Mark Cuban Wants Democrats to Stop Whining and Do Something

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Speaker 2 Welcome to to Pot Save America.

Speaker 2 I'm Dan Pfeiffer, back hosting another Sunday show because I simply couldn't pass up the chance to talk to our guests today, businessman, reality TV star, and former Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

Speaker 2 Mark may be a billionaire, but he's not the typical tech pro.

Speaker 2 He was a spokesman for former Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign in 2024, a fierce critic of Donald Trump, and is an outspoken advocate for affordable health care and medication.

Speaker 2 I wanted to talk to Mark about Trump's approach to the economy, how Democrats can do a better job selling our policy, and how we get attention in this broken media environment.

Speaker 2 Plus, I had to get his take on some pressing NBA questions. Mark Cuban, welcome to Pot Save America.
How are you?

Speaker 7 I'm great. Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 2 I know that's a loaded question in this day and age for a lot of people. How are you feeling? But are you legitimately great?

Speaker 7 I'm a little bit sore from working out today.

Speaker 7 But other than that, I have the same concerns that everybody else has, just, you know, about the uncertainty in the world, in the country, you know, but I still, you know, think there's hope.

Speaker 2 All right, that's good. Well, we'll get into all of that, but I want to just start by leaving with some table sticks here.
You were out on the campaign trail for Kamala Harris.

Speaker 2 You were hitting the Battleground States. You were one of our most vocal spokespeople.
You were omnipresident in the media and on podcasts.

Speaker 2 From what you saw on the front lines, why do you think Trump won this election?

Speaker 7 A couple reasons. One,

Speaker 7 Democrats try to extrapolate. Everything that Democrats talk about is an extrapolation.

Speaker 7 If Trump did this, you know, and in their mind, when they're extrapolating, then the normal conclusion is hell's freezing over at some some level or another. Republicans deal with the here and now.

Speaker 7 You know, they're eating cats and dogs. They're coming to your neighborhood to eat your cats and dogs.

Speaker 7 There's no question mark about whether or not there's going to be, whether or not they want you to have a visceral experience. Democrats want you to think.
They want you to understand what

Speaker 7 they envision and get you there. Republicans, you know, they're taking your jobs.
That's what immigrants do.

Speaker 7 DEI DEI is keeping your husband, your son, your wife, your daughter from getting a promotion.

Speaker 7 Those are here and now things that people can, whether it's true or not, assign to themselves and say, this really could impact me.

Speaker 2 I mean, Democrats, we are probably overly professorial. We look like we're nerds, maybe.
That's our problem.

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 7 like,

Speaker 2 I think in this one, like the extrapolation, right? The idea is like Trump is going to do these things. He's not ended up doing a whole bunch of these things.

Speaker 2 Like, maybe it sounded hyperbolic when people were saying it that he's going to deport all these people.

Speaker 7 It's not just about what he does, right? It's the conclusion. Like you said, you're professorial, right? The conclusion is always

Speaker 7 the end of the world, right? The conclusion is always it's the end of the country. The conclusion is this, you know, demographic is done.
They're over with.

Speaker 7 People, when they live their lives day to day, they don't, you know, we watch movies to see the end of the world, right? They don't think about end of the world consequences.

Speaker 7 They think about what's happening to them today.

Speaker 7 And often it's just an excuse.

Speaker 7 Often it's not real, but it's visceral to them, you know, and thinking about the end of the world is not visceral, you know, it is to Democrats, but not to the Republicans I know.

Speaker 2 Do you think we oversold the case in that sense that it was not believable? Absolutely.

Speaker 7 Absolutely. And I think that's the lesson that Democrats have to learn going forward.
You can't project. And I think the guy in New York, I always get his name wrong, right?

Speaker 2 Mandani.

Speaker 7 Yeah, Mandani. Yeah.
We're cutting rents, right? We're changing grocery stores. None of that shit has a chance.

Speaker 7 Doesn't matter. No one did an evaluation and did a risk assessment to say, well, there's a 50% chance that he could extend rent control so that another, you know, 50,000 people could benefit from it.

Speaker 7 No, not a single person does that. They're like, okay, this could impact me.
I mean, what's the difference? Like, it's like what a Trump guy told me in 2016. He said, I'm like, I know this guy, Dan.

Speaker 7 Why are you voting? Mid-50s, right? Lifetime Republican. He goes, Mark, I've been voting for politicians my entire life.
And you know what they've done for me? Nothing.

Speaker 7 You know the definition of insanity?

Speaker 7 And the same thing applies here. you know in new york i've been voting for traditional mayoral candidates for a long time you know what they've done for me?

Speaker 7 And this guy is walking in telling me he's going to walk on water. He's going to make me more money.
He's going to save me money. He's going to make my life better.
Is it true? Does it matter?

Speaker 7 Because what's the option? And that's Trump 101. Is it true? Does it matter? If you say it enough times, people believe it.

Speaker 2 I think in the Mandani case, and this is maybe, I think this is probably true of Trump too, is maybe I give voters too much credit, which is that I think they know how hard it is going to do some of these things, but the policies that people say show who they're going to fight for, right?

Speaker 2 Like, I think most voters probably thought building a wall and having Mexico pay for it was stupid and probably was never going to happen.

Speaker 2 But it said to them, like, he really cares about immigration in a way in which I care about immigration.

Speaker 7 Immigration matter, right? Right. Because it impacts my job or it impacts the jobs available to me.
It impacts what I earn. It impacts my pocketbook in the here and now.

Speaker 7 Kamala, and I tried to tell him to talk, Kamala talked about price gouging.

Speaker 7 How often do you get hit by price gouging? And she was very specific that 37 states already had price gouging laws.

Speaker 7 And nobody ever knew that those 37 states had those laws or what the impact would be on them. Yet that was her pricing mechanism.
Like that, when I would go out there, I would say,

Speaker 7 look,

Speaker 7 your price of Gatorade might go up 9%.

Speaker 7 Your price of bread. eggs might go up nine percent.
But under Trump, your price of health care is going to skyrocket. Your Christmas presents are going to skyrocket because of tariffs.

Speaker 7 I couldn't get them to focus on the impact on voters in their lives today.

Speaker 7 And I think that's why they use me so much because, you know, I didn't care what they told me to say because I told them not to tell me.

Speaker 7 I just tried to make it. pertain to people's lives in the immediate, right, or businesses in the immediate timeframe.
That's what Madani has done. That's what Trump does better than anybody.

Speaker 7 That's what the Democrats suck at.

Speaker 2 And why do you think we suck at it?

Speaker 7 Because we want to think. Democrats want to think.
They want to engage. They want to have conversations.
They want to feel smart. They want to look smart.

Speaker 7 They go to college. These are college graduates.
That's what college graduates do. Everything's like a dorm room discussion.
And I think that's a big difference.

Speaker 7 Most people just want to live their lives and hope things get better.

Speaker 7 And if both sides are saying things are bad for their own own reason, give me the short-term hit that's going to benefit me as opposed to the long-term possibilities that maybe are a little bit too esoteric for me to even put any brain cells towards.

Speaker 2 I assume you think that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama sort of avoided that trap? Did they do things differently or politics just changed?

Speaker 7 Different world. Politics didn't change.
The world changed. Social media changed everything.

Speaker 7 Social media, every single social media user on each individual platform that supports algorithms has their own unique feed.

Speaker 7 That's night and day different from the Barack Obama, Bill Clinton world.

Speaker 7 You know, and look how Donald Trump, what helped him win when Brad Parscale took, you know, Facebook and did micro-targeting.

Speaker 7 You know, he created the algorithm for Facebook because Facebook wasn't as good at it back then, I guess is the best way to say it.

Speaker 7 Now, you, you know, I would talk all the time, you got to reverse engineer. You got to do what Mr.
Beast does.

Speaker 7 He reverse engineers the algorithms to know what's going to sell best and get the most engagement. Go talk to him, right? That's probably your

Speaker 7 best person to educate you on all of this. But in a world where everybody has their own unique feed, you have to flood the zone.
You have to say things that are going to...

Speaker 7 be fed to each individual person in a way that may connect to them. That's like when Kamala first got picked and the Brat Summer thing hit,

Speaker 7 everything was about algorithms and social media. And that's when all the momentum hit.
The minute they started doing testing in a traditional political

Speaker 7 basis, right, where it's just like, test this word, test that word. They would tell me all the time, yeah, we tested it.
This is what works best. I'm like, fuck that.

Speaker 7 I'm not going to say that shit, right? You've got to hit, it's like selling. I said it all the time.
When Biden was in the White House, he couldn't, you know, he couldn't sell anything.

Speaker 7 He couldn't sell dollar bills for 50 cents. Kamala, when you sit down, have you ever sat down and just spent one-on-one time with her?

Speaker 2 I have, I have, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 7 She'll start saying, fuck you, fuck this, da, da, da, da.

Speaker 7 She's a normal human being that's smart, that is, you know, has some charisma to her, but they don't let any of that come out, you know, and I think that really held everything back.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's interesting what you said about the traditional testing, because one of the things that I've taken from this last election, looking back on it, is that

Speaker 2 Republican, I would, I get all this testing, right?

Speaker 2 That's always, you know, they send it all to me and it says, this exact phrasing of this word, these issues issues are the ones that will, they're 99% more effective than any other message we ever tested.

