Mark Cuban Wants Democrats to Stop Whining and Do Something

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on credit approval offerings 9-2-25. Welcome to Pod Save America.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer, back hosting another Sunday show because I simply couldn't pass up the chance to talk to our guest today. Businessman, reality TV star, and former Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.
Mark may be a billionaire, but he's not the typical tech pro. 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 healthcare and medication.
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. Plus, I had to get his take on some pressing MBA questions.
Mark Cuban, welcome to Pod Save America. How are you? I'm great.
Thanks for having me on. 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? I'm a little bit sore from working out today. But other than that, I have the same concerns that everybody else has just about the uncertainty in the world, in the country, but I still think there's hope.
All right. That's good.
Well, we'll get into all of that, but I want to just start with some table stakes here. You were out on the campaign trail for Kamala Harris.
You were hitting the battleground states. You were one of our most vocal spokespeople.
You were omnipresent in the media and on podcasts. From what you saw on the front lines, why do you think Trump won this election? A couple of reasons.
One, Democrats try to extrapolate. Everything that Democrats talk about is an extrapolation.
If Trump did this, and in their mind, they're extrapolating, then the normal conclusion is hell's freezing over at some level or another. Republicans deal with the here and now.
You know, they're eating cats and dogs. They're coming to your neighborhood to eat your cats and dogs.
There's no question mark about whether or not there's going to be, whether or not they want to have a visceral experience Democrats want you to think They want you to understand what they envision and get you there Republicans, they're taking your jobs That's what immigrants do DEI is keeping your husband, your son, your wife, your daughter from getting a promotion. 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.
I mean, Democrats, we are probably overly professorial. We look like we're nerds, maybe that's our problem.
But I think in thisation, right? The idea is like, Trump is going to do these things. He's not ended up doing a whole bunch of these things.
Like maybe it sounded hyperbolic when people were saying it, that he's going to deport all these people. But it's not just about what he does, right? It's the conclusion.
Like you said, you're professorial, right? The conclusion is always the end of the world, right? The conclusion is always it's the end of the country. The conclusion is this demographic is done.
They're over with. 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.
They think about what's happening to them today. And often it's just an excuse.
Often it's not real, but it's visceral to them. And thinking about the end of the world is not visceral.
It is to Democrats, but not to the Republicans I know. Do you think we oversold the case in that sense, that it was not believable? 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? Mondani. Yeah, Mondani.
We're cutting rents, right? We're changing grocery stores. None of that shit has a chance.
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 50,000 people could benefit from it.
No, not a single person does that. They're like, okay, this could impact me.
I mean, what's the difference. It's like what a Trump guy told me in 2016.
He said, I'm like, I know this guy, Dan. 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.
You know the definition of insanity? 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? 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? 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.
I think in the Mondani 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? 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. But it said to them, like, he really cares about immigration in a way in which I care about immigration.
Why does 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.
Kamala, and I tried to tell them to talk, Kamala talked about price gouging. How often do you get hit by price gouging? And she was very specific that 37 states already had price gouging laws.
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.

When I would go out there, I would say, look, your price of Gatorade might go up 9%. Your price of bread, eggs might go up 9%.
But under Trump, your price of healthcare is going to skyrocket. Your Christmas presents are going to skyrocket because of tariffs.
I couldn't get them to focus on the impact on Voters in their lives today 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 him not to tell me I just try to make it pertain to people's lives in the immediate right or businesses in the immediate time frame That's what modani has done. That's what Trump does better than anybody.
That's what the Democrats suck at. And why do you think we suck at it? 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. 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.
Most people just want to live their lives and hope things get better. And if both sides are saying things are bad for their own reason, give me the short-term hit that's going to benefit me as opposed to the long-term possibilities that may be a little bit too esoteric for me to even put any brain cells towards.
I assume you think that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama sort of avoided that trap? Did they do things differently or politics just changed? Different world. Politics didn't change.
The world changed. Social media changed everything.
Social media, every single social media users on each individual platform that supports algorithms has their own unique feed. That's night and day different from the Barack Obama, Bill Clinton world.
Yeah. You know, and look at Donald Trump, what helped him win when Brad Parscale took, you know, Facebook and did micro targeting.
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. Now, you, you know, I would talk all the time, you got to reverse engineer, you got to do what Mr.
Beast does. 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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
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? I have.
I have. Yeah.
She'll start saying, fuck you, fuck this, da, da, da, da. She's a normal human being that's smart, that has some charisma to her,

but they didn't let any of that come out. And I think that really held everything back.

