Mark Cuban: Character Is Destiny

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Speaker 18 Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast.

Speaker 31 I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Speaker 32 Delighted to finally welcome an entrepreneur and investor, film producer, former owner of the Dallas Mavericks boo.

Speaker 3 He just wrapped the final season of Shark Tank.

Speaker 34 It's Mark Cuban. How you doing, man?

Speaker 35 Good, Tim. How are you doing?

Speaker 14 I'm doing pretty well.

Speaker 37 You know, with the obvious caveats applying, the nuggets aren't in the finals tonight.

Speaker 38 Well, I guess we're taping this on Thursday.

Speaker 40 So the finals might be over by the time people hear this tomorrow afternoon.

Speaker 41 And, you know, the world has gone mad, but my life's good.

Speaker 42 How about you?

Speaker 35 You know, same, right? I mean, the Mavs aren't aren't in the finals. Nothing else would matter, right? What else matters?

Speaker 43 You got the number one pick.

Speaker 6 All right.

Speaker 32 I've got so much I want to pick your brain on and limited time, so we'll just try to move through it all.

Speaker 39 I guess since we're doing the Never Trumper podcast, I just, I kind of want to start with the Trump report card from you.

Speaker 23 I mean, you were for Kamala and for Hillary, but you try to be a straight shooter, which I appreciate.

Speaker 34 You know,

Speaker 32 you'll give him something.

Speaker 5 I don't like to hand it to him.

Speaker 8 You know what I mean?

Speaker 8 I'm reluctant to be.

Speaker 3 It's like that old drill meme.

Speaker 22 I'm issuing a correction.

Speaker 29 You don't got to hand it to the terror group ISIL.

Speaker 44 I feel that way about Trump.

Speaker 47 But how about you?

Speaker 41 What kind of report card would you give him right now?

Speaker 34 Just, you know, across economy, foreign affairs, et cetera.

Speaker 35 So when I was campaigning for Kamala, we said we were going to shut down the border effectively, right?

Speaker 35 And we talked about how the new plans from Biden have reduced the numbers so that they were lower than Trump in his final month, et cetera. He's done it.

Speaker 35 He shut down the border, you know, and so he deserves credit for that. He said he was was going to change the conversation on DEI.
I don't think he understands what DEI is.

Speaker 35 And so, I don't know how much he's actually changed other than a lot of copypasta and search and replace.

Speaker 35 And obviously, there's been times when, you know, there's been economic impact where programs have had to be shut down.

Speaker 35 But I think generally across the country, I don't think he's had dramatic changes on corporations, but he's done what he said he's going to do. Right.
So that's true.

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 41 No Harvey Milk on the boat anymore.

Speaker 11 Sorry, Harvey. Yeah.

Speaker 8 R.I.P.

Speaker 35 And so third, I say deportations. He's done it wrong, but he's done it.
I think we get confused a little bit on deportations because

Speaker 35 he puts everything on tape and he makes everything an event, which amplifies it. But at least the last numbers I saw, he wasn't deporting as many people as Joe Biden.

Speaker 17 I think that's changing a little bit the last couple of weeks.

Speaker 35 Well, I think he's tried to make it seem like it's changed, right? And he's certainly done a lot of high-profile attempts at deportations for sure. But then he walked it back.

Speaker 35 I mean, where the greatest numbers were, you know, farmhands, you know, working in service industry.

Speaker 41 The deportation thing is very important to me.

Speaker 14 So I just like, part of that is because Joe Biden gets credit for like, he didn't shut down the border the first three years, right?

Speaker 20 So the people, some people are coming across the border and then they're getting turned right back around.

Speaker 8 So that's a one.

Speaker 5 Right, force.

Speaker 38 You know, that's just that counts as a one.

Speaker 35 I understand the count.

Speaker 33 And so that number, right?

Speaker 17 So now Trump has fewer, but he's doing more of like the raids of like random businesses and people that have worked here a long time.

Speaker 35 So no, look, when I was out there for Kamala and I talked to businesses and I would say, do you want somebody walking in the door, asking you for all your I-9s and then going in and then taking those phone numbers and showing up at people's homes?

Speaker 35 And we're going to have Elian Gonzalez day in and day out. So he said he was going to do that.
And he's done it. I don't say that I'm agreeing with it, but he's doing it.
Right.

Speaker 35 And I think he's made a lot of mistakes in his approach, et cetera. But then again, he walked it back.

Speaker 35 And the numbers show, at least prior to that, that he wasn't even hitting Biden numbers, which obviously freaked Stephen Miller out a lot. So that's three.

Speaker 35 Number four is what he's done on crypto and with the SEC. And I'll separate those two, right? Crypto put aside his grift, right? That's ridiculous.

Speaker 35 The Trump meme coin, like literally, when that Trump meme coin came out, I emailed the CEO and the people I knew at Coinbase and said I was embarrassed to be a customer of Coinbase because they were trading it.

Speaker 35 He's allowed to do a meme coin, more power to him, right?

Speaker 44 The sponsor of the military parade, you mean mean?

Speaker 6 Coinbase?

Speaker 35 Yeah, those guys.

Speaker 35 You know, you got to kiss up to the audience of one.

Speaker 35 But that said, I am a fan of crypto, and I think there is utility for it. But how Trump has done it with the meme coin is ridiculous.
That's a 4A, I guess. 4B is the SEC.
The SEC was a mess.

Speaker 35 And, you know, I truly believe Gary Gensler cost comma the election, but that's a different conversation.

Speaker 35 But just generally, the way the SEC has historically done business, and look, they came after me for insider trading.

Speaker 35 I beat them in about three hours in a trial, literally in the time it took for lunch. That was it.

Speaker 35 But their whole spiel has been, you litigate to regulate, meaning you don't tell anybody what the rules are, but if they believe you broke the rules, then they're going to sue you anyways.

Speaker 35 which is wrong. And this guy who's, and Kamala, when I was out campaigning with her and talking to Doug about it too, Kamala's a smart lawyer.
And we had this conversation.

Speaker 35 You need bright line rules in the SEC so people know what they can and can't do when it comes to starting or running any business.

Speaker 35 Bright line rules, I think, will reduce the number of infractions and lawsuits because people know what they can't do. The new approach, that's what they're doing.
So, those are his wins, in my point.

Speaker 17 All right. Let's hear about the negatives.

Speaker 41 Where do you give him some L's?

Speaker 35 Oh my God, just

Speaker 35 no leadership, you know, no ability to make a decision, still listens to the last person he talked to, is excluded from the big boy conversations. I mean, the list is long.

Speaker 41 Economics.

Speaker 35 How about your wheelhouse? I mean, he doesn't understand tariffs, but, you know, I just look at a whole picture.

Speaker 34 And what you're doing is he's putting together this bill on the hill that's going to raise interest.

Speaker 29 I think this is, I can appreciate it.

Speaker 39 And I wonder your take on this.

Speaker 41 Because the first term, he did some pretty traditional Republican economics and took a lot of credit for it and pretended like it was his magic business apprentice skills, but it was like kind of the same policies that Marco Jeb would have done, right?

Speaker 8 101.

Speaker 14 This time it's been, it's different.

Speaker 34 And the environment's different because of interest rates and a bunch of other stuff globally.

Speaker 23 So we've got a debt-busting bill that's going to increase everybody's interest rates, combined with tariffs that is going to increase everybody's costs, combined with deportations and a culture of fear that is, that is going to affect the workforce.

Speaker 6 Like you combine all that shit together.

Speaker 33 And I mean, it feels kind of status quoey to Biden, except for in certain industries like right now in people's lives every day.

Speaker 40 But I don't.