Speaker 2 But if you say it, the question is, who can, who's actually going to hear it? Right.

Speaker 2 Which is, I think, a change in like how campaigns work because in the old days, you could just pay to show that to people on linear television.

Speaker 2 Which now you, you can't, it doesn't work.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it doesn't work. And you've, and you've got to be able to connect personally.

Speaker 7 You've got to be able to listen and you've got to be able to put yourself in the shoes of every demographic that you're trying to reach and ask yourself, what is it that's important to that person, that demographic, and what is it that reduces their stress?

Speaker 7 Like the IRA for drugs, great,

Speaker 7 but that's big picture. You take, you know, a 35-year-old, you know, non-college graduate that's working on a construction site.

Speaker 7 They're more concerned with immigration and whether or not, and actually they could have used immigration against Trump because you could have said, you're not going to have enough people to even have a job at a construction site.

Speaker 7 You know, there's ways to play it to make it personalized to individuals, but they don't have, there was not a single salesperson in that campaign.

Speaker 7 There is nobody that ever, you know, that ever sold magazines door to door or, you know, sold construction equipment or sold whatever.

Speaker 7 You know, they were lifers in politics and it was just so obvious where Trump was the exact opposite. He could sell.

Speaker 7 That's the skill.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, going back to the messaging thing, what I think is interesting is the thinking is, I guess Trump really does follow what you say about Mr. Research.

Speaker 2 He reverse engineers from what goes viral, not what

Speaker 7 it's natural to him. Like he says, you know, you say it enough times.
Look, his mentor was Roy Cohn. Just read up about Roy Cohen and his playbook is obvious.
Doesn't matter if it's true or not.

Speaker 7 You say it enough time, people will believe it. You get it places where it's going to get coverage enough so that, it fill in this day and age fills those algorithms.

Speaker 7 And so you would always see Trump in your algorithm, no matter what, right? And their eating cats and dogs was so stupid, it was brilliant because everybody had to cover it and deal with it.

Speaker 7 And he knows as a candidate, everybody's got to cover him and deal with it. There's no, you know, he, it's not like he was looking to govern.
He's looking to sell.

Speaker 7 He wants, he wants his, whatever he's saying, he wants it to be ubiquitous. He wants to flood the zone 100 times over so there's no room for everybody else.
He crowds everybody else out.

Speaker 7 And we, you know, Kamala's group was more interested in test, test, test, test, test. How does this work? Traditional advertising, go out and, you know, knock on doors is great.
That's face-to-face.

Speaker 7 Nothing wrong with that. But anything else was like, come on.

Speaker 2 We're now. seven months or whatever it is into this into the Trump presidency.
Is it worse than you thought it was going to to be?

Speaker 2 Basically what you expected?

Speaker 7 Some things are worse. Some things are better.
Some things are what I expected.

Speaker 2 Say more. What do you mean?

Speaker 7 You know, I expected him to always flood the zone every day, and that's what he does. There's always something.
And tariffs is his fallback. He doesn't want to solve tariffs, right?

Speaker 7 He wants them to be something he can talk about every day.

Speaker 7 I was surprised that... you know, DEI, immigration, he did it so quickly.
I thought he would drag it out to try to use it to his benefit. But, you know, he was smart.

Speaker 7 And again, this is going to sound counterintuitive, Democrats, and a lot of progressives will hate me for it, but it was direct to the heart of what he said during the campaign.

Speaker 7 And so, by dealing directly and immediately with DEI, even to an extreme, cut out Jackie Robinson, we'll put him back if too many people, you know, complain, right?

Speaker 7 Shut down the border completely. Those two things

Speaker 7 gave him,

Speaker 7 in his voters' minds, carte blanche to do everything else.

Speaker 7 You came in the things that impact me the most directly short term, you know, for so many of those voters. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, right?

Speaker 7 You can say it's wrong in a lot of cases, right?

Speaker 7 But he did what he said.

Speaker 7 So when it comes to tariffs, and even to a certain extent, you know, guys putting on hoods to go just grab people off the street, the most un-American thing that anybody could ask for,

Speaker 7 his supporters are like, well, he's batting 100 on the first two things. You know, yeah, maybe he's taking some folks that weren't criminals off the streets.

Speaker 7 But let's just see what happens. And tariffs, look, all the numbers say prices aren't going up.
He ain't lying, right? Well, tariffs are going to do this, this, and this.

Speaker 7 And I've, including me, I've said it, and I think it's still, well, it ain't hitting me yet, son. So if it ain't hitting me yet, you know.

Speaker 7 So he's, you know, batting 500. And if that's your candidate, you're going to give him every, you know, benefit of the doubt.

Speaker 2 Like, I get that he has, you know, to his supporters, he has delivered on the things he said he was going to deliver to them, or at least seems to be trying to do them, right?

Speaker 2 Like shutting down the border. There are exceptions, right?

Speaker 7 Yeah. Yeah.
If you were TPS, right, if you were,

Speaker 7 you know, and now you're getting kicked out and you believed, you know, your family wasn't going to be deported.

Speaker 7 There's a whole big, growing group of people who have every right to be pissed at him, right?

Speaker 2 But he avoids it like a champ and there are other people who you know there are people who even who were supporters of his who like they and if you listen if you read the fine print of all his pot of the syndicated policy papers and you listen to the entire two-hour rally you would know what that mass deportation was coming but if you just watched the ads and read the news signs right behind it saying mass deportation right you know but i think people's general impression and this showed up in like polling and focus groups was they thought he's coping for criminals and gang members people just got here it's when the person who's been in your community.

Speaker 7 The conversation was they're sending their worst, right? From day one, they're sending their worst to now they're opening up their prisons and da da da da da.

Speaker 7 But the Democrats aren't responding in a way that has a visceral impact.

Speaker 2 What would that look like?

Speaker 7 So what that looks like is showing the families of every single person who's not a criminal has been deported. Instead, we had the one guy from Maryland.

Speaker 7 One guy from Maryland is big the first week, but when there's just a nonstop progression and we see the videos of people getting pulled off the streets, it's horrific.

Speaker 7 Every single one of those families should be in front of a camera and we should be working to say what's going on.

Speaker 7 They should be putting Tom Homan on blast, saying, okay, the FBI has their top 10 most wanted list, right?

Speaker 7 Let's just get this right. Homan, don't, you know,

Speaker 7 do it right. List the top 100.

Speaker 7 Go after them. List the top 1,000,

Speaker 7 criminals that are here that need to be deported. We'll all help you.
But the Democrats would never say something to the fact, we'll help you.

Speaker 7 They only have to do something that's the antithesis of what Trump says and does.

Speaker 7 You've never heard a Democrat say in the past seven months, yeah, okay, I don't like it, but this is a step in the right direction.

Speaker 7 We're going to help, because I think the better path is for the Democrats to bring attention to the bad things and the good things and say on the good things, we'll help you, right?

Speaker 7 Which they would never say because that disarms. Whenever you're in a sales environment and you say something positive about your competition, it's disarming.

Speaker 7 Yeah, we're better, but these guys, you know, that's not so bad. They're trying really hard.
Okay, Tom Homan.

Speaker 7 We don't want criminals if, you know, Venezuela and Colombia opened up their jails and sent all their worst criminals to us. We don't want them here either.

Speaker 7 If MS-13 has 173 gang members here from wherever, we don't want them here either. Post that list and you know what?

Speaker 7 Chuck Schumer, I'm Chuck Schumer. I'm going to help you get rid of them.
I'm going to post all those lists everywhere.

Speaker 7 We're all going to go after those bad guys together because they shouldn't be here. Now you disarm him.

Speaker 7 Now you disarm the Republicans who, you know, think that you guys, that the Democrats can't get anything right. You know, you do things that you, you can undermine.

Speaker 7 Undermining in the Democrats perspective is always, you're wrong, you're wrong. It's Trump, it's Trump, you're wrong.
The T-word Trump is a trigger word,

Speaker 7 you know, and you can't just always use that in a negative line. The best way to convince people to reconsider is to say, okay, they're doing this.
Okay, we'll help them.

Speaker 7 Let's go, you know, what about these people they're pulling off the streets

Speaker 7 in black hoodies, right? Post all the bad guys. We'll use our resources.

Speaker 7 Every single sanctuary city is going to, you know, I'm going to make sure that they all allocate resources to go after the Tom Holman 100.

Speaker 7 And when one of them's off, you put another one on, we'll go after that one. Let's get those criminals out of here like they deserve to be.

Speaker 7 Now all of a sudden, what, you know, it's a different conversation. We agree on that part, but why, you know, you've listed the criminals.

Speaker 7 Why are you taking this mom, this grandmom, you know, this kid? Why, why are you doing this when they're not criminals? Let's get the criminals.

Speaker 7 Because now if nobody knows which ones are criminals, everyone that's taken off the street could be a criminal.

Speaker 2 I get, like, I can understand the, you know, like that would definitely get attention if Democrats were to do that. Cause you're right.

Speaker 2 It's unexpected, which I guess is part of like a good sales technique or a good media technique in this environment is do something that's unexpected because that draws more attention than just doing the same thing over again.

Speaker 7 It's effective, right? And it's effective.