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, and I get all this testing,

right? They send it all to me and it says says this exact phrasing of this word, these issues are the ones that will, they're 99% more effective than any other message we ever tested. But if you say it, the question is who can, who's actually going to hear it, right? Which is, I think a change in like how campaigns work is in the old days, you could just pay to show that to people on linear television.
And now you do kid, does it work? Yeah, it doesn't work. And you've, and you've got to be able to connect personally.
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? Like the IRA for drugs, great, but that's big picture. You take a 35-year-old non-college graduate that's working on a construction site, 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.
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. There is nobody that ever, you know, that ever sold magazines door to door or sold construction equipment or sold whatever.
They were lifers in politics and it was just so obvious where Trump was the exact opposite. He could sell.
That's the skill. Yeah.
I mean, going back to the messaging thing, what I think is interesting is the thinking of is, I guess Trump really does follow what you say about Mr. B.
So he reverse engineers from what goes viral, not what persuades. 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 Cohn and his playbook is obvious. It doesn't matter if it's true or not.
You say it enough times, people will believe it. You get at places where it's going to get coverage enough so that it in this day and age fills those algorithms.
And so you would always see Trump in your algorithm no matter what, right? And they're eating cats and dogs was so stupid. It was brilliant because everybody had to cover it and deal with it.
And he knows as a candidate, everybody's got to cover him and deal with it. It's not like he was looking to govern.
He's looking to sell. Whatever he's saying, he wants it to be ubiquitous.
He wants to flood the zone a hundred times over so there's no room for everybody else. He crowds everybody else out.
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. Nothing wrong with that.
But anything else was like, come on. We're now seven months or whatever it is into the Trump presidency.
Is it worse than you thought it was going to be? Basically what you expected? Some things are worse. Some things are better.
Some things are what I expected. Say more.
What do you mean? I expected him to always flood the zone every day, and that's what he does. There's always something.
And terrorists is his fallback. He doesn't want to solve terrorists, right? He wants them to be something he can talk about every day.
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. 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.
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? Shut down the border completely. Those two things gave him, in his voters' minds, carte blanche to do everything else.
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? You can say it's wrong in a lot of cases, right? But he did what he said.
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, his supporters are like, well, he's batting 100 on the first two things. You know, yeah, maybe he's taken some folks that weren't criminals off the streets, 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, and 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, um, so he's, you know, batting 500. And if that's your candidate, you're going to give them every, you know, benefit of the doubt.
Like, I, 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. Like that shutting down the border exceptions, right? Yeah.
Yeah. If you were TPS, right? If you were, you know, and now you're getting kicked out and you believe, you know, your family wasn't going to be deported.
There's a whole big growing group of people who have every right to be pissed at him, right? 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 his, who like they, and if you listen, if you read the fine print of all those, they said he had policy papers and you listen to the entire two hour rally, you would know what the mass deportation was coming.
But if you just watched the ads and read the news, signs right behind it saying mass deportation, you know, but I think people's general impression, this showed up in like polling and focus groups was they thought he's coming for criminals and gang members. People just got here.
It's when the person who's been in your community- The first conversation was, they're sending their worst. From day one, they're sending their worst, to now they're opening up their prisons and da-da-da-da-da.
But the Democrats aren't responding in a way that has a visceral impact. What would that look like? 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. 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.
Every single one of those families should be in front of a camera and we should be working to say, what's going on? They should be putting Tom Homan on blast saying, okay, the FBI has their top 10 most wanted list, right? Let's just get this right. Homan, don't, Do it right.
List the top 100. Go after them.

List the top 100. Let's go after them.
List the top 1000, you know, 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. They only have to do something that's the antithesis of what Trump says and does.
You've never heard a democrat say In the past seven months Yeah, okay, I don't like it