Speaker 26 I think it's going to start feeling worse for people not too long from now.

Speaker 35 But it already is starting to feel worse, right? There's two economies in the United States right now. There's all the small towns and cities and states.
They're getting torched.

Speaker 9 Everything that they do, you know, the forgotten man, you mean?

Speaker 35 The forgotten man.

Speaker 35 Exactly.

Speaker 35 Yeah, the real people that, you know, working on farms, the people who do beef, you know, that do cattle in Nebraska, all the states that have to balance their budget now find themselves short because of all the doge cuts or all the office closings or the people that are laid off.

Speaker 35 They're all in deep shit. Like Like, one of my fun pastimes is to look at small-town newspapers.
So, like, I'll get the Parkersburg Sentinel, I forget what it's called,

Speaker 35 and I'll just go reading through it because they'll write about the things that are impacting their local community.

Speaker 35 And I want to understand where the impact the Doge is having or is not having, just to check my whole card.

Speaker 35 And literally, you know, the Daughters of American Revolution Museum type thing, that money that they got from the states, gone, right?

Speaker 35 The buildings that housed, you know, Social Security or in Parkersburg, West Virginia, it's a town of 29,000. And there's the treasury group there that has 2,000 employees.

Speaker 35 And I don't, you know, at least 125 have been fired. But all these small towns, particularly red towns, are decimated and it's only going to get worse.

Speaker 35 And I think they're going to have the hardest time with all the economics.

Speaker 35 And even from a tariffs perspective, you know, when something goes up in cost and you have to ship it to a small town, it's a lot more expensive to ship it to a small town.

Speaker 35 So they get double whammied. Whereas the blue towns that are the bigger, more urbane and consolidated cities, they're going to get hit less.
New York, L.A., right?

Speaker 35 They'll have an impact there, but it's not going to be nearly as bad as the small towns.

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Speaker 46 I I want to

Speaker 41 do a little bit of going back, unfortunately. You mentioned Kamala a couple of times as if you were like, you were in the room.

Speaker 19 And so I'm going to start here.

Speaker 20 We're going to do just a little gossip at first.

Speaker 34 There was some green room gossip at MSNBC.

Speaker 8 You ready for this? You ready?

Speaker 18 I wouldn't tell you this if it wasn't like pretty good.

Speaker 49 Like somebody I kind of trust said that they asked you to send in VP vetting papers and you said, no, the list would be too long.

Speaker 8 Is that true? Yeah.

Speaker 26 It is true. Yeah.

Speaker 43 Why didn't you consider? I mean, you ended up out there campaigning with her, advising her.

Speaker 35 Yeah, the second part of that, my response was, I'm not very good as the number two person.

Speaker 35 And so the last thing we need is me telling Kamala, you know, the president, that, no, that's a dumb idea, right? And I'm not real good at the shaking hands and kissing babies either. All right.

Speaker 17 Well, I don't know about that.

Speaker 51 I was talking to Pete Buttigieg a couple of weeks ago, and I was like, I wanted to, you know, give you a time machine.

Speaker 44 We're going to go back in a DeLorean, like, what could we do different?

Speaker 35 So I want to ask you that same question, but also in the context, like, if it was you instead of Tim Walls, walls i don't who the hell knows i don't know it feels maybe different it feels maybe different i mean obviously would have been different uh my personality is completely different than tim's my experiences my backgrounds are completely different i think i cut through the more directly i i'm not a politician and so it would have been different but It would have been awful.

Speaker 35 She would have fired me within six days.

Speaker 50 It would have been better than present situations.

Speaker 35 Yes, it's true. But, you know, I really thought she was going to win either way.

Speaker 39 Here's what I want to pick on that. And I know you don't want the clip here.
You're like, we would have won if Mark Cuban was VP.

Speaker 8 And I, I get it.

Speaker 56 And I don't even know if I believe that, but maybe.

Speaker 41 I think it would have been meaningfully different in a way that like picking Josh Shapiro or whatever wouldn't have been meaningfully different in a way that's kind of hard to predict.

Speaker 41 But I was listening to you today with my man Theo Vaughn, my fellow Louisiana podcaster.

Speaker 5 My God.

Speaker 34 And you did two hours with this dude. Yeah.

Speaker 46 And I listened to all of it on 2x Speed.

Speaker 35 And I'm like, well, you find it the most crazy experience ever because Theo L1X Speed is crazy.

Speaker 43 Yeah, it's wild.

Speaker 33 He's like asking about porn and gay stuff. And like, then you get into politics.

Speaker 32 And he's all over the map.

Speaker 56 But like at the end of the two hours, it's still hard for me to understand why he's for Trump.

Speaker 3 Like there's no real substance.

Speaker 35 He's gangster.

Speaker 35 He's gangster, baby.

Speaker 8 That's what he's got, right?

Speaker 35 Yeah. Yeah, his vibes.
He's gangster. But that's, look, most people just want to live their life.
Right. They want to get up in the morning with a smile and not be stressed.

Speaker 35 In my mind, the number one job of any candidate, and this is where Trump has spectacularly failed, the number one job of any president should be to reduce the stress of the people of the country.

Speaker 8 Well, that's only one thing.

Speaker 35 Look, there's only one thing we all share, and that's our president.

Speaker 35 Everything else is unique to us, you know, or unique in a thousand different ways. But the president is the one thing we all share.

Speaker 35 And having somebody who communicates trust and hope and reduces people's stress is critical. But the point point being relating it back to Theo, it's not his job to think about all that shit.

Speaker 35 They're not going to think pragmatically about what's best for me and what's best for the country. And that's what the Democrats have to learn.

Speaker 35 People just want to get through shit and get to the game. Like, who's going to win tonight? Like, am I going out to get drunk? Where are my boys at tonight? You know, who's playing who?

Speaker 35 And what's the spread?

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 42 We're going to talk about how gay the Roman Empire was, you know, and like whether if you get rich enough, you get bored with straight sex, whatever other random shit he wants to talk about here's the thing though i and i i am actually i'm not critical theo i wish we lived in a world where every single person with a platform like thought a little bit more deeply about policy i and you know i've had a chance to meet him

Speaker 56 yeah yeah i wish that but we don't we live in the world we live in and like the thing that's actually important about that observation you just made is that like

Speaker 33 I came away from that thinking like basically he just wanted a guy that wasn't a power like he's not ideological.

Speaker 29 A lot of the Democrats look at all of that and they're like, they're racist, they're conservative, we're not gettable.

Speaker 37 And like this dude, like, it pretty much came down to he didn't want somebody that was a politician.

Speaker 38 Trump's vibes are a little more gangster.

Speaker 3 He doesn't like getting his finger wagged at.

Speaker 53 And like, that might be shallow, but like, that's also gettable.

Speaker 57 That makes them get.

Speaker 33 And so that's why I'm like, if Cuban was on that ticket, they're gettable, right?

Speaker 35 They're all gettable, right? Look, Rogan, Theo, the Pauls, you know, the Nelt Boys, all but Rogan, I've been on. They want to talk about sports.
They want to talk about girls.

Speaker 35 They want to talk about getting fucked up. They want to talk about gambling, right? They don't want to talk about politics.

Speaker 35 99% of people in this country do not want to talk about politics on a day-to-day basis. And in fact, they're trying to get away from it.

Speaker 35 So if you're going to try to connect to them, you've got to connect to them on a human level. You can't talk ideologies.
You can't ask for ideological purity.

Speaker 35 You know, you can't extrapolate every single piece of shit that happens and say, now this is going to happen all the time everywhere. That's not how most people think.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 41 And this is, so now this is the part that makes me want to pull my hair out about them, though.