Speaker 2 You know, and I can imagine that just for people who don't pay a ton of attention to politics, just Trump bad, Trump, bad, Trump, bad can sound monotonous enough to the point that you miss what's really, really fucking bad.

Speaker 7 Turn it off.

Speaker 2 But I guess here's my question on that, though: is in the last four years, Programs have won the House, the Senate, and the White House. At no point has any Republican been like, you know what?

Speaker 2 Here's the good things Joe Biden's doing, right?

Speaker 2 Like they, yeah. But I'm just saying, like, just as a

Speaker 2 measure of political messaging, right? Yes. Like, why would it work for, why, why can they get away with it if we can't?

Speaker 7 It's not us versus them. It's what works and what doesn't work.

Speaker 7 Right? That's part of the problem. It's like, it's my side versus your side.
This isn't a basketball game. You know, Trump is really good at half-court shots.
He sucks at layups.

Speaker 7 He makes the easy things difficult and the difficult things may not be difficult. Maybe he makes them more difficult.
But some of them, like some of the international things around, et cetera.

Speaker 7 Okay, you can make an argument that it's not the worst thing that happened. Some of them are bad, but, you know, you get my point, right?

Speaker 7 These are things that you, that if you would have told me this would happen seven months in, I would not have believed you. He hit the half court shot.
Maybe it was luck. Maybe it wasn't.

Speaker 7 Maybe it was, you know, maybe it's not real and what we're seeing isn't real. We don't know, but that's what it is.

Speaker 7 But the easy stuff, like tariffs, like having guys in hoodies pulling people off the street that are not criminals, that's easy stuff. But how you, you know, and it's horrific.
pulling people off.

Speaker 7 I can't say it enough times. And the tariffs are not good for anybody.
And it's obvious, you know, everybody around him is just placating him.

Speaker 7 And he's just using it as a media tool rather than an economic tool. Well, you've got to come in and do something that people feel, not just talk about how awful he is.

Speaker 2 So let's talk about the tariffs for a second, right? They're on, they're off. There's a lot of uncertainty.

Speaker 7 The whole taco thing, yeah.

Speaker 2 The whole taco thing, right?

Speaker 7 Like, what are you

Speaker 2 like.

Speaker 2 What's your view of how the tariff policy is going? What are you hearing from other CEOs about this?

Speaker 2 Because whether the price increases are as bad as we, as we said they would be a few months ago or not,

Speaker 2 there's just like a massive injection of uncertainty into the kind of we're recording this on Monday, July 7th, and Trump has already extended the reciprocal deadline another month.

Speaker 2 He's threatened a bunch of countries with tariffs that maybe they'll get, maybe they'll not. It's like, how do business people like yourself plan in this environment?

Speaker 7 It's not business people like me. It's the little businesses, right? They're the ones that are screwed over because they don't have the capital to absorb uncertainty.

Speaker 7 They, you know, maybe they used up all the capital, you know, they have X amount of dollars and maybe they were trying to hire somebody. Maybe they were trying to, you know, open up a new office.

Speaker 7 Maybe they were doing trying to use that capital for raises, whatever it may be. But now they're trying to get ahead of the tariff.
So they have to take all that money and put it in.

Speaker 7 And then he comes back and says, well, okay, we're going to delay them. So they just overpaid for shipping and overpaid for a product to try to get ahead of the tariffs.
Now it's costing them money.

Speaker 7 You know, you see the stock market go up, but you don't see the smaller companies in the stock market go up just the s p 500 and the dow right smaller companies are being debilitated by the on-off tariffs and

Speaker 7 wherever they come out, it's not going to be a positive for them. Big companies, they'll game it, right? They can borrow the money.

Speaker 7 Interest rates aren't so high that they don't have access to capital.

Speaker 7 There's just all kinds of ways they can play with it. So you don't see it in the stock market.
And you know, you don't even see it in a lot of the inflation numbers yet.

Speaker 7 But at the same time, if he goes down the path that he said he would and on August 9th, we get 20, 30, 40% tariffs, the shit's going to hit the fan.

Speaker 7 And like I said, during the campaign, he'll be the Grinch that killed Christmas.

Speaker 2 So during the campaign, like Trump had more business support in 2024 than he did in 2016 or 2020 or throughout his presidency.

Speaker 2 And one of the things you've heard a lot, like if you ever turned on CNBC, these CEOs who were like pro-Trump, or like were going to support Trump, really seemed to believe that tariffs were not going to happen, right?

Speaker 2 Even Scott Besson, his secretary of the treasury, suggested the tariffs would never happen before he got appointed in the administration.

Speaker 2 Like in your conversations with other CEO business leader types, are they sort of shocked by what's happening here? Do they feel like they made a mistake?

Speaker 7 Yes. I mean, there were two things, two reasons why they went along.
One, because they thought he learned his lesson from Trump 1.0. Tariffs went up, price of washing machines, dryers went up.

Speaker 7 You know, they had to reduce interest rates because the economy slowed down. He's not going to do that again.
That's one reason why they went along with him.

Speaker 7 Two, and possibly the more important reason is Biden didn't give any CEO leader the time of day. Not at all.

Speaker 7 When tech guy, he kept Elon out of the EV meeting, right? You know, it's just, that's just dumb. That is just self-inflicted pain.

Speaker 7 So one guy won't talk to you, floated a net worth tax effectively, right? And untaxed capital gains tax.

Speaker 7 There ain't no business person in the history of business persons who are going to accept that and think that's good for their business or the economy.

Speaker 7 Half of the conversations I had with business people after Kamala came in was explaining to them that

Speaker 7 the tax on unrealized capital gains

Speaker 7 was part of a budget just to fill a number and there was no chance it was going to happen. And they were like, you promised me, Mark, you promised me because it would kill me if it happened.

Speaker 7 It would kill the economy. It would kill the stock market.

Speaker 7 Who would you vote for if that's what you thought?

Speaker 2 And there also seemed to be a lot of concern among business folks about the FTC, right? And that it would stop it.

Speaker 2 You couldn't do, couldn't do mergers.

Speaker 2 I think it was particularly to run the tech people. But then now you have Trump has come in and you have.
It's the opposite, right? Yes.

Speaker 2 Well, you thought, you thought, and they sort of thought everyone's going to get the merge.

Speaker 2 And still you have, you know, Paramount's trying to buy CBS, sorry, Paramount's trying to end this acquisition. They have to like pay tribute to Trump to get it.

Speaker 2 So, it's like this is not the environment they thought they were getting, right?

Speaker 7 Not at all, not at all. Um, you know, Lena Khan,

Speaker 7 I agree with everything she did, actually, except for her attitude on AI, that breaking up some of these big technology companies would hurt our, I felt it would hurt our ability to compete globally in artificial intelligence.

Speaker 7 I, we had this conversation directly with, I had it with her directly, she disagreed. Um,

Speaker 7 So I didn't see her as a threat to business in general or to mergers and acquisitions, but a lot of people did. And,

Speaker 7 you know, be careful what you ask for sometimes because it's worse.

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Speaker 2 Last week, President Trump signed the quote-unquote big beautiful bill.

Speaker 2 Tax cuts for a lot of people, a bunch of tax breaks,

Speaker 2 $700, you know, nearly a trillion dollars in Medicaid cuts. $3 trillion in debt.

Speaker 2 What's your take on the bill?

Speaker 7 I think you can't generalize. I think the Democrats are generalizing too much on it.
You know, like Medicaid is a perfect example. It's more about the provider taxes than actual cut to Medicaids.

Speaker 7 And each state is absolutely different. And you have to go talk to each state to see what the impact is.
I think, you know, a couple of states, it's a 9% cost.

Speaker 7 Well, where do you make that up elsewhere so that you have no results?

Speaker 7 But the provider tax is just an arbitrage that hospitals use to try to gain money that was created during COVID. And so, you know, from my perspective,

Speaker 7 I think, you know, it's, it may not be as bad as people expect it to be, but I understand why, and just in terms of Medicaid only, right? Specific to that, right?

Speaker 7 You know, in terms of some of the other things, like you couldn't, you had to reinstate the tax cuts. You had to,

Speaker 7 right? There's just no way that you couldn't do that. That would cost everybody too much money.

Speaker 2 Could you have done it just for the, you do it like Obama did in

Speaker 2 2012, where it's just where you for everyone under a certain income threshold.

Speaker 7 Yeah, you could, right? There's no reason to cut my taxes, and I don't need my taxes cut, right? And, you know, it

Speaker 7 it was, you know, it was a non-event for me. But at the same time, where were the Democrats saying, you know what?

Speaker 7 Let's propose, you know, reinstating, put aside reducing the, you know, making the same adjustments you just referred to. Just the problem with the big bill is that it's too big.

Speaker 7 And it hides a lot of shit that is hard to find, particularly things that give Trump more executive power. That's what I worry about more than anything.

Speaker 7 It didn't make it easier to pass because it was so enormous. It made it easier to hide things.
And that's the concern that I have because it's almost impossible to read it.

Speaker 7 You can plug it into ChatGPT, you know, Gemini, whatever you want, and it's not going to catch everything. But where were the Democrats saying, okay, we're going to extend the Trump tax cuts.

Speaker 7 Let's just do a bill just for that and we'll all vote for it.