But something that's the antithesis of what Trump says and does. 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.
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? 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.
Yeah, we're better, but these guys, you know, that's not so bad. They're trying really hard.
Okay, Tom Homan, 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.
If MS-13 has 173 gang members here from wherever, we don't want them here either. Post that list.
And you know what? 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. We're all going to go after those bad guys together because they shouldn't be here Now you disarm him 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 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. 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, but let you know, what about these people they're pulling off the streets in black hoodies, right? Post all the bad guys. We'll use our resources.
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 Homan 100. 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. Now, all of a sudden, it's a different conversation.
We agree on that part, but you've listed the criminals. Why are you taking this mom, this grandma, this kid? Why are you doing this when they're not criminals? Let's get the criminals.
Because Because now if nobody knows which ones are criminals, everyone that's taken off the street could be a criminal. I get, like, I can understand the, you know, like that would definitely get attention if Democrats were to do that.
Because you're right, 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. And it's effective, right? And it's effective.
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. Turn it off.
But I guess my, here's my question on that though, is in the last four years, probably once I've won the house, the Senate and the white house, at no point has any Republican been like, you know, here's the good things Joe Biden's doing, right? So what? Yeah. But I'm just saying like, just as a measure of political messaging, right? Like why would it work for, why can they get away but if we can't? It's not us versus them.
It's what works and what doesn't work, 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. 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. Okay.
You can make an argument that it's not the worst thing that happened. Some of them are bad, but you get my point, right? These are things that if you would have told me this would happen seven months in, I would not have believed you.
He hit the half course shot. Maybe it was luck.
Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it's not real and what we're seeing isn't real.
We don't know, but that's what it is. But the easy stuff like tariffs, like having guys in hoodies, pulling people off the street that are not criminals, that's easy stuff.
And it's horrific pulling people off. I can't say it enough times.
And the tariffs are not good for anybody. And it's obvious everybody around him is just placating him and he's just using it it as a media tool rather than an economic tool.
You've got to come in and do something that people feel, not just talk about how awful he is. Let's talk about the tariffs for a second.
They're on, they're off. There's a lot of uncertainty.
The whole taco thing, yeah. The whole taco thing, right? What's your view of how the tariff policy is going on? What are you hearing from other CEOs about this? Because whether the price increases or as bad as we said they would be a few months ago or not, there's just like a massive injection of uncertainty in the time.
We're recording this on Monday, July 7th, and Trump has already extended the reciprocal deadline another month. 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? 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.
Maybe they used up all the capital. They have X amount of dollars, and maybe they were trying to hire somebody.
Maybe they were trying to open up a new office. Maybe they were trying to use that capital for raises, whatever it may be.
But now they're trying to get ahead of the tariffs, so they have to take all that money and put it in. And then he comes back and says, well, okay, we're going to delay him.
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.
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 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.
Interest rates aren't so high that they don't have access to capital. There's just all kinds of ways they can play with it.
So you don't see it in the stock market. And you don't even see it in a lot of the inflation numbers yet.
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. And like I said, during the campaign, he'll be the Grinch that killed Christmas.
So during the campaign, Trump had more business support in 2024 than he did in 2016 or 2020 or throughout his presidency. And one of the things you heard a lot, like if you ever turned on CNBC, these CEOs who were like pro-Trump or like going to support Trump really seemed to believe that tariffs were not going to happen, right? Even Scott Besson, his secretary of the treasury, suggested that tariffs would never happen before he got appointed administration.
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? 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.
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. Two, and possibly the more important reason, is Biden didn't give any CEO leader the time of day.
Not at all. Tech guy, he kept Elon out of the EV meeting, right? That's just dumb.
That is just self-inflictedicted pain so one guy won't talk to you floated a net worth tax effectively right and untaxed capital gains tax 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 half of the conversations i had with business people after Kamala came in was explaining to them that the tax on unrealized capital gains 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.
It would kill the economy. It would kill the stock market.
Who would you vote for if that's what you thought? And there also seemed to be a lot of concern among business folks about the FTC, right? And that it would stop. You couldn't do mergers.
I think it's particularly true around the tech people. But then now you have Trump has come in and you have- Yes, the opposite, right? Yes.
And they sort of thought everyone's going to get the merch and still you have, you know, Paramount's trying to buy CBS, so Paramount's trying to, in this acquisition, they have to like pay tribute to Trump to get it. So it's like, this is not the environment they thought they were getting, right? Not at all.
Not at all. Um, you know, Lena Kahn, 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. We had this conversation directly with, I had it with her directly.
She disagreed. 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, you know, be careful what you ask for sometimes because it's worse. Pod Save America is brought to you by Haya.
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See dealer for financing details, financing, or credit approval offer ends 9-2-25. Last week, President Trump signed the quote-unquote big beautiful bill.
cuts for a lot of people a bunch of tax breaks uh 700 you know nearly a trillion dollars in medicaid cuts three trillion dollars in debt what's your what's your take on the bill 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 Medicaid. 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.
Well, where do you make that up elsewhere so that you have no results? You know, 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, I think, you know, it may not be as bad as people expect it to be, but I understand why, just in terms of Medicaid only, right? Specific to that, right? You know, in terms of some of the other things, like you couldn't, you had to reinstate the tax cuts.
You had to. There's just no way that you couldn't do that.
That would cost everybody too much money. Could you have done it just for the – you do it like Obama did in 2012, where it's – for everyone under a certain income threshold? Yeah, you could.
There's no reason to cut my taxes, and I don't need my taxes cut, right? It was a non-event for me, but at the same time, where were the Democrats saying, you know what, let's propose reinstating, put aside reducing, making the same adjustments you just referred to. The problem with the big bill is that it's too big 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 The re it doesn't 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 You can plug it in the chat gpt, 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.
Let's just do a bill just for that, and we'll all vote for it. Because that preempts them on saying, we got to get this cut.
We got to get this passed rather because we can't have taxes go up for everybody. They just, anything that 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. This is what you're saying you need.
You need to keep these tax cuts. Okay, yes.
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.
Now what? Now all of a sudden, that big, beautiful bill is smaller and people can start paying more attention to the details. This warms my heart because this is one of my arguments was the Democrats should have done exactly that.
And this is just me as an old retired political hacker just going back to the same old tricks. That's what Obama said when he was fighting with the Republicans about this.
He said, I want to extend all the tax cuts up to, he said, 250 originally and the negotiation ended up at 500. And so the point is, we agree on all people who need the tax cuts.
So you want to have this big fight and maybe raise everyone's taxes because you're so hellbent 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 as they wanted to focus attention on people getting kicked off their healthcare here. Yeah, but they're not, okay, first, they're not, some people are getting kicked off because of the work requires.
But what is it like 72% or more of people, you know, are already working, and they're most likely going to qualify? Well, the hard part here is most people, it's not that people who are not working are getting kicked off.