Speaker 20 Because when you get to the policy, it's like most of them are for like Bernie healthcare stuff, totally vibing with your cost plus drugs reform stuff, which we'll talk about, like against the Iran war that Trump might be getting us into right now.

Speaker 33 And so like on policy stuff, like on immigration stuff, they're pretty reasonable.

Speaker 35 What does that mean? It means we don't know how to sell. Well, I told this to Kamala.
I told it to Tim. I told it to the people around Kamala.
Our problem isn't our policies.

Speaker 35 Our problem is how do we sell them, right?

Speaker 35 How do we make people feel comfortable with what we believe so that they will at least absorb it and understand that there's, you know, that there's something in it for them.

Speaker 35 It's just like our lives that we live on a day-to-day basis. The things that we eat, the things that we, you know, how we look at our health have all changed.
They've changed.

Speaker 35 And over time, these things have been, you know, communicated and sold to us in different ways And we've evolved. The Democrats have not evolved.
Republicans have evolved.

Speaker 35 There is no more Republican Party.

Speaker 35 It's the Trump family business. And Trump has always been a salesperson.

Speaker 35 And Trump understands that if you make people feel envious of some other group, and then in turn, you shit on that other group that they're envious of, you can sell them pretty much anything.

Speaker 14 Okay.

Speaker 17 So there's another group of people you hang with that I do have a little more contempt for than the theos of the world, and that's the rich guys.

Speaker 8 I don't hang with motherfucking rich guys you don't okay well whatever you know rich guys better than me i don't get to talk to rich guys you talk to rich guys sometimes at least if you don't hang with them no you at least you know you at least hear from them like

Speaker 53 a lot of what you guys do you know in an investing class and all that is it's risk assessment right there's risk assessment as a central part all this and i just for the life of me can still not wrap my head around the failed risk assessment of for from these guys on trump versus yeah trump versus biden slash trump okay Okay, I'll explain it to you exactly.

Speaker 35 So even when I was out there trying to talk about cost plus drugs, and I went to the White House and Ron, I met with Ron Klain a little bit for a few minutes. And then I wanted to meet with Biden.

Speaker 35 He wouldn't meet with me. I wouldn't say he wouldn't, he couldn't.
Maybe it was just couldn't. But put me aside, maybe I don't rank, right?

Speaker 55 Crazy.

Speaker 35 But every single business person that I've spoken to said the same thing, that they wanted to get time with Biden and couldn't do it.

Speaker 35 And whether it was about AI, whether it was about crypto, whether it was about other businesses, you know, even Elon, when they were talking about EVs, he couldn't get in the room.

Speaker 35 So their first initial response is, this guy doesn't like us. So then the question comes, Biden or Kamala versus Trump, right?

Speaker 35 The response as it we make, as it applies to Trump, because I was like, I know this guy, right? I did a podcast with Vivek where I said, Vivek, this guy underpaid invoices.

Speaker 35 Would you ever underpay invoices? No, This guy ripped people.

Speaker 8 Well, Vivek might, but okay, that's neither.

Speaker 35 I may not agree with him policy-wise, but he's not like that.

Speaker 35 But in any event, like I use the example, because that's when not long after the trials in New York were happening, and Michael Cohen was talking about how Trump underpaid invoices, and he was proud of Michael when he did the same thing.

Speaker 35 I'm like, I thought when Michael said that shit, maybe, you know, when he'd have his, you know, little stand-up press conference after each day's hearing, that he would say, of course I paid everybody.

Speaker 35 No, right?

Speaker 35 All these guys, all these business guys, I would say, character is destiny. Character is destiny.
This is what you're going to get. And they're like, they would always go back to his first term.

Speaker 35 But he didn't do any of these things in the first term. He didn't do this, this, this, this, and this.

Speaker 35 And we have no reason to expect that he would change dramatically and do anything differently than the first term. Obviously, that was wrong, but that was their logic.

Speaker 41 That was not satisfying to me.

Speaker 29 It might be true, but it wasn't satisfying.

Speaker 8 It's like, oh, okay.

Speaker 8 Oh, Biden won't meet with me. Oh,

Speaker 35 let me give you another perspective. Biden won't meet with me.

Speaker 8 Trump's a moron.

Speaker 55 If Trump walked into any of those guys' boardrooms 10 years ago and was like, will you give me $50 million?

Speaker 56 He would have been laughed out of. Mark Don Jason would have laughed him out of

Speaker 35 office. But let's take it one step further, right? So let's talk about them showing up at the inauguration and giving all that money.
Why? Right. And I'm going to tell you exactly why.

Speaker 35 We are in a a zero-sum game with artificial intelligence. These companies, these five, six, seven companies are spending $60 to $100 billion

Speaker 35 a year so that they could potentially win AI.

Speaker 35 You know who had no interest in talking about that or dealing with that? Joe Biden. I tried to get Amala more pushing it, and she did, but by that time, it was already too late.

Speaker 35 They were already all in. And so if you're in a position, Tim, where you just spent $60 to $100 billion

Speaker 35 and the requirement so that one guy with one pen can't fuck you over and end that 60 to 100 billion dollars is you have to kiss the ring.

Speaker 35 If the Democratic Party said, you know what, we've got this asshole Republican who'll switch. If Tim Miller goes and kisses the ring and shows up at, you know, you're doing it.

Speaker 35 You know, it's a zero-sum. Well, I'm not doing it.

Speaker 5 I've got a great life at my home in New Orleans, but I hear you. Most people are doing it.

Speaker 49 Most people are doing it.

Speaker 8 I'm not happy in my little studio.

Speaker 35 No, but you know what I'm saying, though, right? Because it is a zero-sum game for them.

Speaker 44 I want to get to the A, I think next is literally the next thing on that list, but just, I just want to push back on one more element of it.

Speaker 41 Okay, I don't agree with it or endorse it, but I get it in the period between him winning and Inauguration Day.

Speaker 33 Again, that last two months, though, it's just like you look at this guy. I mean, forget going into Andreessen Horowitz.

Speaker 50 If he showed up on Shark Tech for a crossover episode,

Speaker 33 it's just like, this is ridiculous. Like the downside risk, the tail risk of giving him, and imagine when he's 82.

Speaker 35 What are you going to do? How do you change it?

Speaker 35 Okay, they could could have done what you did i guess i guess this is my question why is it just i literally would say this to nicole wallace who'd be off air and i'd be like why is it liz cheney and mark cub and you and me like where is everybody else why didn't they do anything i don't need anything from them you know i mean they literally have hundreds of billions of dollars at risk the future of their companies that they've spent their entire lives building is at risk that's why all right you're kinder to them than i am which is nice that's a good instinct

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Speaker 22 I want to ask you about the AI stuff.

Speaker 41 This is another thing you're more optimistic about than me.

Speaker 3 There's an alarming AI story I want to get to, but I just, I want you to do a bull pitch for me on AI first before I get to the alarming stuff.

Speaker 35 I'll tell you what I tell every kid. I wish I was 16 because the tools that AI provide any 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 25, 30-year-old kid to go out and start a business are amazing.

Speaker 35 It's like having every professor, every library, every mentor, every consultant available at your fingertips to go out and do whatever it is you want.

Speaker 35 If you didn't graduate from high school, if you never even sniffed a community college, if you're you're willing to spend time with all these new AI tools that are changing by the minute because you have the time and the interest to do it, you are going to have the most significant job advantage, competitive advantage, entrepreneurial advantage.

Speaker 35 This is such a unique time in history when it comes to enabling young kids to do unique things. We've never seen anything like it.

Speaker 35 And if you believe in Gen A and Gen Z and what they're able to do for the future, put aside, you know, our age, my age, right? If you believe in them and what they're able to do,

Speaker 35 I think it's just going to be incredible.