Speaker 7 Because that preempts them on saying, we got to get this cut you know we got to get this passed rather because we can't have taxes go up for everybody

Speaker 7 they just anything that would they think would be even a marginal win for trump they just won't consider and yet more often than not when you're trying to get somebody that you know is doing the wrong thing to try to change, particularly when there's voters involved, you've got to give them some wins so that, again, you can preempt them and say, we gave you what you needed.

Speaker 7 This is what you're saying you need. You need to keep

Speaker 7 these tax cuts. Okay, yes.

Speaker 7 Let's propose a bill, yes. You want to adjust to some? Yes.
We're not going to mess with it at all. No pork from the Democrats.
Yes.

Speaker 7 Now all of a sudden, that big, beautiful bill is smaller and people can start paying more attention to the details.

Speaker 2 This sort of warms my heart because this was one of my arguments was the Democrats should have done exactly that.

Speaker 2 And this is just me, like as an old retired political hack just going back to the same old tricks.

Speaker 2 That's what Obama said when he was fighting with the republicans about this he said i i want to extend all the tax cuts up to he said 250 originally and the negotiation ended up at 500.

Speaker 2 and so we all like so the point is we agree on everything on all of on all people who need the tax cuts but we disagree so you want to have this big fight and maybe raise everyone's taxes because you're so hell-bent on raising taxes for the mark cubans of the world democrats did not do that i think the reason if i'm being fair they didn't do it the same is they wanted to focus attention on people getting kicked off their health care here yeah but they're not okay first they're not some people are getting kicked off because the work requires.

Speaker 7 But what is it? Like 72% or more of people, you know, are already working and they're most likely going to qualify?

Speaker 2 Well, the hard part here is most people, it's not that people who are not working are getting kicked off.

Speaker 2 It's that the requirements are so onerous, the people who are working are not going to meet them. Because this is what happened in

Speaker 2 Arkansas.

Speaker 2 But it's still by the states, yes. But in these red states, like this is what happened in Arkansas, where I think it was 94% of the people who got kicked off were working.
Like they had jobs.

Speaker 7 And then they did that before, right? But it's still controlled by the states. This bill really didn't change the control by the states.

Speaker 7 And so you didn't see any, you know, call out, you know, Akabee Sanders. What are you going to do? It's in your control.
Call out DeSantis. What are you going to do? It's in your control.

Speaker 7 Put the pressure on them, right? The people who actually, you know, can make or break somebody. All right, you you know, DeSantis, you, you know,

Speaker 7 how are you going to deal with these people? Are you going to kick them off? Or because you can make the decision to retain them on Medicaid.

Speaker 7 We picked the wrong pressure points. It's just Trump sucks.
That's the underlying, you know, thought of everything the Democrats do. Trump sucks.
Trump says, you know, the sky is blue. Trump sucks.

Speaker 7 You can't, that's not the way to win. It's just not, because it's not about Trump.
It's about the people of the United States of America and what's good for them.

Speaker 7 And how do you get them to a place where they're in a better position and it's less stressful for them? And so you go to the points where, you know, they're, they're impacted.

Speaker 7 You, for Medicaid, you go to the states.

Speaker 7 You know, I'm not a Medicaid expert. I got a general understanding, but.

Speaker 7 You go to the states because that's who controls it. Maryland has something different than California that has something different.

Speaker 7 Now, California comes back and says, well, we don't have enough money to do A, B, and C. Okay, what do you have money to do? Let's work on that for the people in your state.

Speaker 7 You know, Texas who didn't, you know, expand Medicaid. What are you going to do? Kentucky, you know, bad example.
What are you going to do in each red state?

Speaker 7 We could have gone where you could have put pressure on the governor and made them answer the question.

Speaker 7 I mean, it's just like the whole Doge thing. It's like, Doge sucks, yeah, because they didn't plan it out.
They just cut things, right?

Speaker 7 And there was a whole lot of red states that had in red communities that voted for him that lost a lot of jobs, that lost a lot of funding.

Speaker 7 West Virginia got crushed, you know, funding for things that they expected in communities gone.

Speaker 7 I haven't seen anybody pulled up in front of a camera with, you know, a Democrat next to them, maybe once or twice.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there are, I say, a lot of times this stuff doesn't break through, which is the hard part, which is like, that is a, we're in a chicken or egg problem here.

Speaker 2 But I will say in defense, there are members of Congress who are doing this, particularly in like the Virginias of the world, where they're like especially hit by this.

Speaker 7 Right. In your local community, that's a great start, right? But you got to flood the zone.
You've just, that's what Trump does, right? Flood, you've got to flood the zone.

Speaker 7 If you see enough of these people that have lost their jobs, that, you know, that buildings are being shut down, that the

Speaker 7 person in charge of the mayor is saying revenues are going to be down you know 20 and we're going to have to cut this service this service and this service because our tax base is declining those people will do a better job communicating for the democrats than the democrats themselves and even though somebody might not care about the mayor of parkersburg west virginia on cnn like i push that stuff to cnn and they don't think it's big enough msnbc doesn't think it's big enough Great.

Speaker 7 Doesn't matter. Put it out there continuously so those algorithms pick it up.
Because if you say it enough and you post enough, then more and more people will see it. And that'll feed the algorithms.

Speaker 7 And the algorithms will do the work for you.

Speaker 2 You also need people who can actually draw attention, right? This was the blessing and the curse for Trump of Elon, which is Elon gets all the attention in the world.

Speaker 2 He's maybe, he's as good at getting attention as anyone maybe other than Donald Trump. Other than Trump.

Speaker 2 And so like, that was great for Trump in the campaign when Elon was selling it. It was bad when he was in charge of making a whole bunch of really, really unpopular cuts.

Speaker 2 So it's like, you know, it's like having, you know, I joke, it's like having Kim Kardashian drive your getaway car when you're you're robbing a bank. It's not, it's not what you want to do, right?

Speaker 7 Green line.

Speaker 2 I like that.

Speaker 2 But like for Democrats, we just, this is part of like,

Speaker 2 this is a problem that exists every time a party's out of power, but in this media environment, it's like massively

Speaker 2 magnified, which is who can actually get attention, right? Like Trump can stand with any single person.

Speaker 7 You can get attention. The dumbest shit ever goes viral.
The dumbest shit ever goes viral. But who's working on going viral in the Democrats?

Speaker 7 You know, you want to stand in front of an MSNBC camera, a CNN camera. Maybe Pete, you know, goes out on Fox and does a great job.
And, you know, we see that and everybody cheers.

Speaker 7 But everybody's got a feed on their social media. Everybody.

Speaker 7 Everybody.

Speaker 7 That's the only feed that matters because we all see the same things in our feeds. Now we're seeing all this AI video.

Speaker 7 Why aren't they creating just tons and tons and tons and tons of AI video that's all prompt generated? The stuff makes us laugh, right?

Speaker 7 I mean, you know, you see the gorilla with Down Z and all this stuff that's, you know what I'm talking about?

Speaker 2 I don't, no, tell me.

Speaker 7 Okay, it has made because it, like, maybe it's because I look at my son's stuff sometimes, but

Speaker 7 there's just like there's stuff that becomes ubiquitous on social media. And that

Speaker 7 you've got to use it. You've got to go, Mr.
Beast.

Speaker 7 I mean, what percentage of the population isn't on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or Twitter or Blue Sky?

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 And how much, like,

Speaker 7 you don't even see things promoted on any of them. You see, I mean, you see little things here and there.

Speaker 7 But when was the last time you thought to yourself, oh my God, this is too much from the Democrats on social media in your feed?

Speaker 2 Yeah, this is a problem with the part. I mean, I think I very

Speaker 2 like and sometimes i i think the democrats in get too much shit because it's like they have limited power to stop some of the stuff trump's doing right and so it's like we don't have the votes but i think that a fair critique a very fair critique is that the leadership of the democratic party is

Speaker 2 has a very poor understanding of the modern media environment right it's like chuck schumer who i like personally a lot he call he always calls it the social media when he talks about it which is which is a problem where it's like trump you know not knowing how to spell AI.

Speaker 7 You know, it's just, it's just,

Speaker 7 that's the tool. It costs nothing to post.
You can reach hundreds of millions of people in a nanosecond if you get lucky. I mean, Brat Sommer changed all the momentum of the election.

Speaker 7 And it's like nobody remembers it. Nobody learned anything from it.

Speaker 2 And but I think the lesson from that also is that's not something that anyone put on a whiteboard in the Kamala Harris headquarters. It's like something that just took off.

Speaker 7 Well, that's

Speaker 7 okay.

Speaker 7 Yeah. It's not like there aren't millions of kids who aren't posting things.

Speaker 7 Like you go on TikTok and there's, you know, depending on what direction you want to go, there's all pro-Trump stuff and there's pro, you know, Democrat stuff and there's anti-Trump stuff.

Speaker 7 You get these feeds, but and it's all coming from individuals. There's no support, no help, no innovation,

Speaker 7 no

Speaker 7 creators creations from Democrats themselves.

Speaker 2 I mean, obviously, I I think that's sort of why Zoran Mandani stands out because he was able to do this, right? AOC stands out because you could do this.

Speaker 2 Like what is unique about them, it's not just their populist liberal

Speaker 7 using social media.