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 Arkansas.

But it's still controlled by the states.

But it's still controlled by the states, yes.

But in these red states, 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.

When they did that before, right?

But it's still controlled by the states.

This bill really didn't change the control by the states.

And I think that's what I'm saying. were working, like they had jobs.
I know when they did that before, right? But it's still controlled by the states. This bill really didn't change the control by the states.
And so you didn't see any, you know, call out, you know, I could be 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.
Put the pressure on them, right? The people who actually, you know, can make or break somebody. All right, you know, DeSantis, you know, 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.
We picked the wrong pressure points. It's just Trump sucks.
That's the underlying, you know underlying thought of everything the Democrats do. Trump sucks.
Trump says, you know, the sky is blue. Trump sucks.
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. 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 they're impacted.
For Medicaid, you go to the states. I'm not a Medicaid expert.
I got a general understanding, but you go to the states because that's who controls it. Maryland has something different than California that has something different.
Now, California comes back and says, well, we don't have enough money to do A, B, and C. OK, what do you have money to do? Let's work on that for the people in your state.
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? We could have gone where you could have put pressure on the governor and made them answer the question. 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? And there was a whole lot of red states and red communities that voted for them that lost a lot of jobs, that lost a lot of funding. West Virginia got crushed.
You know, funding for things that they expected in communities, gone. I haven't seen anybody pulled up in front of a camera with, you know, a Democrat next to them maybe once or twice.
Yeah, there are 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, 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 specially hit by this. Right.
In your local community, that's a great start. Right.
But you've got to flood the zone. You've just, that's, Trump does, right? Flood, you've got to flood the zone.
If you see enough of these people that have lost their jobs, that buildings are being shut down, that the person in charge of the mayor is saying revenues are going to be down 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, I push that stuff to CNN and they don't think it's big enough.
MSNBC doesn't think it's big enough. Great.
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 and the algorithms will do the work for you. 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.
He's maybe, he's as good at getting attention as anyone maybe other than Donald Trump. Other than Trump, yeah.
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.
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 robbing a bank. Like, it's not what you want to do, right? It's a great line.
I like that. Yes.
But like for Democrats, we just, this is part of like, this is a problem that exists every time a party's out of power. But in this media environment, it's like massively magnified, which is who can actually get attention, right? Like Trump can stand with any single person.
Everybody 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? 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, but everybody's got a feed on their social media. Everybody, Everybody.
That's the only feed that matters. Because we all see the same things, you know, in our feeds.
Now we're seeing all this AI video. Why aren't they creating just tons and tons and tons and tons of AI video that's all prompt generated? This stuff makes us laugh, right? I mean, you know, you see the gorilla with Downsy and all this stuff that's, you know what I'm talking about? I don't know.
Tell me. Oh, you know? Okay.
Maybe it's because I look at my son's stuff sometimes, but there's stuff that becomes ubiquitous on social media and that you've got to use it.

You've got to go Mr. Beast.
I mean, what percentage of the population isn't on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or Twitter or Blue Sky?

Yeah.

And how much like you you don't even see things promoted on any of them. You see, I mean, you see little things here and there.
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? Yeah, this is a problem with the part. I mean, I think I very, like, sometimes I think the Democrats didn't get too much shit because it's like they have limited power to stop some of the stuff Trump's doing.
And so it's like we don't have the votes. But I think a fair critique, a very fair critique is that the leadership of the Democratic Party has a very poor understanding of the modern media environment.
It's like Chuck Schumer, who I like personally a lot. 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, you know, it's just, it's just, that's, 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, Brad Summer changed all the momentum of the election.
And it's like, nobody remembers it. Nobody learned anything from it.
And, but the thing is, 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.
Well, that's okay. It's not like there aren't millions of kids who aren't posting things.
Like you go and tick 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-Democrat stuff and there's anti-Trump stuff. You get these feeds, and it's all coming from individuals.
There's no support, no help, no innovation, no creators' creations from Democrats themselves. I mean, obviously, I think that's sort of why Zoran Mandani stands out, because he was able to do this, right? AOC stands out because she could do this.
What is unique about them, it's not just their populist liberal policies. No, they're authentic and using social media.
And they're digital natives, right? They grew up using it, right? No one had to teach them. Yeah.
And look, it's all changed. 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. 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.
They need to get over that. You know, it is here.
It'll be the most impactful technology in our lifetimes. Whichever party, whether it's a new or existing party, makes best use of it, will have a huge advantage.
I mean, if you can find, 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.
If you're a great creator, it'll allow you to 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.