Speaker 41 I do believe in them.

Speaker 2 I worry, though, about

Speaker 41 just even the widening gap that we have now. Like, look, I got a seven-year-old.
I hear you, man.

Speaker 12 Like, a 16-year-old who's

Speaker 33 somebody that's a self-starter, who's curious, who's interesting, and on the best time in the world, right?

Speaker 5 A 16-year-old who's lonely,

Speaker 10 who doesn't know what to do with

Speaker 35 yourselves. Now you've got somebody to talk to.

Speaker 31 Okay, Mark, that's very concerning.

Speaker 8 That's not a real conversation.

Speaker 5 That's not a real human, though.

Speaker 8 But

Speaker 35 so having access to a therapist on a marginal smartphone.

Speaker 49 Not a real therapist.

Speaker 35 Read some of the research now in terms of how kids are. Look, there are risks, right? There's been a kid who killed himself, right? There's been kids who get too connected to it.

Speaker 35 So it's pick your poison. Do you want a kid who's isolated with nobody to talk to at all, with no access to therapy? Now, that's a different problem and a different issue.

Speaker 35 We might be able to solve in another way by getting them support or having a tool.

Speaker 17 I maybe want them at the pool. I want them at the local pool.

Speaker 8 I want them at the community pool. Well, that's a whole different thing.

Speaker 20 Can I pick option three?

Speaker 35 No, option three is go into ChatGPT or perplexity and says, I need a workout program and I need a social program.

Speaker 35 So the point being that we have a lot of problems, social problems, a lot of social problems across the entire spectrum of people, every city, every demographic, right? No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

Speaker 35 Now, we can talk about what are the paths we can take to solve those problems. And all the ones that don't involve AI

Speaker 35 are incredibly expensive, incredibly people-intensive, and really difficult to implement in any political environment.

Speaker 35 But on the other hand, what we're talking about are the frailties of AI that's relatively new.

Speaker 35 And so, can we get accomplished therapists, accomplished psychologists, accomplished sociologists to produce models that are trusted because they define the models?

Speaker 35 I think the misperception that we have is that there's going to be this one big AI model. That's not going to be the case.

Speaker 35 Those people who are spending the $60 to $100 billion a year, they all have to compete. And each of those is not going away.
But more importantly, there are going to be millions of models.

Speaker 35 There are going to be millions of things and apps where you can say, the therapist you wish you could have gone to, like this was the perfect therapist for you or your child, that therapist will have a model.

Speaker 35 And that model will have the guardrails that you'd want that they would use in a face-to-face conversation.

Speaker 35 And if hopefully there's a reasonable price, then you can use a tele have a telehealth moment where they talk to them. AI will make that better, not worse.

Speaker 41 Okay. There's a key word that you had in there, guardrails, because I do want to talk about this because I would have, if had we done this, I mean, this would have been a dream for me in 2007.

Speaker 41 So I would have been a pig and shit and not had the balls to push back on you.

Speaker 47 But in 2007, I would have agreed with you.

Speaker 32 I'd have been like, because I was like South by Southwest kid, very excited about all these new social apps.

Speaker 19 And, you know, I've got 18 years of experience now.

Speaker 32 And all of the cool stuff about the social web that I was promised.

Speaker 35 We got some of them. Totally different, though.
Totally different.

Speaker 21 But okay, but part of that was because, you know, there wasn't a lot of smart regulation.

Speaker 41 These

Speaker 18 boomers on the hill did let these guys kind of do whatever they wanted.

Speaker 33 And now you're telling me, well, what the AI gazillionaires, the wannabe trillionaires that are doing this AI, what they want right now is a president who

Speaker 51 won't do anything, who won't put any limits on them, any regulation.

Speaker 9 That concerns me a lot, given our experience in the last little round.

Speaker 35 Right. And that's fair.
But the question becomes: who are we competing with? What are the options available to us, right? And so, unlike most technologies historically, the U.S. has just dominated.

Speaker 35 But now countries are starting to realize France, the U.K., China in particular, are realizing that, look, this is a race that might end up, you know, creating some level of economic and military dominance.

Speaker 35 And we have to win the AI race. And they're not going to have any guardrails.
And so will there be some level of collateral damage? Yes. What it is, I don't know.

Speaker 35 Could it be worse than we ever expected? Yes.

Speaker 35 I'm not going to lie, right?

Speaker 35 But what's even worse is where we know there are no guardrails and nobody will attempt to create guardrails in other countries.

Speaker 35 And I'd rather have somebody who's living domiciled here, pays taxes here, whatever, has a business base here where you can go after somebody when they've done some AI that

Speaker 35 we don't think is.

Speaker 35 acceptable at any level. If you just dop it before anybody gets to innovate, we're not good at determining where innovation will lead to.
And that's the catch-22.

Speaker 35 Now, going to social media, where the algorithms have gone and the dominance by all these people who are rich, the good news is from AI is it's so much easier to create competitive applications and have different levels of communications.

Speaker 35 I think people are going to use social media less. And I think a lot of this has just started.

Speaker 33 But in retrospect, we should have regulated the algorithms.

Speaker 44 Like you should have had a system where like you had to opt in to getting information.

Speaker 35 and so i'll tell you an argument i got on twitter right this was years ago and i said we needed to use real names yeah i've always been for that too yeah but here was the argument against it and it made you really think right whistleblower yeah all that stuff yeah and so you pick your poison and so but now when you you know with elon owning twitter and you know meta with zuckerberg and it's all self-enrichment and all that you know the question becomes what alternatives can you create the good news is we may not have to create alternatives because AI, have you seen all the AI generated videos that are popping up?

Speaker 35 They will

Speaker 35 dominate social media because everybody's trying to arbitrage the economics and make money from it. And so it's going to be really tough to know what's real and what's not real.

Speaker 35 And you may not need real people to create entertainment, which means that... No, don't don't do that because that, in my mind, I think it's going to force more face-to-face communications.

Speaker 35 I did this.

Speaker 20 I just loved it in your pro pitch.

Speaker 43 It's like, it's going to be hard to tell what's real and what's not real.

Speaker 8 And that's in the positive.

Speaker 35 But that is positive in some respects, right? Because it ends up being not a silver bowl. That's not the right term.

Speaker 35 But it becomes so easy to overwhelm, to flood the zone, if you will, with stuff that isn't real. People are going to want stuff that is real and we'll want more face-to-face communications.

Speaker 35 In business as well, when you get all these fake voices calling you as a sales bitch, it's like if you're the company that has a salesperson at least knocks on your door or shows up face-to-face, you're going to appreciate that.

Speaker 35 If you don't know what's real or not, you're going to want somebody telling it to your face so you know it's real and that you can trust it.

Speaker 35 I just had the same conversation with a bunch of doctors an hour ago. The number one business attribute is trust.

Speaker 35 For any app, for any business, you have to be able to engender trust. In an an AI world.

Speaker 8 In my business.

Speaker 35 Yeah, for sure, right? In an AI world, it's easier to do a lot of processes, but it's going to get harder and harder to get people to trust what you're presenting because the pedigree is uncertain.

Speaker 35 The background is uncertain. So when you try to game all these things out and look at second, third, fourth order, right? I don't think it's as bad as you think because there's so much competition.

Speaker 35 And I think there's a positive to it, but I understand the risks.

Speaker 35 If I convinced you, if I'm convinced you're not going to be able to do that.

Speaker 8 No, because here we go.

Speaker 43 I haven't even got you to the thing that

Speaker 20 I wanted, that prompted this topic.