Speaker 2 And they're digital natives, right? They grew up using it, right? No one had to teach them.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and look, it's all changed.

Speaker 7 We're in a unique inflection point right now. And this is another topic that Democrats need to get over, right? There is like, if I talk about AI on Blue Sky, I am getting torched.

Speaker 7 Like, Like I get torched about everything and anything on Blue Sky now and Twitter. So it doesn't matter where I post.
But AI is like the Antichrist to a lot of progressives.

Speaker 7 They need to get over that. You know,

Speaker 7 it is here. It'll be the most impactful technology in our lifetimes.
Whichever party, whether it's a new or

Speaker 7 existing party, makes best use of it will have a huge advantage. I mean, if you can find,

Speaker 7 what AI does is amplifies the skill set of anybody who uses it. If you're a great writer, it can make you a greater writer.

Speaker 7 If you're a great creator, it'll allow you to, you know, create 100 different versions of something in minutes and then pick out the best one as opposed to say, okay, I only have X amount of time.

Speaker 7 I've got to make a choice. It may or may not work.
You know, there's just so many unique opportunities that it creates. Is there going to be job disruption? Yes.

Speaker 2 But is there

Speaker 2 a lot of job disruption, at least for some industries, right?

Speaker 7 It depends on where you're looking at and when, right? Is there going to be job creation? Yes. I mean,

Speaker 7 it can take a 16-year-old kid and make him or her as smart a business person as...

Speaker 7 anybody on the planet because it's like having every professor, every research paper, et cetera, available to you if you ask the right questions and are willing to take the time to learn.

Speaker 7 And it's like, you know, I used to love to sit in a library and just read, sit in bookstores and just read, because I know nobody else would. AI is that ultimate tool so that the Democrats, whoever,

Speaker 7 Americans have this tool at their disposal that allows them to do things they otherwise never would have been able to do.

Speaker 7 And so, you know, when I go talk to like middle school kids, one of the things I always talk about, I always say, look around you, that chair you're sitting on, that desk in front of you, that projector there, that screen there.

Speaker 7 There was a point in time where it did not exist and somebody said to themselves, I have this idea. Now, 99% of the time when people have an idea, they take one or two steps and they stop.

Speaker 7 Somebody took the initiative to go through and take it to a place where those products were created, however long it took them. Now with AI, that time from thought

Speaker 7 to creation and distribution and sale, it could be cut by 90% or more in some cases.

Speaker 2 Like I get, I get the power of it, right? And I use it and it helps me, but it has to be regulated, right? Like it can't.

Speaker 7 Well, it depends on where, right? So there's two different pieces there.

Speaker 7 Like this stuff about the states being able to regulate or not regulate for 10 years, that's shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic, right?

Speaker 7 Because there's nobody who's innovative and creating new, you know, AI models who's going to give a shit about any of that. And if you come after them, they'll just move somewhere that lets them.

Speaker 7 They'll drive to Mexico and it'll be a Mexican product because it's just so much so rapidly.

Speaker 7 And it doesn't take a lot of,

Speaker 7 you can do it

Speaker 7 with a laptop anywhere. And so in terms of regulating, you can regulate it early.

Speaker 7 before something gets created thinking you're going to be able to stop it, which you won't, or you can regulate it after it's created and somebody tries to implement it, which is where I think the regulation should be.

Speaker 7 Because you're trying to regulate ideas, you're trying to regulate concepts, you're trying to regulate computing power,

Speaker 7 algorithms. Ain't nobody in government going to be able to cover that.

Speaker 7 But if somebody releases, if NVIDIA releases a toolkit that does A, B, and C, and you say, no, you can't have something that automates the creation of a Molotov cocktail to 16 seconds and buys everything and finds the robot that will assemble it for you.

Speaker 7 No, that's where we're drawing the line. So that's an implementation issue.

Speaker 7 We're regulating that. And I think do it at a state level.
It's got to be federal.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I agree with this.

Speaker 2 The state level thing, like in the absence of any federal regulation, if you can do things that will at least prevent some of the some of the more manageable harms, like some of the deep fake stuff, the stuff in politics, like that, like I think that's not your regulation.

Speaker 2 But to me, it feels like

Speaker 7 you're regulating the output. Yeah.
right.

Speaker 2 But it does feel like we need a holistic policy here, right? Which seems so far above and beyond what the government can manage.

Speaker 2 Like, you need regulation at the, you know, at the whatever point makes sense. You need something for all the people who are going to lose their jobs, right?

Speaker 2 Because they're like, if you are someone who works in,

Speaker 2 like, there's a whole generation of people whose job was to write SEO copy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And those jobs are gone.

Speaker 7 Like

Speaker 7 when I was a kid, like, I knew I knew parents of friends that were, you know, the

Speaker 7 moms, not to be too sexist, but the moms took dictation. There were secretaries that took dictation.
Gone.

Speaker 7 I went to school in Indiana, and Terre Hote, Indiana, was the record capital of the world, right?

Speaker 7 They created more, you know, albums and then CDs.

Speaker 7 Gone. You are going to have creative destruction.
Now, can you find ways to create more revenue from all of this to deal with whatever comes along in case it's worse than we expect? Absolutely.

Speaker 7 You can put, you know, small taxes, per hour taxes on robots. You know, you could say, you know, 25 cents an hour for every robot.
Like we have robots at costplustdrugs.com, right?

Speaker 7 And we're making, you know, drugs, pediatric cancer drugs that are on short supply.

Speaker 7 And it only takes us four hours to shift, you know, from one line to another, from a pediatric cancer drug to Pitocin to whatever it is.

Speaker 7 And we get it to hospitals and, you know, we can move faster and cheaper because of all the robotics and the AI we use.

Speaker 7 If it was another 25 cents per hour per robot, okay, I could make the argument if I was that type of person, well, that'll increase the cost of pediatric cancer drugs, but I wouldn't because it'd be fair to do that.

Speaker 7 And collecting that money would make us more effective.

Speaker 7 And if you took some of that money and let's just say you take 20% of that collected and reinvest it so that we can become a global leader in robotics and not just software, the software side of it.

Speaker 7 Yes, because China is eating our lunch on that stuff. And we have to learn how to do it.
So, you know, you can't just dispel it and say, no, you know, no, I think you can.

Speaker 2 And the other thing, just the last thing I'd say on a holistic policy is you need an environmental policy that has the clean energy you need to actually power this, right?

Speaker 7 Well, for sure, right? But go to NEPA, right?

Speaker 7 You know,

Speaker 7 If I were involved in the political side, you know, in the White House or wherever, I would say as support side of the White House, I would say we're going to use AI and we're going to take a time, the time it takes to approve an application under NEPA, we're going to cut the non-environmental study side to three weeks, right?

Speaker 7 Using AI, we're going to feed every application that's ever been, you know, we're going to put it into a model.

Speaker 7 We're going to train the model on all those applications and then we're going to spit out you know, a response to each application and put it in front of a committee to evaluate.

Speaker 7 And we're going to help people that are doing the environmental impact studies that go into ANEPA

Speaker 7 and say, look, you know, we're going to cut that time down as well.

Speaker 2 Because which would help us get more green energy products. Ultimately, like we need more clean power to power this because it's a huge deal.

Speaker 7 The time it takes to

Speaker 2 is reduced. You can use AI to make it so you have more power for AI.

Speaker 7 Which is the whole abundance thing, right? Abundance is the whole innovator's dilemma for government. That's effectively what it is.
We can't get out of our own way.

Speaker 7 So we do legislation, particularly when it comes like to the bullet train example, et cetera, where it's like this project is never going to change.

Speaker 7 It's always going to apply the same way it did when the legislation was originated. That's fantasy land, particularly now.
It's all going to evolve.

Speaker 7 And so using AI, we can become a lot more productive. And that's an opportunity the Democrats have.
Because I know one thing about Donald Trump, he doesn't understand AI models.

Speaker 2 As you said, he can't spell it. So,

Speaker 7 And, you know, historically, even like Obama, even though it wasn't his strong suit, he sure made a big effort to learn and understand and bring in great people, where Trump is bringing in loyalists.

Speaker 7 And so, you know, we have an opportunity to do something incredible there, but we fight it as if, you know, It's the end of the world again.

Speaker 7 And that is just counterproductive and it's not good for anybody. You want, you know, here's Trump, the big, beautiful bill and the deficit.

Speaker 7 Okay, well, the only way, now that it's passed, the only way to overcome that deficit is through productivity and through innovation.

Speaker 7 And we have a chance, because we still are, at least for the moment, the leaders in AI. So how are we going to overcome that deficit? Through productivity and innovation.

Speaker 7 And what's going to be a huge part of that? Artificial intelligence. NVIDIA is probably the most powerful company in the world right now, followed by TSMC.

Speaker 7 We ain't doing shit to try to push that through. Okay, Trump has no idea what he's doing with the big beautiful bill.
Put aside the things that give him more executive power.

Speaker 7 But all these things that put us in this bad spot,

Speaker 7 we're going to come up with solutions because that's what we do. We're going to stop bitching and start solving.
Then

Speaker 7 the perspective of the Democratic Party changes. People, if they start to feel those solutions, because obviously they're going to be afraid of AI, everybody is.