I've got to make a choice.

It may or may not work.

There's just so many unique opportunities that it creates.

Is there going to be job disruption?

Yes.

A lot of job disruption, at least for some industries, right?

It depends on where you're looking at and when, right? Is there going to be job creation? Yes. I mean, it can take a 16-year-old kid and make him or her as smart a business person as 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 and it's like you know go 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 americans have this tool at their disposal that allows them to do things they otherwise never would have been able to do.
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, 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. 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 to creation and distribution and sale, it could be cut by 90% or more in some cases. I get the power of it, and I use it, and it helps me, but it has to be regulated, right? It can't- Well, it depends on where, right? So there's two different pieces there.
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? 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, you know, they'll, they'll drive to Mexico and it'll be a Mexican product because it's just so much so rapidly.
And so, and it doesn't take a lot of, you know, you can do it, you know, with a laptop anywhere. And so in terms of regulating, you can regulate it early 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. Because you're trying to regulate ideas, you're trying to regulate concepts, you're trying to regulate computing power, algorithms.
Ain't nobody in government going to be able to cover that. 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.
No, that's where we're drawing the line. So that's an implementation issue.
We're regulating that. And I think at a state level, it's got to be federal.
Yeah, I agree with this. The state level thing, in the absence of any federal regulation, if you can do things that will at least prevent some of the more manageable harms, like some of the deep fake stuff, the stuff in politics, I think that's that's not – But even then, you're regulating the output.
Yeah, right. But it does feel like we need a holistic policy here, right, which seems so far above and beyond what the government can manage.
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? Because they're – someone who works in, like there's a whole generation of people whose job was to write SEO copy, right? And those jobs are gone.
Like when I was a kid, I knew parents of friends that were, you know, the moms, not to be too sexist, but the moms took dictation. There were secretaries that took dictation.

Gone.

I went to school in Indiana.

Terre Haute, Indiana was the record capital of the world, right?

They created more albums and then CDs.

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. You can put small taxes, per hour taxes on robots.
You could say 25 cents an hour for every robot. We have robots at costplusdrugs.com, right? And we're making drugs, pediatric cancer drugs that are in short supply, and it only takes us four hours to shift from one line to another, from a pediatric cancer drug to Pitocin to whatever it is, and we get it to hospitals, and we can move faster and cheaper because of all the robotics and the AI we use.
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 and collecting that money would make us more effective. 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.
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, they can't. And the other thing, just last thing I'd say on a holistic policy is you an environmental policy that has the clean energy you need to actually power this, right? Well, for sure, right? But go to NEPA, right? You know, 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 the time it takes to approve an application under NEPA.
We're going to cut the non-environmental study side to three weeks, right? Using AI, we're going to feed every application that's ever been, you know, we're going to put it into a model. We're going to train the model on all those applications.
And then we're going to spit out a response to each application and put it in front of

a committee to evaluate.

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

a NEPA and say, look, we're going to cut that time down as well.

Which would help us get more green energy product.

Ultimately, we need more clean power to power this because it's a huge-

The time it takes to get-

Yes, yeah.

