $570. Then there's probably a copay by the patient, and that's probably $20. So now the net investment that the pharmacy, the local pharmacy has for that brand medication is $550. Where it gets really fucked up is those big three PBMs, they're not reimbursing them $550 or more. they're reimbursing them $500 or less.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And literally those community pharmacies are eating that loss. And as a result, they're going out of business left and right. And the most insane part of it is, yes, with corporate employer insurance, that happens, but it happens more with Medicare Part D and Medicare Advantage. It happens all the time with those, almost with every script. So the government is complicit
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
and these community pharmacies going out of business. So how does that connect to Cost Plus Drugs and what we're doing and the big brands? The big brands know that if all these community pharmacies are going, tens of thousands of them are going to go out of business because of the way this pricing is, they're going to lose a connection
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
between their brand medications and grandma and grandpa and aunt Sally, and all that business is going to get transferred to the big companies. And they're going to have even less leverage. So they're working with us to come up with programs that are very supportive of independent pharmacies. And that's going to allow us to break the cartel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Oh, you can definitely develop it. Yeah, I mean, because selling garbage bags door to door was easy, right? You guys like... 12-year-old Mark going, hi, my name is Mark. Do you use garbage bags? You know what the answer is going to be, right? Can I just drop them off for you once a week whenever you need them? You just call and I'll bring them down? Sure. So that was easy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Because it's in their best interest not to allow them to be so vertically integrated that they destroy the entire community and independent pharmacy industry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah. So what we're going to do with our own healthcare, right? We're not going to be in the business of selling healthcare or anything like that. But the things we do for my companies... We're only going to do deals with providers, healthcare providers, that allow us to be completely transparent so that whatever contracts we do, we're going to post them all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Whatever pricing we get, we're going to post them all so that every company who's our size or even bigger will have a template that they can work on. which will take it away from the big three insurance companies and the big three PBMs. Because now without that transparency, they have to use consultants who are getting paid by those big companies and aren't giving them the best response.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And so now that transparency will overcome that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
To kind of push this forward. It's the only company I've ever put my name on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
No, because it's a big business and most people, like if I was 25 trying to start a company, I'd work in the system because if I can build it up big enough, they would just buy me. And I'd make, you know, money and buy a sports team. But I don't need that money now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Meaning that... Meta's doing open source, right? That's a good choice for them. I think that's a smart choice, right? But it's just a business decision for everybody else. I don't think it should be forced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Because they're all... That's a very incestuous industry where, you know... The people all work together at some level. They read the same papers. They go to the same conferences. You know, it's like the early days of streaming and the internet where people used the same technology everywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And now they just try different things and you get one smarter to a couple of smart people in one company like Anthropic, right? And they do things a little bit better and model efficiency gets better. So, you know, it's just a business choice, but I don't think it should be forced, but I think it's a smart business decision.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But I'm sure you've been rejected. Oh yeah, of course. Not everybody says yes. What was your percentage? I don't remember, but it's pretty close to 100%. Oh, okay. So that's why you don't remember. Yeah, right. Because who's going to say no to a 12-year-old kid who's going to save time and money?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It really, really is, right? But go back to historically, you know, there was digital computing, which was a dominant player. And they thought, and IBM to a certain extent, thought that they wouldn't be subject to a problem with the PC industry. And then all of a sudden, And with their mainframes and everything, they had captive software. They wouldn't use off-the-shelf software, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So for a digital equipment mainframe or an IBM mainframe, you needed software that was written for it. There was nothing off-the-shelf. And when the PC industry came along, it was the exact opposite. There was, you know, MS-DOS and then Windows, things that were off-the-shelf that every PC could use. And that changed how people thought about software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And I think the same thing will happen here where it's going to be... As models become more efficient and easier and less expensive to train, I think there'll be more reasons to open source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, I'm not buying that at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
No, no. I think I'm not an AI fatalist at all, right? I'm an AI optimist. But it's not to say that there isn't a lot of scary shit that can happen with it. Yeah. Militarily... Like I said earlier, I'm a big believer that there's going to be millions and tens of millions of models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And people will take their expertise and either get hired for it and contribute or create their own models and license. So that you see now with this thing called mixture of experts, right? Where you connect things. And people can... take their expertise and will be able to take that expertise and retain it in a way that they want to retain it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So, you know, I don't think there's going to be one medical database. I told this to people at a couple of big companies that were doing healthcare initiatives. Branding is so important in the healthcare space, you know, for hospitals, you know, the Mayo Clinics, the MD Andersons, they're huge brands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And I don't think they're just going to give up their expertise to some, you know, singular model, you know, and say, okay, you know, whatever expertise we have is available to you in Gemini or ChatGPT or, you know, so-and-so's version of Meta's open source. I just don't, there's just, that would be business suicide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But typically my career where I've started companies, it's to do something that other people aren't doing, whether it was connecting PCs to local area networks and at microsolutions. And the salesmanship was walking into a company and just saying, look, talk to me and I can help you improve your productivity and your profitability. Is that important to you? And the answer is obviously always yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And so I think you're going to see each of them have their own models and update them as they go and license them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Love your life, right? Find the things that you can enjoy. Be curious. You don't have to have all the answers when you're 12, 15. I get emails from 13, 15-year-old kids, right? What do I do? What do I do, right? I feel like I'm being held back. I'm like a 15. You feel like you're being held back? Yeah. But just be curious because you don't have to have the answers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You don't have to know what you're going to be when you grow up. I'm a hardcore believer that everybody has something that they're really, really, really good at that could be world-class great, every single human being on this planet. And the hard part is just finding what that is and in some places having resources to enable it. Yeah. But be curious so you can find out what it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I took one technology class in college, Fortran programming, and I cheated on it, right? I mean, it wasn't until I got a job at Mellon Bank and I started learning how to program in this thing called RAMUS, this scripting computing language, that I realized, oh, this is interesting to me and I like it. And that's what got me a job selling software and going on from there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You just don't know what that's going to be until you go out and experience different things. So for anybody young out there listening, enjoy your life, find things to smile about, be curious, read, watch, expose yourself to as many different ideas as you can because something's going to click at some point. You may be 15, you may be 25, you may be 55, but it can happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I would call it wokeness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Oh, for sure. And I'll tell you one quick story. 1992, I went to Moscow State University. um to teach kids how to start businesses wow because i had sold um micro solutions and i wanted to travel and i took russian in high school my risky is like not how to show good enough to remember that yeah right yeah um but it was interesting to me and i bring it up because just they didn't
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And then the question is, can I do the job and can I do it cost effectively? And so you didn't have to be a born salesperson to be able to ask those questions, but you have to be able to be willing to put in the time to learn that business. And that's the hardest part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
They didn't know what the word prophet meant, right? But at the same time, I would go around and meet people and... It was this entrepreneurial, like right after the Soviet Union fell, entrepreneurship went through the roof. I mean, a lot of it was mafia-driven, but people found that spark, because I think that is natural.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And so you just never know when and how and when the circumstances will come together for you to be able to take advantage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
There would have been no reason for me to go over to do what I was doing if it was otherwise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
know it's going to be interesting with ukraine if they're able to survive this right because as horrific as it is you know as you saw across europe after world war ii um the rebuilding creates opportunities rebuilding creates opportunities but you know first the war has to end how that ends i don't know either is a really complex path what gives you hope about the future of humanity
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
um just looking in my kids eyes just you know talking to them and seeing their spirit their friend's spirit and obviously we're blessed as can be right and it's not the same for every kid but i do you know i get emails that i respond don't respond to all of them but from 13 14 15 year old kids around the world you know because shark tank shown everywhere asking me business questions and it's just like they took the time
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
They were that curious and that interested. And I see it when I talk to schools, when I go to different groups. that spark in kids' eyes that there's something bigger and better and exciting out there. And that's not to say there's not fear, you know, climate and any other number of things, but that's the beauty of kids. And I think Gen Z really embodies that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And to me, that's just really exciting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's funny, because when I go talk to like... elementary school kids, right? One of the things I do, I said, okay, let's look around. You see that light there? One day that light didn't exist. Then somebody had the idea, then somebody created a product out of it, and now your school bought that. You see that chair? Chairs didn't always look like that. Somebody had that idea. Why not you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So when you walk out and want to make them do, ask yourself, why not me? Why can't I be the one to change the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, I mean, there's skill from the perspective that I read like a maniac. Then like now you can give me an example of any type of business and it'll take me two seconds to figure out how they make money and how I can make them more productive. And I think that's probably my biggest skill, being able to just drill down to what the actual need is, if any.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And then, you know, from there being able to say, well, if this is what this company does and this is what their goal is, how can I introduce something new that they haven't seen before? And is that a business that I can create and make money from?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And you think you're born with that? No, I worked at it. Because going back to what I said earlier about curiosity, you have to be insanely curious because the world is always changing. My dad used to say, We don't live in the world we were born into, which is absolutely true. If you're not a voracious consumer of information, then you're not going to be able to keep up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And no matter what your sales skills or ability are, they're going to be useless. What'd you learn about life from your dad? You mentioned your dad. My dad did upholstery on cars, you know, got up, went to work every morning at 7 o'clock, came back 5 or 6, 7 o'clock, exhausted. And I learned to be nice. I learned to be caring. I learned to be accepting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Just, you know, qualities that I think he really tried to pass on to myself and my two younger brothers were just be a good human. And I think he didn't have business experience. So as I got into business, he would just say, sorry, Mark, I can't help you. I don't understand what you're doing. Neither one of my parents had gone to college. You've got to figure it out for yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But he was also very insistent that he worked at a company called Regency Products where they did upholstery on cars. And he would bring me there to sweep the floors, not because he wanted me to learn that business, because he wanted me to learn how backbreaking that work was. I mean, he lost an eye in an accident at work, a staple broke.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And the only thing he wanted from my brothers and I was for us to never have to work like that, to go to college, to figure it out.