Speaker 7 But you start feeling those solutions and seeing how there could be some upside to it and it could create jobs and enable things to happen and, you know, reduce your taxes or reduce, you know, the debt in this particular case.

Speaker 7 Where are the Democrats in any of this?

Speaker 2 More of my conversation with Mark Cuban when we come back. But first,

Speaker 2 from the big, ugly bill passing to the lessons progressives can draw from Zoran Mandani's campaign, My MessageBox newsletter breaks down what's happening in the media, why it matters, and helps each and every one of us figure out what we can do to defeat the MAGA movement.

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Speaker 2 Let me, I want to ask you about Elon Musk, who announced just the other day he's forming a new political party called the America Party.

Speaker 2 You were on Blue Sky, I believe, where you suggested that an organization that you work with would help get them on the ballot. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I saw that that did not go over well on Blue Sky.

Speaker 7 It's not a surprise.

Speaker 2 It's not a surprise, no.

Speaker 2 But so just help me understand what's your reaction to the new party and why would you help Elon Musk's party get on the ballot?

Speaker 7 So a couple of things there. One,

Speaker 7 what's a party? What's a political party, right? We see it as, okay, we're going to run somebody for every position. We want to have a full slate.
We're going to run somebody for president.

Speaker 7 I don't know Elon, right, other than just fucking with each other on Twitter.

Speaker 7 But that's not, as best as I can tell, that's not how he thinks. And I think he came out today or yesterday saying there's only going to be six or seven

Speaker 7 spots that he's trying to fill, which is smart because that's how Elon thinks. He looks for leverage.

Speaker 7 And there's absolute leverage in making sure that the two incumbent parties don't have enough power to pass anything. And so that's smart.
That is really smart.

Speaker 7 And the way the parties are right now, where it's my team versus your team, and that, and people do things that are counterproductive and, you know, create all these self-inflicted wounds for the American people all the time, I think that's a positive.

Speaker 7 You know, everybody wants the Democrats to win or the Republicans to stay in control. No.
I want us to get to the point where we have to actually evaluate bills and do things for the American people.

Speaker 7 Now, do I trust Elon to just do all these things because I think he's a good guy? Fuck no, right?

Speaker 7 But whatever he does, we're going to be able to evaluate and that creates a new opportunity. And, you know, that is something that I think this country needs.

Speaker 7 Could it be just dismissed because he's doing it all wrong? Of course. Does it mean just because it's Elon, it must be wrong or right? No.

Speaker 7 But until we find out details, why are we jumping to conclusions?

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 yes, we don't have details. He hasn't even formed a party, recruited a candidate.

Speaker 2 Like, then this may all just be something he does on Twitter and talks about it, whether it actually executes, who knows.

Speaker 2 It is an either-or choice, right? One of two parties is going to be in charge of Congress.

Speaker 2 It's either going to be the party that's going to greenlight all of the terrible things Trump is doing, or one party, as flawed as it may be in people's eyes, will actually try to stop him from doing those things or may investigate all of the stuff that's happening.

Speaker 2 And so, we do, like, I would love a large menu, but at the end of the day, there's only two dishes. We're only getting one of two dishes, right? One of them is Trump, one of them is us.

Speaker 7 At the same time, you know, you can still have control of Congress and have six or seven seats in this new party, you know, and

Speaker 2 maybe or not, or it could hand it back to the Republicans.

Speaker 7 But you'll know by the candidates that they run because it may well be that they are better Democratic-leaning candidates than the others.

Speaker 7 And look, the presumption is Elon will just pay them to say whatever and do whatever he wants, right? So we'll have to see if that's actually the case.

Speaker 7 Obviously, he'll influence them like any party, but I'm just not going to say no to change

Speaker 7 when we have a set of circumstances where it's not good for anybody. This bifurcation of the country into red and blue is not good for anybody short term, medium term, or long term.

Speaker 7 And even just saying, okay, we're going to stop Trump. Well, we don't know what he's going to try to do next, but just to say we're going to stop Trump and we're going to have the leverage to do that.

Speaker 7 Okay,

Speaker 7 but that doesn't necessarily change our fundamental problems either. And it's not going to change Donald Trump because he's just given himself a bunch of executive power anyways.

Speaker 7 And he's, you know, and so I don't, unless the Democrats come out with a plan that says, here's how we're going to do things, you know, and here's why we're going to be able to bring the country together, or here's, you know, where we see these problems.

Speaker 7 And here's the bills we're going to introduce, it's just us versus them.

Speaker 2 Look, I don't, I think this is going to move in a couple of directions, right? One is Democrats will, they will have an agenda of some kind, or

Speaker 2 the things they're going to do. We understand, right, that Trump will still be president, right?

Speaker 2 And so it's like if they come out and say, here's our plan to make healthcare more affordable, we know Trump is not signing that plan. That's the plan this Romans may still have to sign.

Speaker 2 You don't know that?

Speaker 7 You don't know that. I do.

Speaker 2 I do, that I do know. I feel like I can know.

Speaker 7 Well, let's talk about that, right? This is an area I know, right? His MFN for most favored nation for drugs. could really change the game.
It could cut the cost of drugs.

Speaker 7 Now, he may not know it, but I'm trying to educate some of the people that work with them.

Speaker 7 Could literally cut the cost of medications because he's already come out and said effectively he's against the middleman.

Speaker 7 And by the way, everything I'm telling you right now, I've said to Joe Biden's camp. I've said to Kamala's camp.
Joe Biden had a chance to do something. They didn't do shit, right?

Speaker 7 And so if we can change how PBMs work, how insurance companies work,

Speaker 7 I'd rather see it come from the Democrats. But all the Democrats talk about is Medicare for all.

Speaker 2 And look at that. Well, that's not true because I mean, there are some Democrats talk about that.

Speaker 7 April 25th,

Speaker 7 Bernie and Jaipaul, and

Speaker 7 they came out with a whole nother present, a whole nother proposal, right?

Speaker 7 They didn't come out with here's a better way. And all I have to tell you on that is read it like I did two days ago.

Speaker 7 And every single single payer system, Medicare for all introduced in this country, always effectively starts out with the secretary of HHS runs the show,

Speaker 7 which makes it like,

Speaker 7 you know,

Speaker 7 something that could be used and abused in any way, shape, or form. You've got to deal with the fundamental problems of healthcare.

Speaker 7 And the fundamental problems of healthcare are effectively the middlemen.

Speaker 7 There's these things called pharmacy benefit managers. And when you say, why are for generic drugs, which are 91% of scripts, cost plus drugs,

Speaker 7 when we sell almost all of those, we're cheaper than almost every other country except for China and India. So for 91% of prescriptions, the United States is already cheaper.

Speaker 7 Now, the other 9% are the more expensive and cover more dollars, right?

Speaker 7 And so what he's trying to do, the reason that they're more expensive is because of these middlemen called pharmacy benefit managers. And he has said, let's get rid of them.

Speaker 7 I have, and I've sold every single part of this to Democrat after Democrat after Democrat and said, come up with something. I'll help you.
Nothing, nothing.

Speaker 7 And so you can't just say, he'll say no to healthcare. Now, you know, maybe

Speaker 7 he'll be the same way in response.

Speaker 7 You know, if Chuck Schumer and AOC and Bernie got their shit together instead of just, you know, doing it the way they've always done it and came up with something that's more nuanced, maybe he'll just say no because, but at least they'll be offering something and, you know, people who are in the industry could come out and say, no, this is good.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think, look, I think the way the way I say I think think this is going to move in cycles is that Democrat, like I said,

Speaker 2 the Democrats running for the House will have a set of things, therefore. Then we're going to have a group of, I don't know, two dozen Democrats.

Speaker 2 You have told me you're not going to be one of those Democrats. You've told people you're not going to be one of those Democrats.
I won't bother you with that right now.

Speaker 2 You've said there was 0% chance. So I will take you at your word.
There's 0% chance. Her to my president, we're all going to have ideas, right? And then we're going to have a marketplace of ideas.

Speaker 2 And they're going to have to have a healthcare plan. Some of them will be Medicare for all or a version of what Bernie have done.

Speaker 2 Some of them will be something else, just as as there was in 2019, 2020 when Democrats were running. And so, and then the people are going to get to look at it and see what that looks like.

Speaker 7 That to me is when we're going to have- I'll just tell you up front, it won't work.

Speaker 7 Why not? It can't work because there's no transparency in the system.

Speaker 2 But can there be a plan to add more transparency to the system?

Speaker 7 You've got to do it up front.

Speaker 7 It's got to be more like Canada.

Speaker 7 Like Canada, their healthcare system was built one province at a time, started in 1947, and didn't really click until 1965 for the whole country and effectively each province makes a decision you know what they're going to include or not include and what the budget is and they make it so it's all transparent we don't have that transparency and so even

Speaker 7 even in the bills that say they'll determine the budget and figure out what they're going to pay they don't know what they can and can't pay because there's no transparency what i was going to say is three cost plus drugs the smartest thing we did was we issued our we released our entire price price list.

Speaker 7 It shows our costs, shows our 15% markup, shows exactly what you're going to pay if you go to costplustdrugs.com. Three plus years, January of 2022, we're still the only company who does that.