Speaker 28 Open AI

Speaker 54 in a press comment yesterday, they cautioned that upcoming models will carry a higher level of risk when it comes to the creation of biological weapons, especially by those who don't really understand what they're doing.

Speaker 35 Yeah, that's fucking good.

Speaker 3 That's not a great warning sign.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I'm putting that in.

Speaker 13 On the cigarette pack, it's like might get lung cancer.

Speaker 33 On OpenAI, it's like, you know, maybe a random teenager will create a a biological weapon.

Speaker 35 That's a little concerning. Yeah, it's like a cigarette pack stack.
You're saying when you light this, it might have a blast radius of two miles, right? No.

Speaker 35 Like I said, there's going to be unintended circumstances. There's going to be collateral damage, just like there are on the internet.

Speaker 35 Remember when the internet first started hitting, it was like, let's see if we can look up how to make an atom bomb, right? Yeah, sure. And, you know, and so, yes, all those things.

Speaker 35 And I would be shocked. that OpenAI didn't put guardrails because it's easy to say bomb and da-da-da-da-da, but it makes for a great way to sell yourself and get everybody talking about you.

Speaker 35 Oh, interesting. Because look at what Gemini is.
And the difference between Gemini and ChatGPT is Gemini, the guard reels, are too extensive, right?

Speaker 35 It's like Gemini is boring, whereas ChatGPT kisses your ass too much, right? And it, right?

Speaker 35 You know, and so they've all made choices, but they're in a death war, death not being literally, to see who's going to win market share.

Speaker 35 Right now, it's ChatGPT, but they might be the IBM of AI models right now. We just don't know.

Speaker 62 Hi, I'm Martine Hackett, host of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a production from Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenix.

Speaker 64 This season, we're sharing powerful stories of resilience from people living with MG and CIDP.

Speaker 66 Our hope is to inspire, educate, and remind each other that even in the toughest moments, we're not alone.

Speaker 60 We'll hear from people like Corbin Whittington.

Speaker 65 After being diagnosed with both CIDP and dilated cardiomyopathy, he found incredible strength through community.

Speaker 68 So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including, of course, the patients at the center that are all trying to live life in the moment, live life for the future, but then also create a new future.

Speaker 70 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Speaker 4 These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 7 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 9 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 14 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 1 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust.

Speaker 17 MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 20 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 25 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 27 Same mission, new name, MS Now.

Speaker 29 Learn more at MS.Now.

Speaker 17 All right, I want to go back to crypto really quick.

Speaker 41 I'm so torn on this one because I agree with your kind of passing comment earlier that it really hurt the Democrats how hostile they were to crypto and Gensler.

Speaker 41 And I see it, yeah, I see it in my life just anecdotally with a random non-political friends.

Speaker 29 So I agree with that.

Speaker 14 And yet, like

Speaker 12 crypto needs to be regulated.

Speaker 43 And this bill that they put through Congress is not it.

Speaker 37 And I get, I have friends that are into crypto.

Speaker 35 That's only for staple coins.

Speaker 35 That's only pretty much the staple coins.

Speaker 14 Right.

Speaker 3 And so they get mad at me.

Speaker 58 I get friends that are at Coinbase at these other, at these other platforms.

Speaker 3 They get mad at me for my comments on this.

Speaker 51 And I'm like, and they're like, well, you know, there's some really legit

Speaker 33 Bitcoin is legit, the X is legit, Y is legit.

Speaker 12 And I'm like, okay, but if you walked into Walmart and it was like three aisles were legit products and then like 27 aisles were total scams.

Speaker 35 Okay, but let's take what you're saying. Go to Amazon, right? So one of my big things that I pushed and I tried to get Kamala, but it was too esoteric, is all the knockoffs on Amazon.

Speaker 35 Like all a bunch of my shark tank companies, a bunch of shark tank companies, period. This shows on Shark Tank.
They're already on Amazon. Boom, in come the Chinese knockoffs.

Speaker 35 And you probably don't know this, but if you're a Chinese company and you want to sell on Amazon, you don't have to have any nexus in the United States, meaning there's no paperwork you have to fill out.

Speaker 35 You don't have to have a domestic location. You don't have, there's no proof that you file taxes on anything you make.
You can just come in and fuck over as many American companies as you want.

Speaker 35 So to your point that they're, you know, even in real life products, they're scams left and right. And that's a whole lot more expensive than even even the crypto.

Speaker 39 Just really quick, though, like I hear you, and that's bad. And we should have rules against the Chinese knockoff guys.

Speaker 41 But like, it's the business person that's getting screwed over in that case.

Speaker 54 Like in the crypto coin case, it's the consumer.

Speaker 35 No, it's the people. No, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 12 Consumer's getting a product.

Speaker 35 No, it's Tim walking in and thinking he's buying dude wipes, one of my shark tank companies, and it says dude emails.

Speaker 8 You don't know the difference.

Speaker 49 Okay, gotcha.

Speaker 35 Yeah, so you don't know the difference. So because if they weren't selling anything, I thought you were saying they were just making a cheaper knockoff brand for them.

Speaker 41 No, they are.

Speaker 49 They're literally copying it.

Speaker 35 Yeah, they're literally copying it and making a knockoff. And they're getting, they're outselling the Shark Tank companies.

Speaker 35 And though some of those Shark Tank companies have gone out of business, right?

Speaker 28 Well, I did at least get my Chinese wipes, though, whereas the people invested in Melania coin just lost their fucking ass.

Speaker 35 But it's their lottery ticket, right? I hate meme coins. I hate them.
I hate them, right? I think they're the scum of the crypto earth, right? It's a problem. I don't think they should exist.

Speaker 35 But the people who love them look at it as a musical chair's lottery ticket. That if you know how to play the game, you can make money out of it.

Speaker 14 But we've got rules on the lottery, man.

Speaker 58 Steve Wynn and

Speaker 33 the casino business.

Speaker 8 You can't just like have a lottery where everybody loses.

Speaker 35 I hate meme coins. That's what I just said.
But we have rules, though.

Speaker 29 We got to have rules, right?

Speaker 35 I agree, right? I'd have no problem outlining meme points. Now, the crypto people would hate me, right? And they do hate me because I'm not purely libertarian on it.

Speaker 35 But I think to evolve from the pure libertarian history of crypto to get it to where it's more mainstream and easy for grandma, which we've failed at miserably so far. Look, let me say it differently.

Speaker 35 There's been things that have worked really well with crypto and things that have failed miserably. And things that should have worked well have failed miserably.

Speaker 35 Things like smart contracts on Ethereum to create

Speaker 35 applications that truly have utility. That should have been way further ahead than it is.
And the reason it's not is because Gary Gensler made it impossible to follow the rules.

Speaker 35 Now, that's not the same case in other countries. So a lot of companies left.
But when you look at the grifts, like the meme coins, like the Melania and Trump coins, that's just a grift.

Speaker 35 And there's just no other way to put it. And either you pay a whole lot of tax to grift people, that there's rules, there's regulations.
I agree with you 100% there.

Speaker 41 Do you worry about paranoid Tim's coming in now? Do you worry about the Teal, like the idea that they're trying to move us off of fiat currency altogether and the risk associated with that?

Speaker 41 Does that worry you at all?

Speaker 35 Yeah, there certainly is risk, right? Because I forget the name of it, but I lost money 15 years ago with this, not a bond, but it was

Speaker 35 RI something

Speaker 35 that said it was backed by the dollar and it would never break a dollar until it did, right? In like 2008. And this was a regulated thing.
So there is that risk for stable coins.

Speaker 35 The Genius Act was a first step, but it's not the last step. I don't think people are going to take it.

Speaker 40 You liked the Genius Act?