You can use AI to make it so you have more power for ai it's the whole abundance thing right abundance is the whole is innovators dilemma for government that's effectively what it is we can't get out of our own way so we we do legislation particularly when it comes like to the bullet train example etc where it's like this project is never going to change. 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.
And so using AI, we can become a lot more productive. And that's an opportunity that Democrats have.
Because I know one thing about Donald Trump, he doesn't understand AI models. As you said, he can't spell it.
Right. And 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.
And so 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. And that, 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. Okay.
Well, the only way now that it's passed, the only way to overcome that deficit is through productivity And through innovation 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? 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. 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.
But all these things that put us in this bad spot, we're going to come up with solutions because that's what we do. We're going to stop bitching and start solving.
Then 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, 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 reduce your taxes or reduce the debt in this particular case.
Where are the Democrats in any of this? More of my conversation with Mark Cuban when we come back. But first, from the big ugly bill passing to the lessons progressives can draw from Zoran Mondani'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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Code crooked. Possibility means you have a chance.
Passion opens the door to all possibilities. When I feel like anything's possible, I feel kind of giddy.
I want to be an astronaut, an artist, an actress, to visit another country. All I need is a backpack and a pair of shoes and I'll find a way.
That I'm able to do anything I set my mind to. I've never felt like more things are possible than right now.
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Imagine the possibilities. Let me, I want to ask you about Elon Musk, who announced this the other day, he's forming a new political party called the America Party.
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.
I saw that that did not go over well in Blue Sky. It's not a surprise.
It's not a surprise, no. 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? So a couple of things there.
One, 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. I don't know Elon, right, other than just fucking with each other on Twitter.
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 spots that he's trying to fill, which is smart because that's how Elon thinks.
He looks for leverage. 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.
And the way the parties are right now, where it's my team versus your team, and people do things that are counterproductive and create all these self-inflicted wounds for the American people all the time, I think that's a positive. 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.
Now, do I trust Elon to just do all these things because I think he's a good guy? Fuck no, right? But whatever he does, we're going to be able to evaluate, and that creates a new opportunity, and that is something that I think this country needs. 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. But until we find out details, why are we jumping to conclusions? I mean, yes, we don't have details.
He hasn't even formed a party, recruited a candidate. And this may all just be something he does on Twitter and talks about it, whether it actually executes, who knows.
It is an either or choice, right? One of two parties is going to be in charge of Congress. It's either going to be the party that's going to green light 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.
And so we do, like, I would love a large menu, but at the end of the day, there's only two, we only get in one of two dishes, right? One of them is Trump, one of them is us. 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 maybe or not, or it can hand it back to the Republicans.
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. 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.
Obviously, he'll influence them like any party. But I'm just not going to say no to change 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. 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.
Okay. 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. 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 and here's the bills we're going to introduce.
It's just us versus them. I look, I don't, I think this is going to move in a couple directions, right? One is Democrats will, they will have a, an agenda of some kind, or they'll be the things they're going to do.
We understand, right. That Trump will still be president.
Right. 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. You don't know that.
I do. That I do know.
I feel like I can know that. Well, let's talk about that, right? Because this is an area I know.
His MFN for most favored nation for drugs could really change the game. It could cut the cost of drugs.
Now he may not know it. Um, but I'm trying to educate some of the people that work with them could literally cut the cost of medications because he's already come out and said effectively he's against the middlemen.
And by the way, everything I'm telling you right now, I've said to Joe Biden's camp, I said to Kamala's camp, Joe Biden had a chance to do something. They didn't do shit.
Right. And so if we can change how PBMs work, how insurance companies work, I'd rather see it come from the Democrats, but all the Democrats talk about is Medicare for all.
And well, that's, that's not true because I mean, some, there are some Democrats talk about that. 25th, Bernie and Jaipal, they came out with a whole other presentation, a whole other proposal, right? 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. 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.
Which makes it, you know, something that could be used and abused in any way, shape or form. You've got to deal with the fundamental problems of health care and the fundamental problems of healthcare are effectively the middlemen.

There's these things called pharmacy benefit managers.

And when you say, for generic drugs,

which are 91% of scripts,

cost plus drugs, 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. Now, the other percent are the more more expensive and cover more dollars right 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 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. And so you can't just

say, he'll say no to healthcare. Now, you know, maybe he'll be the same way in response, 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 people who are in the industry could come out and say, no, this is good.
Yeah, I think – look, I think the way I think this is going to move in cycles is that the Democrats are running for the House, but we'll have a set of things they're for. Then we're going to have a group of, I don't know, two dozen Democrats.
You have told me you're not going to be one of those Democrats. You've told me you're not going to be one of those Democrats.
I won't bother you with that right now. You've said there was 0% chance, so I will take you at your word at the 0% chance.
We're going to represent you. We're all going to have ideas, right? And then we're going to have a marketplace of ideas.
And they're going to have to have a health care plan. Some of them will be Medicare for all or a version of what Bernie have done.
Some of them will be something else, just as there was in 2019, 2020 when Democrats were running. And then the people are going to get to look at it and see what that looks like.
That to me is when we're going to have – I'll just tell you up front, it won't work. Why not? It can't work because there's no transparency in the system.
But can there be a plan to add more transparency to the system? You've got to do it up front, right? It's got to be more like Canada. 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 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 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 list. It shows our costs, shows our 15% markup, shows exactly what you're going to pay if you go to costplusdrugs.com.
Three plus years, January of 2022, we're still the only company who does that. Now you've got hospitals who have to 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. 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? So we created an organization, a 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.
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, a, like for my companies, if the drug comes from, there's no premiums. 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. 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 city states, federal government can negotiate all these things.
And 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. And as technology moves on and there's more solutions and there's more cell and gene therapies that are curative, we need more transparency to be able to negotiate.
Could you just require that? Could that be like page one of Democrat X's health airplanes? But they're going to lie because the way the system is set up right now, it's so opaque that in vertically integrated, you couldn't disassociate all the different pieces to know what it is. And so, you know, you've got to be able to show now so that you know what it's going to cost.
Because just to try to transition, like when you look, you know, it's going to take two years to try to do that. Every bit of self-interest that providers have, that insurance companies have, look, over 150 million people in this country are provided their healthcare by companies that self-insure.
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.
And so for 150 million people, we don't need insurance companies already. And so by making all this stuff transparent, because the companies that cover those 150 million people, they are getting ripped off.
They are getting ripped off and they just don't know how. And it's just a whole big game that's going on.
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. There's so many things that you can do, but you got to take these first steps first.
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 to quality affordable healthcare, right? Everybody has a right to healthcare, right? And for some people like, but you can means test at all. Yeah, of course.
Of course. And so there's no reason why anybody should ever pay more than 10% of their paycheck for care.
And if you're making at Medicaid levels, 138% of poverty should be free. If you're making 200% of that, depending on the family size, should be close to free.