Speaker 7 Now, you've got hospitals who have to

Speaker 7 publish a lot of their procedures, not all, but a lot of them. And when you look at their procedures, there's a price that they negotiated with.
United Healthcare.

Speaker 7 There's a price they negotiated with Aetna for let's say a hip replacement. And then there's the cash price.
The cash price is always cheaper, right?

Speaker 7 So we created an organization at Cost Plus called Cost Plus Wellness that hasn't launched yet, where we're negotiating all the cash prices with all these different providers, and then we'll publish those contracts.

Speaker 7 Once all this stuff is published, so there's no question about what it costs, then a state, a city for that matter can say,

Speaker 7 a company, you know, like for my companies, if the drug comes from, there's no premiums.

Speaker 7 If the drug comes from cost plus drugs or one of the providers we have an agreement with, there's no out of pocket for the employee or their family member because we've got the prices low enough to be able to afford to do that.

Speaker 7 And there's no reason why once there's transparency to the price and contract level and maybe even to the general ledger transaction level for providers, then cities, states, federal government can negotiate all these things.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 because it's already out there, it's not going to be a battle. It's just like, okay, here's the prices.
We think we deserve better for A, B, and C reasons.

Speaker 7 And as technology moves on and there's more solutions and there's more, you know, gene and cell and gene therapies that are curative, we need more transparency to be able to negotiate.

Speaker 2 Could you just require that?

Speaker 2 Could that be like

Speaker 2 page one of Democrat X's?

Speaker 7 But they're going to lie because the way the system is set up right now, it's so

Speaker 7 opaque that, and vertically integrated, you couldn't disassociate all the different pieces to know what it is.

Speaker 7 And so, you know, you've got to be able to show now so that you know what it's going to cost.

Speaker 7 Because just to try to transition, like when you look at, you know, it's going to take two years to try to do that.

Speaker 7 Every bit of self-interest that providers have, that insurance companies have, look, Over 150 million people in this country are provided their health care by companies that that self-insure.

Speaker 7 And what that means is they don't use the insurance companies for insurance. They take on all that risk with maybe reinsurance from a company for big expenses.

Speaker 7 And so for 150 million people, we don't need insurance companies already.

Speaker 7 And so by making all this stuff transparent, because those 150, the companies that cover those 150 million people, they are getting ripped off.

Speaker 7 They are getting ripped off and they just don't know how. And it's just a whole big game that's going on.

Speaker 7 If these companies are, you know, and this transparency will save them money, will allow them to do better, allow you to disaggregate it from employers.

Speaker 7 There's so many things that you can do, but you got to take these first steps first.

Speaker 2 Once you've taken those first steps, can we just like, this would be at the core of every, like there'll be different ways to get there, but can we have the core principle at the heart of what it will be any Democrats healthcare plan that everyone has a right

Speaker 2 to quality, affordable health care, right?

Speaker 7 Everybody has a right to health care, right? And for some people, like, but you can means test it all.

Speaker 2 Yeah, of course.

Speaker 7 Of course.

Speaker 7 And so there's no reason why anybody should ever pay more than 10% of their paycheck for care.

Speaker 7 And if you're making, you know, at Medicaid levels, you know, 138% of poverty should be free.

Speaker 7 If you're making 200% of that, depending on the family size, should be close to free.

Speaker 7 If you're making $100,000 a year as a single person, let's just say it's 5% or 6% is is the most you'll pay with no premiums, right? No premiums out of pocket. There's so many ways to get there.

Speaker 7 You can cut,

Speaker 7 I don't think I'd be out of school saying if our spending on healthcare is 4.9 trillion now, you could cut it 3.5 trillion

Speaker 7 like that.

Speaker 7 It's just nobody thinks of it. Like, let's get into the details like a real entrepreneur would look at it.

Speaker 7 It's like the ACA did a lot of brilliant, amazing things, but they set this thing called a medical loss ratio, which is 80 to 85% of the premiums collected.

Speaker 7 Well, if you only get to keep 15 or 20% of what's collected, what's the one thing you're going to want to do? Increase the collections and not care about what you send.

Speaker 7 You've got to get into the details. And the Democrats are really, really bad at that, particularly with healthcare.

Speaker 2 I think, I think, well, we can have this conversation again a couple of years in the primary assessment, but I think there will be very detailed plans from a bunch of Democrats.

Speaker 2 You may not like the plans. Some of them may be good, but I think the wilderness.

Speaker 7 You You know, I've read, I've read the proposals, right? I've read the single payer plans, you know,

Speaker 7 and just they won't work.

Speaker 2 Well, let's put it, let's put healthcare first out for a second.

Speaker 2 I have one last 2024 question, and then I have a couple of basketball questions for you that will not be about the Luka trade, I promise you.

Speaker 2 The last 2024 question is, One of your main jobs on the Harris campaign was they said you went on all the quote-unquote bro podcasts, right? You were, you were on Theo Vaughan. You were on Flagrant.

Speaker 2 You went on all in with all the tech guys and all of that. And I heard you tell Tim Miller of the Bulwark that you told the Harris campaign they should go do those things.

Speaker 7 Why did that not happen?

Speaker 2 Like, what was you, what was the response when you said that?

Speaker 7 They were afraid.

Speaker 7 They were afraid, right? They didn't trust her.

Speaker 2 That she would make a mistake?

Speaker 7 Yeah. And because they had her so wrapped, so wound tight.

Speaker 7 Like if the cursing Kamala would have gone on the broadcast, she would have killed it.

Speaker 2 Which she did do with Shannon Sharp, right? When she went on Club Sheche.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and you could see some of her personality come on.

Speaker 2 Yeah, she was more relaxed there, yeah.

Speaker 7 Right. You could see some of her personality.
But even like Alex Cooper, that was so,

Speaker 7 you know, just preset, right? That was so overly organized that it made it tough. But like flagrant, Andrew Schultz is a Democrat, you know, votes Democrat mostly.

Speaker 2 You know, not this time, but most, but yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah, not this time, right? But he was trying. He was really trying.

Speaker 7 But he's had Bernie on, he's had pete on he's had all these democrats on and he understands you know his his impact that he could have theo vaughan he doesn't give a he'll have anybody on right he just wants to have fun and i remember asking him like why do you vote for trump why are you supporting trump why are people voting for him and i gave him all these re characters destiny da da da he's like dude he's gangsta he's gangster i like that boy that boy's gangsta right he don't give a

Speaker 7 it's not hard to go on there and just have a real honest conversation where you can you know have some fun with it and they just did not want kamala to do that

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Speaker 2 Okay, couple of NBA questions here. All right.
I want to start with the health of the game.

Speaker 2 You were in a big debate during the finals on various social media platforms with Clay Travis, the conservative Fox, I'll kick the coverage sports guy.

Speaker 2 Every time the ratings are down, he blames the NBA for being too woke. Too woke.
Which is a pretty stupid argument for all kinds of reasons, but ratings have been down.

Speaker 2 What's your take on the health of the game these days?

Speaker 7 I think the game's in great, you know, great situation economically and with fans. I mean, and all television ratings are down except for the NFL.

Speaker 7 You know, it's not like you can look at every, the NHL was down, but, you know, like game seven of, of the Pacers Thunder, for 18 to 34, of every 18 to 34 year old with a television turned on during the game, 71%

Speaker 7 of them were watching the game. That's an insane number.
You know, we set records and share of people watching television.

Speaker 7 So the people who could, you know, viably watch the game, we set records in share. Now, the problem is fewer people are watching television, which is why we went in a big chunk to streaming.

Speaker 7 So we'll be on Amazon and we'll have other ways to get the games.

Speaker 7 Now, that could work against us because we'll be on too many platforms, but at least it gives an opportunity to people who can't afford cable, traditional linear television cable, to watch games.

Speaker 2 It does seem that there's this, I think this is a point you might have made in this argument, but like the cultural imprint of the NBA is as big as it's been in a while.

Speaker 2 Maybe not as big as the Jordan years, but but no, probably

Speaker 7 it's

Speaker 2 huge.

Speaker 2 But it's happening at a time when, like, particularly young people are not watching the games at the same way because they don't have TVs, right?

Speaker 2 But they may be following the game on less monetizable formats like social media, right?

Speaker 7 Right. Yeah.
So we dominate in social media. Yeah.
You know, our players are maybe, you know, Premier League soccer, a little bit bigger globally. Yep.

Speaker 7 But after them, there's nobody, Steph, LeBron, Luca, Exet, Kyrie. They have huge huge social media platforms.
You know, an NFL team walks through the door.

Speaker 7 Maybe you know the quarterback and a running back or wide receiver. And that's it.

Speaker 7 You know almost every NBA player by sight if you're a kid. And so, you know,

Speaker 7 in terms of cultural impact, the NBA has never been stronger.

Speaker 2 Do you think the season's too long?

Speaker 7 No. Too many games? No.
I think the game's just gotten faster, a lot faster. Guys are stronger, quicker,

Speaker 7 bigger. You know, the game is at a bigger pace.
I saw somebody said that teams run more than 200 miles a year more now than they did 10 years ago.

Speaker 7 You know, that's going to have an impact on your body.

Speaker 7 I think the biggest mistake we made was, you know, when we were talking about load management and resting players to be in a position to win, and everybody gave us shit and we caved on that.