Speaker 35 I thought it was a good first step just so we can start making the point that crypto can be regulated because it won't be the last regulation. But to your point, is Thiel trying to undermine the U.S.

Speaker 35 dollar? I don't think so, right? I think he knows that there's two regulations.

Speaker 8 Are you 100% sure?

Speaker 35 No, I'm not. Obviously, nothing about Peter Thiel am I 100% sure about, right? You know, I've only met the guy once.

Speaker 35 But at the same time, that undermines the entire economy, and that does no good for anybody.

Speaker 39 That circles me back to the Trump point, I guess.

Speaker 40 This is my whole thing of the Trump point the whole time.

Speaker 35 is like he obviously was going to be bad for the economy to me like it was obvious like his stated plans were all very i agree with you yeah i agree with you right i mean all the things i said when i was out for kamala turned out to be 100 true yeah right i i was up i bet at 100 and i would tell people this and they were like but he did do it before He didn't do it before.

Speaker 33 Terrible.

Speaker 20 That's why it's my people. It's Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan's fault.

Speaker 17 It's my people for jamming through the traditional Chamber of Commerce Republican agenda and letting him brand it, you know, honestly.

Speaker 35 Yeah, I mean, and, you know, again, I'll say it again, character's destiny. Donald Trump is a great marketer, great salesperson.

Speaker 35 And like a lot of salespeople that I've dealt with, he cares more about closing the sale and saying he closed the deal than following through to make sure the service is delivered.

Speaker 62 Hi, I'm Martine Hackett, host of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a production from Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenix.

Speaker 64 This season, we're sharing powerful stories of resilience from people living with MG and CIDP.

Speaker 66 Our hope is to inspire, educate, and remind each other that even in the toughest moments, we're not alone.

Speaker 60 We'll hear from people like Corbin Whittington.

Speaker 65 After being diagnosed with both CIDP and dilated cardiomyopathy, he found incredible strength through community.

Speaker 68 So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including, of course, the patients at the center that are all trying to live life in the moment, live life for the future, but then also create a new future.

Speaker 70 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Speaker 4 These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 7 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 9 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 14 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 1 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust, MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 22 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 25 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 27 Same mission, new name, MS Now.

Speaker 29 Learn more at ms.now.

Speaker 44 All right, cost plus drugs. How would you fix the healthcare system?

Speaker 41 Easy question. You have two minutes.

Speaker 35 Oh, I only got two minutes. Well, first, what is cost plus drugs? You go to costplustdrugs.com and you put in the name of your medication.
Let's just say you have cancer and you need a matinib, right?

Speaker 35 If this was... Four years ago, you'd walk into a big pharmacy and that a matinib would cost $2,000 plus.
Now you go to costplustdrugs.com, you put it in. we show you our actual cost.

Speaker 35 What we pay for it shows up. We show you our markup.
It's only 15%.

Speaker 35 If you want it via mail order, we have a pharmacist review it for $5 and $5 for shipping and handling, and that's it. And so you know exactly what it's going to cost you for any of your medications.

Speaker 35 And we've helped millions of people and saved, I don't even know how many lives and helps all over many families. So that's part one.
Part two, how do you fix healthcare, right? First is transparency.

Speaker 35 That's a big part of it.

Speaker 35 But part two is you look for the leverage points in healthcare because that's what fucks it all up when you think about healthcare it's really simple right you go to the doctor the doctor either says you need something or you don't if you need something then there's only two questions what's it cost and how do you pay for it that's it the problem with healthcare isn't the doctors or even the hospitals it's what we charge and how we ask people to pay for it and a big part of that problem is because of how the whole system is set up.

Speaker 35 If you think about healthcare plans, whether it's ACA, whether it's Medicare Advantage, whether it's Medicare Part Part D, or for your company, right?

Speaker 35 You've got some insurance company that's saying, look, here's the plan. We're going to change it every year.

Speaker 35 We're going to have one plan that has a low premium, high deductible, and another plan that has a high premium and low deductible.

Speaker 35 And young people, the people with less money always choose the high deductible and hope they don't get sick, right? But what they don't tell you is.

Speaker 35 One, they set the deductible so high, given that most of America can't afford $400, there ain't no fucking way they can afford afford to pay their deductible.

Speaker 35 Now, you know who loses that money when they can't afford to pay their deductible? It's not the insurance company. It's not the company that you're getting your insurance from.
It's not the ACA plan.

Speaker 35 It's the fucking hospitals and doctors that they've turned into prime lenders, you know, the guys who have to take on any risk.

Speaker 35 And so because of the plans that the insurance companies have designed where they don't pay any attention or give a shit if the people can afford the deductibles that they sign up for, and the government hasn't figured out yet that we've got to guarantee it.

Speaker 35 Like, we can't do single-payer right now. What are your feelings on single-payer?

Speaker 42 No, insane, like, to the idea that we could afford that.

Speaker 23 No, I liked the old, there was a Ryan, I think it was Ryan Wyden, it was an old Paul Ryan thing, which will trigger some of the progressive listeners, but it was basically just like a public option for like low-income.

Speaker 41 It's like a Medicaid thing, and it was scaled up.

Speaker 49 And like, the higher you go, we got that, right?

Speaker 35 We kind of got that with Medicaid, sort of a scaled-up version of it.

Speaker 41 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah, first thing in Medicare Care for All, if you read like

Speaker 35 Jaipel's, Congressman Jaipelle's Medicare for All proposal, the first thing it says is this, this shall be run and organized by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Insane.

Speaker 41 So RFK Jr.

Speaker 20 is running it?

Speaker 35 That's all you need to know.

Speaker 35 That's all you need to know, right? But here's the thing, right? If we introduce transparency, just say like Cost Plus, everything was transparent, right?

Speaker 35 Then you could have cities, states, counties and say, look, here's our budget.

Speaker 35 And if we know exactly what it's going to cost and we can use scientists to extrapolate the data to figure out what our annual budget should be then it can start just like canada started their care programs because that's what canada did like in 1947 one of the you know ottawa what one of the provinces just said look we know what it's going to cost we think we can cover it but you can't do that in the united states of america until you're transparent about all the costs and if you start doing that The two problem children are the insurance companies and the PBMs, because they have all the leverage, right?

Speaker 35 The PBMs control the formularies for 250 million lives, and the insurance companies that own the PBMs control the plans, the insurance plans for just as many lives. And so they have all the leverage.

Speaker 35 If you, A, divorce formularies from PBMs, they lose that leverage and you don't need them for formulas anyways. And so it goes down to a direct cost.

Speaker 35 And if you're transparent on that, and the same thing on healthcare, if you simplify the payment terms, All of a sudden, you can get to single payer, but it's on a municipality, county, employer, or whatever.

Speaker 35 Did I do that in two minutes?

Speaker 21 No, it was three, but that's okay.

Speaker 5 I'm making a hard turn.

Speaker 8 It was pretty good, man.

Speaker 31 Healthcare is the hardest one.

Speaker 39 You asked me like, what do I think about the socialized?

Speaker 25 My honest opinion about healthcare is that it seems like our current system is the worst of both worlds.

Speaker 33 A more free market system with

Speaker 25 a big safety net for catastrophic would be better.

Speaker 8 We don't have a free. Socialized would be better.

Speaker 29 Our system is taking the worst of both of the combos.

Speaker 25 I'm making a hard turn into Blue Sky.

Speaker 32 This started because you DM'd me and you're like, why aren't you on Blue Sky?

Speaker 39 My response to you was like, number one, I like fighting, as you can tell right here, and I don't want to be in a bubble just because I enjoy fighting.

Speaker 55 And number two,

Speaker 47 like,

Speaker 56 bubbles feel toxic.

Speaker 33 And like the types of fighting that happen in bubbles is not the type I like.