If you're making $100,000 a year as a single person, let's just say it's 5% or 6% is the most you'll pay with no premiums, right?

No premiums out of pocket.

There's so many ways to get there.

You can cut.

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 like that.

It's just nobody thinks of it.

Let's get into the details like a real entrepreneur would look at it.

It's like the ACA did a lot of brilliant, amazing things, but they set this thing called

medical loss ratio, which is 80% to 85% of the premiums collected.

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. You've got to get into the details.
And the Democrats are really,

really bad at that, particularly with healthcare. I think, well, we can have this conversation again

a couple of years in this primary process, but I think there will be very detailed plans from a bunch of Democrats. You may not like the plans.
Some of them may be good, but I think the- I mean, I've read the proposals, right? I've read the single payer plans, and just, they won't work. Well, let's put healthcare for a second.
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. Thank you.
The last 2024 question is one of your main jobs on the Harris campaign was you went on all the quote-unquote bro podcasts, right? You were on Theo Vaughn. You were on Flagrant.
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.
Why did that not happen? Like, what was the response when you said that? They were afraid. They were afraid, right? They didn't trust her.
That she would make a mistake? Yeah, and because they had her so wound tight. Like, if the cursing Kamala would have gone on the broadcast, she would have killed it.
Which she did do with Shannon Sharp, right? When she went on Club Shay Shay. Yeah.
And you could see some of her personality come out. Yeah.
She was more relaxed there. Yeah.
Right. You could see some of her personality, but even like Alex Cooper, that was so, you know, just preset, right? That, that was so overly organized that it made it tough.
But like flagrant, Andrew Schultz is a Democrat, you know, votes Democrat mostly. Not this time, but most, but yeah.
Yeah, not this time, right? But he was trying, he was really trying. But he's had Bernie on, he's had Pete on, he's had all these Democrats on, and he understands, you know, his impact that he could have.
Theo Vaughn, he doesn't give a shit. 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 characters, Destiny, da, da, da. He's like, dude, he's gangster.
He's gangster. I like that boy.
That boy's gangster, right? He don't

give a shit. 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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Imagine the possibilities. Okay, a couple of NBA questions here.
I want to start with the health health of the game you were in a big debate during the finals on various social media platforms with clay travis the conservative fox outkick the coverage sports guy he's he every time the ratings are down he's blames the nba for being too woke which is a pretty stupid argument for a whole course of reasons, but ratings have been

down. Um, what's your take on the health of the game these days? 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, you know, it's not like you can look at every, the NHL was down, but you know, like game of of the pacers thunder for 18 to 34 of every 18 to 34 year old with the television turned on during the game 71 percent of them were watching the game that's an insane number you know we set records and share of people watching television so the people who could viably watch the game, we set records and share. Now, the problem is fewer people are watching television, which is why we went in a big chunk to streaming.
So we'll be on Amazon and we'll have other ways to get the games. 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.
It does seem that there's this, I think there's 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. Maybe not as big as the Jordan years, but it's huge.
But it's happening at a time when particularly young people are not watching the games at the same way because they don't TV's right. But they may be following the game on less monetizable formats like social media.
Right. 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, but after them, there's nobody, Steph, LeBron, Luka, except Kyrie.
They have huge social media platforms. You know, an NFL team walks through the door.
Maybe you know the quarterback and a running back or wide receiver. And that's it.
You know almost every NBA player by sight if you're a kid. And so, you know, in terms of cultural impact, the NBA has never been stronger.
Do you think the season's too long? No. Too many games? No.
I think the game's just getting faster, a lot faster. Guys are stronger, quicker, bigger.
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.
You know, that's going to have an impact on your body. 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 and the NBA caved on that.
And now we had, you know, eight guys who had Achilles heel tears, tears, I mean, which is brutal. And they were all almost the same move, right? Where the little step back move.
And so, you know, it's just games evolve and the game, just like football went from 250 pound linemen to 400 pound linemen. You know, now basketball players, they're bigger, they're stronger, they're more talented, they're more skilled, and the game is just so much faster.
And I think that's been the problem. But does that – so we can't live in a world where the best players at age 27 are tearing their Achilles in their outfathers a year.
So it was like, what do you do to prove to protect them against that?

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 a 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.