Speaker 7 And the NBA caved on that. And now we had, you know, eight guys who had Achilles heel tears, I mean, which is brutal.
And they were all almost the same move, right? Were a little step back move.

Speaker 7 And so, you know, it's just games evolve and the game, just like football went from 250-pound lineman to 400-pound lineman.

Speaker 7 You know, now basketball players, they're bigger, they're stronger, they're more talented.

Speaker 7 They're more skilled. And the game is just so much faster.
And I think that's been the problem.

Speaker 2 But does that, so but you can't, we can't live in a world where the best players at age 27 are tearing their Achilles and they're out for the year.

Speaker 2 So it's like, what do you do to protect them against that?

Speaker 2 Because I think for listeners who may not follow this as closely as others, your point about the load management was then we, the NBA put in place this 65 game minimum, where if you wanted to make all NBA, which is incredibly critical to how much money you can make, because you make all NBA, you can get a super max deal.

Speaker 2 And so all these players in like most, not the year he got hurt, but the year before Tyrese Halliburton probably played when he shouldn't have played so he could get to 65 games.

Speaker 2 But even, but it, you know, we've lost, you know, Halliburton, you've lost. Dame, we've lost.
Tatum for a year.

Speaker 7 All number zeros too, right? Right.

Speaker 2 I don't know what has to do with that, but just what.

Speaker 2 So here's what I would do. Yeah, what can the league do to protect these players?

Speaker 7 So I would cut the games to 40 minutes. And for two reasons.
So one is college games are 40 minutes. WNBA games are 40 minutes.
Most international games are 40 minutes.

Speaker 7 So there's already precedent there. But in terms of TV ratings, and so back to that, there's precedent there.

Speaker 7 And I think that would reduce injuries, you know, and you could even set a cap on the number of minutes any one player could play so that, you know, the same guys aren't playing 40 minutes all the time.

Speaker 7 I don't think that would happen, but at least you...

Speaker 2 Well, Tibbs is not coaching next year. So yeah, so that's not going to happen, right?

Speaker 7 Which is another thing.

Speaker 7 So I think that starts to deal with the injury issues and wearing guys down over the course of the season.

Speaker 7 And just economically and for a lot of of different reasons, that's better than cutting the number of games.

Speaker 7 But the other side of the equation is if you look at the highest rated sports, there's an inverse TV ratings and even streaming numbers. There's an inverse relationship between

Speaker 7 the number of minutes played of actual game minutes, action minutes in a game versus ratings. So football has the highest ratings.
There's maybe 12 minutes of actual playing time in a football game.

Speaker 7 Basketball has the next highest ratings typically,

Speaker 7 or actually college basketball during the NCAAs, you could say, and that's a 40-minute game. Then there's the NBA, and we're a 48-minute game.

Speaker 7 It's hard in this day and age to get anybody under the age of 40 to commit to watching 48 minutes of anything.

Speaker 7 You know, and so I think by reducing the length of the game, it would screw up records, but so be it.

Speaker 7 But I think by reducing the length of the game, I think we would solve a lot of the injury problems. And I think we'd also make the game more watchable, whether it's streamed or television.

Speaker 2 It would cost the NBA money, though, because you obviously get fewer commercials.

Speaker 7 Yeah, but not that many. I think, you know, over the over eight minutes, over four quarters, two quarters, you know, you might lose two commercials.

Speaker 2 And I guess

Speaker 2 you're making some of that money back with these new, with the much larger media package and Amazon and all of that, right?

Speaker 7 Exactly right.

Speaker 2 Like money's not the problem here.

Speaker 7 Money's not the problem for the next 11 years.

Speaker 2 What do you think about the

Speaker 2 NBA's and sports in general's relationship with gambling, right? Like, are there dangers there? It's changed.

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah. Really?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, you have, you have the actual case of Michael Porter's brother and

Speaker 2 being involved with Prop Bets. There's now an investigation into another player on that.
How are you feeling about that?

Speaker 2 I know you have, you know, you've worked, you have some gambling interests as well. Yeah.

Speaker 7 You know,

Speaker 7 if you would have asked me two months ago, my answer would have been different.

Speaker 7 I think two months ago, I would have said, look, using sports radar and other artificial intelligence and data tools, we can pretty much catch everything. And I think, you know,

Speaker 7 they're showing that we can catch them. That's how we're seeing, you know, that these guys are under investigation, not just in the NBA, but other sports as well.

Speaker 7 But what I worry more about is younger kids, because now that my son is 15, I just see more of it and we discuss it more.

Speaker 7 And that worries me because it's still possible for underage kids to get in there.

Speaker 7 And I think we need a lot stricter controls to keep kids under the age of 18 and to keep people from gambling money they can't afford to gamble.

Speaker 2 It just is, it's become a part of the culture now. Like,

Speaker 2 if you watch, not that people watch ESPN anymore, but if you were, it would be watching sports. It's almost every time.

Speaker 2 It's all about the spread, the, you know, it used to be like very secretly referenced if they, you know, feel cool if the end.

Speaker 2 But now it's very, now like it is a part of all of it. And it's part of like people are looking for ways to make money in this economy.
And so

Speaker 2 there's dangers here.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I agree. And the funny part of the big beautiful bill, did you see the thing on gambling?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was, I've been following, I am not a gambler, but I am very interested in fantasy sports and gambling.

Speaker 2 I've been seeing some of the discourse about, and there seems to be some dispute about what it exactly means. So

Speaker 7 the way I read it, right, is that you can only write off up to 90% of your losses as opposed to previously 100% of your losses.

Speaker 7 And so, you know, you can say that's positive in some respects, but if you're a gambler, you know, you play professional poker, whatever it may be, it's not just sports betting, you're not going to be happy.

Speaker 2 Okay, last question for you. And I'm going to simulate this as the former owner of the mass that you're going to be very biased on this point.

Speaker 2 But what do you think about

Speaker 2 the lottery odds flattening, right? Which has now led to multiple teams who are... are,

Speaker 2 I know you do, but imagine, and I say, and I'm a Sixers fan, so I benefited from this this year as well.

Speaker 2 Right? Yes. And I bet we've this like benefited from the flattening odds this year because we were the sixth worst team or the fifth worst team.
We got the third pick.

Speaker 2 But if you are a fan of a, it used to be, if you were a fan of a bad team, and whether they tanked or they just sucked,

Speaker 2 you had a chance to get a player.

Speaker 2 And now your chances reduced to the point where it's like the rich aren't getting richer, right? But the, like in case of the Mavs, they are. You have a,

Speaker 2 as they hilariously described in the NBA draft coverage, they were like a tumultuous season. I was like, yes, a very tumultuous season.
Yes. But you know, you can have an injured player.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. We won't get into the details of why they had the first pack, but they had the first pack.
But like the Utahs, the Charlottes, the Wizards, there is just like, they are now stuck.

Speaker 2 It's very, it's much harder for a bad team or the fans of a bad team to have anything.

Speaker 7 I don't know, right? It really, there's the luck of the draft, draft, right? Of the ping pong balls. And, you know, right now, what is it, 14.3% or 13.4% for the top three teams? Right.

Speaker 7 So there's still an 87% chance that you're not getting it.

Speaker 7 And so it's never in your odds. And even before then, you know,

Speaker 7 from the time we went to the ping pong balls in 84 or whatever it was, you never had a 100% chance like the NFL does, right? You have the worst, worst record in the NFL.

Speaker 7 It's 100% chance you're getting the first pick.

Speaker 7 And so there's still the odds were against you, but the bigger problem is really the fact that you may have a bad draft class. Like there are teams that

Speaker 7 got the number one pick and maybe

Speaker 7 the player that they got wasn't transformational and the guy who got pick at nine or 11 turns out to be the better player.

Speaker 7 And so it's really getting the right player and keeping them healthy and getting lucky with the quality of the draft.

Speaker 2 And not trading them.

Speaker 7 Yes. Right.
Yeah. Not trading them, right?

Speaker 7 The odds of getting the number one pick. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 The draft last thing is interesting because it's like if the Spurs had won the draft lottery in 2024 instead of 2023, right, and they'd ended up with Zachary Richescheg instead of Victor Webanyama, a different French player, people would have felt very differently about how it went.

Speaker 2 And same thing with the Maps, right? If they'd won it in 23 or 24 instead of the Cooper flag year, then people very different.

Speaker 7 When I first came in into the league, it was the Kenya Martin draft in 2000.

Speaker 7 and it was a different world back then a lot of old school owners so i was just buying up number one picks and i'm you know cost me three million dollars a pick i was trying to set a tone the mavs are no longer you know a trashy franchise so i bought two we had our own pick and then i bought two more number one picks turns out to be the worst draft in the history of the nba right yes yeah and when you're scouting these kids you know

Speaker 7 particularly back then, it was harder to know who the great players were going to be.

Speaker 7 And while Kenyon Martin turned out to be a good player, you wouldn't say he's a Hall of Fame, you know, transitional player, that generational player. And so

Speaker 7 you got to get lucky on two fronts.

Speaker 2 Yep. Mark Cuban, this has been a lot of fun.
Interesting. We've covered a lot of things.
Great to talk to you. Thanks for being with us on Pod Save America.

Speaker 7 Anytime it was a lot of fun. Thank you.

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