Speaker 37 And like people are nitpicking me all the time.

Speaker 36 And I'd rather be going across, you know, ideological perspectives.

Speaker 35 Across a lot, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 24 And like, that's my issue with it.

Speaker 45 Two months later, because it's taken us a while to make this happen, you skeeted basically my critique of Blue Sky.

Speaker 33 So where are you at?

Speaker 41 You're welcome aboard, but where are you at on it right now?

Speaker 29 What's the solution?

Speaker 35 I'm disappointed, right? It didn't have to be that way.

Speaker 35 They took the path of not trying to bring in

Speaker 35 new users that have different viewpoints. They knew that

Speaker 35 they had a big base of users that wanted ideological purity. They knew it, right? I've talked to them.
And they started to bring in a couple of verticals. Like the NBA has got a great vertical.

Speaker 35 Econ Sky is really good.

Speaker 35 Book Talk, a book sky rather is really good right but they made no effort to go bring in other people it's not too late i actually just wanted to kick him in the ass right because it's disappointing to your point i want to fight with the people who disagree with me and i want to have in-depth conversations to see if i can change their minds or they can change mine i don't want to have smarmy vice president jd vance going on just to be addict about it really

Speaker 35 i did i did though why not he set himself up you like that i love that yes you got he's really smarmy about it though right so what yeah so what but it doesn't just like i know it just doesn't like it's like oh like it's like it's it wasn't a real attempt uh to engage though no

Speaker 35 of course not yeah of course of course and i i even quote tweeted him and quote squeezed him and said you're lying right when he talked about pharmacies paying um for i forget what it was i just quote tweet him said you know you're lying right i don't believe you and that's fine i want that opportunity no matter what the platform because you know if you do it on twitter you're just your replies are just going to get destroyed for a month.

Speaker 20 All right.

Speaker 21 We're going to close with Rapid Fire MBA, but just first, I have to do it.

Speaker 41 So I'm not going to ask you the obvious question, like, because I know that you're going to duck it.

Speaker 8 I know you're going to duck it.

Speaker 34 Or the two obvious questions.

Speaker 33 But before I get to either of them, it's like, so what percent chance are you going to run for president?

Speaker 6 I know you're not going to say you're going to.

Speaker 12 Is it zero? It's not zero.

Speaker 9 It's 2%.

Speaker 26 It's zero.

Speaker 8 0.0 nil.

Speaker 35 My family, my wife repeats that because there was the Bloomberg article that just came out and asked the question and she, someone sent it to her, and then she saw it. She's like, no.

Speaker 34 What was the dumb and dumber thing?

Speaker 32 You're not even going to like be like, you're saying there's a chance, you know, one in 100,000.

Speaker 35 There's a chance. No.

Speaker 5 Nothing.

Speaker 35 Okay. So I'll say it's not 100% zero.
If all of a sudden Trump was on the ballot for a third time. Okay.
Right. Maybe that would do it.

Speaker 8 What if it's his kid?

Speaker 44 What if it's JD and Don Jr.?

Speaker 52 That's not enough to get you off the couch?

Speaker 35 No.

Speaker 42 All right.

Speaker 43 I think you're like, here's why I think you're lying to me.

Speaker 33 I think you're an honest person, but you showed up at the dorkiest never Trumper conference in D.C.

Speaker 38 where the Proud Boys came and protested us and made it kind of interesting.

Speaker 14 I love the principles, first guys.

Speaker 20 They are great.

Speaker 56 But I'm like, only someone who at least thinks they might run for president would show up to this.

Speaker 35 No, that wasn't it at all. It was the exact opposite.
It was like, these people have no idea how to sell. They have no idea how to convince people who don't agree with them, right?

Speaker 35 It's easy to convince people in the church, right? Praise the Lord. We all agree.
It's hard to convince people that the reason you like to go to Twitter, because it's more fun, but it's harder, right?

Speaker 35 You have to find a path in order to do it. That's why I do these things.
I've done it for the mod squad and all these other groups, right?

Speaker 35 Because you've got to be able to tell them you can't, just because Trump, you can't just say no to everything Trump does. That is not an approach, right?

Speaker 35 Maybe it's the stop clock is right twice a day, but

Speaker 35 you've got to be able to say, okay, he was right on this. He was right on this.
And you can't call people who support Trump a cult. Yeah.
You know, they're just. Well,

Speaker 6 sometimes the truth is the truth.

Speaker 35 No, but let's talk about that. Right.
So like one of my buddies, when Trump first ran, I was like telling him, because I've known Trump for 25 years.

Speaker 35 And I'm like, Dan, you know, guys in the mid-50s, like, why?

Speaker 35 Let me tell you something, 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? Not really true.
Well, his mind.

Speaker 35 That's all that matters, right? It's all that matters in the mind of the voter, right? So does he come around this?

Speaker 9 It's Trump's done nothing for him? No.

Speaker 35 No, but let's talk about it.

Speaker 8 Sounds like he's in a cult. No, he hasn't come around yet.

Speaker 14 It's been nine years.

Speaker 49 What has Trump done for him?

Speaker 35 You're a white guy in New Orleans, right? So just a random white guy in New Orleans. You think that because of DEI, you or your brother, your uncle, your friend didn't get that promotion.

Speaker 8 I get it. Right.
Yeah, sure.

Speaker 35 I get it. So he said he was going to do something about DEI.
In your mind, he did it. You have a cousin that works construction, right?

Speaker 35 He's, you know, he thinks that he's not getting a higher paid job.

Speaker 35 Well, yeah, right. But he's thinking, coming into all this, right? He's thinking, I'm not, you know, these guys are on the corner and I'm not getting that work because these immigrants, right?

Speaker 35 So I want the border to close. Did Trump do it? Yeah.
Now I want those guys deported. So maybe my wages, it might be a shittier job, but my wages are going up because of it.
Did Trump do it? Yeah.

Speaker 35 So now tariffs, it's going to cost you more money. Yeah, maybe.
But you know what? Those first three things that were important to me, bam, bam, bam, Trump got it right.

Speaker 35 And so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt on the force.

Speaker 13 I mean, Mark, that sounds like a cult to me because it's like, you could just be like, Barack Obama got you out of the Iraq war.

Speaker 20 Are you not happy about that?

Speaker 31 We got, you know, do you have a nephew that's gay?

Speaker 14 We got a gay marriage now.

Speaker 20 Joe, you got a tax cut from George W.

Speaker 21 Bush.

Speaker 45 Like, like you could do this spin for anybody.

Speaker 35 Of course, of course. But this is the here and now.
Right. And that also is the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans.

Speaker 35 The Democrats always extrapolate some anecdotal scenarios and say, see, he's done it this number of times. So he's going to do it all the time.
I don't think Trump voters think that way.

Speaker 35 Trump voters look at it and say, this is me. This is now.
This is what's affecting my life in a simple way, right? The Iraq war, maybe I had some family there and, you know,

Speaker 35 they're out now. That's great.
Maybe, you know, we had the great financial mess and Obama helped fix it.

Speaker 35 Yeah, but that was, I don't remember back that far, particularly, you know, if I'm 70 years old, the average age of the Fox viewer, 75, the average age, I'm not hearing any of that shit from Fox, right?

Speaker 35 And if I'm going to an SEC school, if I'm going to LSU,

Speaker 35 right? I'm not hearing any of that shit, right?

Speaker 35 I'm hearing, you know, all the, you know, he kid fixed the EI, he, you know, took care of immigration, deporting the guys who are keeping my buddies because I don't want to go to my buddies who don't want to go to college now.