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. But even, but it, you know, we've lost, you know, Halliburton, you've lost Dame, we've lost Tatum for, for a year.
All number zeros too, right? Right. I don't know what that has to do with that, but it's just what.
So here's what I would do. What can the, yeah.
What can the league do to protect these players? So I would cut the games to 40 minutes. Oh, interesting.
For two reasons. So one is college games are 40 minutes.
WNBA games are 40 minutes. Most international games are 40 minutes.
So there's already precedent there. But in terms of TV ratings, and so back to that, there's precedent there.
And I think that would reduce injuries, you know, and you can 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.
I don't think that would happen, but at least, you know, well, Tibbs is not coaching next year. So yeah, so that's not going to happen.
Right. Which is another thing.
But so, so I think that starts to deal with the injury issues and wearing guys down over the course of the season and just economically. And for a lot of different reasons, that's better than cutting the number of games.

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 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. Basketball has the next highest ratings typically, 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 it's hard in this day and age to get anybody under the age of 40 to commit to watching 48 minutes of anything you know and so i think by reducing the length of the game it would screw up records but so be it um but I think by reducing the length of the game, it would screw up records, but so be it.
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.
It would cost the NBA money though, because you obviously get fewer commercials. Yeah, but not that many.
I think, you know, over the,, two quarters, you might lose two commercials. And I guess you're making some of that money back with the much larger media package and Amazon and all of that, right? Exactly right.
Money's not the problem here. Money's not the problem for the next 11 years.
What do you think about the NBA's and sports in general's relationship with gambling right like are there dangers there yeah yeah i mean you have you have the actual case of michael porter's brother and and being involved with prop bets there's now an investigation into another player on that how are you feeling about that i know you have you know you worked you have some gambling interests as well yeah i mean you know if you were asked me two months ago my answer would have been know you have, you know, you've worked, you have some gambling interests as well. Yeah.
I mean, you know, if you were to ask me two months ago, my answer would have been different. Um, I think two months ago I would have said, look, using sports radar and other, and artificial intelligence and data tools, we can pretty much catch everything.
And I think, you know, that 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.

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.

And that worries me because it's still possible for underage kids to get in there. 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 it just is it's become a part of the culture now like if you watch nothing people watch espn anymore but if you were it would you watch almost every right it's all it's all about the spread the you the spread.
It used to be very secretly referenced if they feel good at the end. Yeah, if they happen to be a better.
Yeah, right. But now it is a part of all of it.
And it's part of people are looking for ways to make money in this economy. And so there's dangers here.
Yeah, I agree. And the funny part of the big, beautiful bill, did you see the thing on gambling? Yeah, I've been following.
I am not a gambler, but I am very interested in fantasy sports and gamblers. I've been seeing some of the discourse about, and there seems to be some dispute about what it exactly means.
So what's in there? So 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. And so, you know, you can say that's positive in some respects, but if you're a gambler, you play professional poker, whatever it may be, it's not just sports betting, you're not going to be happy.
Okay. Last question for you.
I'm going to stipulate this as the former owner of the Mavs that you're going to be very biased on this point. Sure.
But what do you think about the lottery odds flattening, which has now led to multiple teams who are... I love it.
I know you do, but imagine... And I'm a Sixers fan, so I benefited from this this year as well.
Oh, yeah. You took process, right? Yes.
And I bet this benefited from the flattening odds this year because we were the sixth worst team, the fifth worst team. We got the third pick.
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, you had a chance to get a player. And now your chances are reduced to the point where it's like the rich aren't getting richer.
Right. But the case of the Mavs, they are.
You have a, as they hilariously draft coverage, they were like, a tumultuous season. I was like, yes, a very tumultuous season.
Yes. But you can have an injured player.
Yeah, exactly. We won't get into details of why they had the first pick, but they had the first pick.
But the Utahs, the Charlottes, the Wizards, there is just like, they are now stuck. It's much harder for a bad team or the fans of a bad team to have any hope right it really there's the luck of the draft right of the ping pong balls and you know right now what is it 14.3 percent or 13.4 percent for the top three teams right so there's still an 87 chance that you're not getting it and so it's never in your.
And even before then, you know, the time we went to the ping pong balls in 84, whatever it was, you never had a hundred percent chance like the NFL does, right? You have the worst draft, worst record in the NFL. It's a hundred percent chance you're getting the first pick.
Um, and so there's still the, 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 got the number one pick and maybe, you know, 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. And so it's really getting the right player and keeping them healthy and getting lucky

with the quality of the draft.

And not trading them.

Yes.

Right.

Yeah.

Not trading them, right?

The odds of getting the number one pick.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The draft class 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 Richachet instead of Victor Webinyama, a different French player. People would have felt very differently about how it went.
And same thing with the Mavs, right? If they'd won it in 23 or 24 instead of the Cooper flag year, then people are very different. When I first came into the league, it was the Kenya Martin draft in 2000.
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 thinking, you know, it cost me $3 million 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, particularly back then, it was harder to know who the great players were going to be.
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 you got to get lucky on two fronts.
Yeah. 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.
Anytime. It was a lot of fun.
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