Speaker 35 And so the point being is you have to recognize that's the reality. Like we did the shark tank thing and I went to LSU, knows Auburn.
And it was like, oh my God, they were hating on me.

Speaker 35 Like they were like hating on me because of all the Trump.

Speaker 17 You could handle it.

Speaker 35 You handled it. I don't give a shit, right? But it's, you know, it was just interesting to know.

Speaker 35 And so I really, really think that if the Democrats are going to understand why Republicans haven't just turned on Trump, like it makes so much sense to us that he should, you have to realize that he's batting 750.

Speaker 35 For most, particularly for white guys under the age of, you know, 50, right, or 55, he's doing exactly what he said. And unless you realize that, you have no way to change their mind.

Speaker 39 All right. Have your wife call me because I hear you on that.

Speaker 8 Two Rapid Fire NBA.

Speaker 37 You realize that you leaving the Mavs caused a butterfly, flapped its wings.

Speaker 55 Think about all the people you hurt.

Speaker 18 Everyone in Dallas, every Lakers hater, every tanking team that wanted Cooper flag.

Speaker 33 The Bus family is gone now.

Speaker 18 Jay Moore is a billionaire now because of you.

Speaker 58 Like, think about all of the impacts of that decision.

Speaker 56 What do you ever reflect on that?

Speaker 14 I mean, how insane is what happened?

Speaker 35 I am one powerful motherfucker.

Speaker 8 That was insane. You should have stayed.

Speaker 35 It was crazy.

Speaker 33 You should have either stayed or been Kamala's vice president.

Speaker 35 In hindsight, I would have done it a lot differently, but it is what it is.

Speaker 14 I got to do nuggets, some will leave.

Speaker 51 We're in a pickle, man.

Speaker 53 I feel like we're like, on the one hand, we took Oklahoma City to seven.

Speaker 13 We're one player away from being NBA champions right now. On the other hand, they got the cap.

Speaker 19 They got no camp space.

Speaker 48 They're stuck with all these kinds of, what do you do?

Speaker 55 And we don't have a GM.

Speaker 32 Well, A, isn't it insane we don't have a GM?

Speaker 51 And B, if you became the GM, what would we do?

Speaker 13 Help save the Nuggets.

Speaker 35 Well, first of all, your former GM was Calvin Booth, who hit one of the biggest shots in Mavericks history. Second, why are you a Nuggets fan?

Speaker 43 I'm from Denver. I grew up in Denver.

Speaker 35 Oh, okay. I thought you were from Louisiana.

Speaker 32 Yeah, no, I live in Louisiana now.

Speaker 35 I I grew up in Denver. Okay.
Okay.

Speaker 35 So the challenge for all teams right now is we're transitioning from the old CBA to this new CBA with the second apron, which isn't a hard tap, but it's pretty damn close.

Speaker 35 And so teams have to all adapt.

Speaker 35 The bad news is the good teams, it's going to be really hard to keep your good players.

Speaker 35 The good news is the bad teams are going to get better a lot faster because you're going to be able to get players for less and still stay under that second threshold.

Speaker 35 So I think for the Nuggets, they're going to have to draft really, really well. They're going to have to keep Russell Westbrook and they need one more score.
You know, they need another score.

Speaker 23 What Michael Porter Jr.

Speaker 29 for two quarters for a dollar?

Speaker 35 It was tough. He hurt his shoulder, man.
You can't put it on Michael. MPJ.

Speaker 43 No, I'm not putting it on him either. I'm just looking at our options.

Speaker 14 All right. I mean, Jokic, Jokic is the best player in the NBA, right?

Speaker 48 And we got a small window.

Speaker 35 Yeah, it's not close.

Speaker 8 Not close. Yeah.

Speaker 35 And you have a long window because it's not like he's super athletic. So he'll be able to be really good until he's 35, 36, and he's only 30.

Speaker 39 It's so beautiful watching him.

Speaker 41 It's unbelievable.

Speaker 35 Oh, he's so amazing to watch.

Speaker 9 Unreal.

Speaker 41 It's really been a joy of my life over this horrific political decade.

Speaker 35 You know what? Basketball is that, right? Ball is, do you still hoop it all?

Speaker 17 I try. I'm not, you know, I never was that good.

Speaker 58 I was always the nerd.

Speaker 20 I was the play-by-play guy for GW's college basketball team.

Speaker 28 So I was always more sidelines. Yeah, but I do love it.

Speaker 35 But still, but that's not even the point. You don't have to be good, right?

Speaker 35 Just the feel of getting out there just solves all the world's problems i get out there with my daughter a couple times a week we go down to the park and it's awesome my son is 15 now and he's now he's taller than me he could finally beat me one-on-one and it's the worst part of life ever because he talks

Speaker 35 like he'll have a ball even if he doesn't have a ball he'll like do a spin move oh my god he's just killing me but well i'm gonna embrace it now because i'm still talking to my seven-year-old making her cry after i win in horse you know and i'm and i enjoy that it's good it's a good life lesson all right i'm not letting you win in horse but tell me if i'm wrong tell me if i'm wrong Going out into the backyard or gym, wherever, and just making some shots and watching the ball go through the hoop.

Speaker 8 Good as it gets.

Speaker 35 You're not wrong.

Speaker 40 Mark Cuban, I really appreciate you taking all the time, man.

Speaker 2 I really am.

Speaker 35 It was fun, Tim. I really enjoyed it.
All right.

Speaker 31 Come back another time.

Speaker 32 Everybody else, we'll see you back here on Monday.

Speaker 46 Peace.

Speaker 8 It's never getting minded, niggas with me. For sure.

Speaker 8 Slipping on Texas, Dirtino Winskin.

Speaker 8 Slippin' on Texas, Dirtino Winskin.

Speaker 8 is never getting money niggas with me

Speaker 8 never get money niggas with me

Speaker 8 zippin' on Texas dirt no winsky

Speaker 8 zippin' on Texas dirt no wins

Speaker 8 41 shots dirt no wins

Speaker 8 whole bunch of chickens in the ceiling

Speaker 8 on my rich hood niggas feel yeah yeah pull out banana get the feeling

Speaker 8 15

Speaker 8 Carter on the wing, 15,

Speaker 8 17, 5, 4, wing.

Speaker 8 Every time my fucking phone ring,

Speaker 8 Asians in trying to speak Chinese.

Speaker 47 Bad bitches in the vill, please.

Speaker 8 Hundred rats on my chain, sneeze.

Speaker 8 I'm sick.

Speaker 8 40,000 risks. Quick or tick your bitch.
Slime in that six. Go.

Speaker 8 It's number game money, niggas with me.

Speaker 8 Number games money niggas with me

Speaker 8 Sippin' on Texas dirt no wins

Speaker 8 Sippin' on Texas dirt no wins

Speaker 8 It's not but getting money

Speaker 8 Never get minded niggas with me

Speaker 8 Sippin' on Texas Dirt no wins

Speaker 8 Sippin' on Texas dirt no wins

Speaker 8 Trappin' down a mansion choppers in a bend though

Speaker 8 Smokin' scroll, doing donuts in Atlanta.

Speaker 8 Eleventh grade in the lunch line with a bankroll. I fucked your bitch from the back without my chains on.

Speaker 8 And my shades on.

Speaker 8 Then I sent her home.

Speaker 8 Cardiel frames matched the presidential road.

Speaker 8 I drank from Menta Z, cause it tastes good with wood up smoking. I told your bitch, take off her shoes for she jump in my car.

Speaker 8 Getting head and counting money, that my favorite part.

Speaker 8 A million dollars worth of cars in the front yard. Hey, I keep real niggas with me everywhere I go.
Real, 20 phones back to back in a row.

Speaker 44 Fourth podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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