In conversation with Mark Cuban
Guests: Mark Cuban
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents11 chapters
§01The Besties intro Mark Cuban: Voting record, working with Ross Perot's campaign in 1992§02The history of Cuban's love/hate relationship with Trump§03Trump's performance as President: what he got right and wrong§04Party nominations: Kamala vs. Trump§05Biden's performance as President: what he got right and wrong§06Should Kamala share blame for Biden's failures?§07International conflict, national debt, crypto regulation§08General sense of Kamala Harris, why she's been avoiding adversarial interviews, why Sacks supports Trump§09Selling a majority of his Mavericks stake, changing business landscape of the NBA, what he's working on at Cost Plus Drugs§10Thoughts on AI, what's next for him§11Relationship with Elon, re-evaluating the Twitter deal, OpenAI's new fundraise§01The Besties intro Mark Cuban: Voting record, working with Ross Perot's campaign in 1992
Alright, everybody. Welcome to the number one podcast in the world. Here we are on the All In podcast. We have a 5th bestie with us today. Joining David Friberg, Chamath Paihappitiya, David Saxe, and myself is the one and the only Mark Cuban.
How are you doing, buddy?
What's up, guys? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on.
Of course. Of course. And I'm here.
Thank you. I've been practicing my virtue signaling, so I'm ready. You're ready to go?
Alright. Let's go. I think
we're gonna have twice the virtue signaling as normal on our side. So
Double the virtue signal. Virtue signal. I'll say you to anybody.
The weather winner's ride. Rain Man
You have gotten very vocal about politics during this cycle. Uh-huh. And you seem to be I don't know if it's official. You're speaking on behalf of the Kamala ticket. So why why are you this active?
What what is the, reason that you've decided to get this active during this election?
Because I'm proud to be an American. That's exactly why. I mean, you know, we all make choices and think what's best for the country and show our patriotism in different ways. And, you know, I'm not a democrat. I'm not a republican.
I'm an independent through and through.
Oh my god. Like J. Cal. He's an independent too.
Do we go? And Why
is it that all the democrats are afraid to call themselves democrats?
Well, look. I've said this many, many times. If if it wasn't Donald Trump running, if it was a non MAGA candidate, particularly if it was Joe Biden still, I'd vote Republican. I voted Republican before. If it was a non MAGA candidate versus Kamala Harris, it would be, you know, let's look at the policies, let's look at the character of the people involved, and let's make a decision.
It's it's just Donald Trump is not a Republican. Republicans are Donald Trump. You know, the Republican party is now the family business for Donald Trump. And to me, I just think Kamala Harris is a better choice for the country.
On a percentage basis, how often have you voted just to level set, democrat versus republican, would you say, out of 10 elections?
Presidential, probably. I voted for George w twice, then I voted for, Obama twice, and then I voted for, Clinton and Biden. But before that, I voted for, Ross Perot Jr. My first vote was for a guy named, something, John Anderson. So, I mean, I literally worked on Ross Perot Junior's campaign way back when.
Tell us about that. That's fascinating. He got 19% of the vote as an independent candidate.
Yeah. I was living out in LA, and this was 92, and this is when computers were relatively new. I sold my company, and I was taking acting classes and just living by Manhattan Beach and just loving life. And, you know, being from Texas, I knew people there, and they were like, look. We need somebody who understands PCs and computers and software.
Can you help us? And I was like, definitely. I mean, I wasn't to the point where I was involved in his decisions, but I actually had met him. My first company was a company called MicroSolutions, where we did systems integrations, local and wide area network. I wrote software for, you know, single and multi user app, wide area network apps, and we literally helped Parot Systems, get into local and wide area networking.
And so, you know, one of my favorite stories from back then is, you know, I'm terrified. I'm a 26 year old kid. I'm in Dallas. I'm going into ProSystems. I get to meet Ross Perot senior, the man.
Right? And I'm walking through him, and he's got the original the the model for the, no. He had the original Magna Carta, one of, like, the 13 Magna Cartas, and he had the original, model for the Iwo Jima, statue, right, with the flag up and everything. And I'm just terrified. I'm gonna trip and just wipe out American history.
And I walk up to him, and I said, hi, mister Cuban. I'm Roxanne. And I
mean, I reversed that.
Yeah. You know? I was so nervous, and he, like, made fun of it and, you know, got to be friends and did a lot of business, helped those guys a lot. I made them a lot of money. They made me a lot of money.
Did you have any more interactions with him when you were on the campaign? Did you get a sense of
No. I did not. No. I was just a little plebe, just trying to do little plebe y stuff in LA.
I didn't know that you took acting classes. That's interesting. Did you wanna be an actor or before a businessman or what?
Oh, no. No. No. This was after I sold MicroSolutions. I bought a lifetime pass in American Airlines, moved to LA, got a place right on Manhattan Beach, right on the beach, get 2 flight attendants as roommates, and I was just loving life.
And I was like, how else can I meet women? I'm gonna take acting classes. And it was, like, one of the best things I've one of the best things I've ever done because, you know, being a business guy, you it's always right brain, right brain, right brain. And acting is like, don't think, just be. Don't think, just be.
Just let it go. So it was a totally different experience, and that's why you see me do all these cameos and stuff, because I like to do it because it's the one place where you just have to completely let go, and it's a completely different approach to life. So, you know, little backstory.
You got yeah. You got a good character arc on Entourage. I think that was probably the best one.
Seven episodes plus the movie. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. That that was, pretty memorable. So, Sacks, lead us off here. I don't know if you've been following Mark Cuban on social media at all or if you guys interact.
I can't resist asking. So is your, is your acting as a surrogate for a comma? Is that acting too or
actually Hell. Oh, wow. Well,
when when they go live, we
when they go live, we go live. No. No. No. Obviously, I truly believe in it.
And, look, it's always relative. It's always relative to the other candidate. And so, obviously, as you guys know, I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump. I gave him a shot 8 years ago. Didn't work out.
§02The history of Cuban's love/hate relationship with Trump
Okay. Wait. Wait. Could can we get can we get into this? Because I Sure.
You obviously have, like, a love hate relationship with Trump going back 20 something years. So Yeah. Let's just go through the the, the timeline here. I'm just very curious
about this. The guy at all. If he was was running for president and we all got together and, you know, just shot the like we are now, he's a blast. He's fun to talk to. You know?
He's got charisma. He's got personality. He's easy to like. I mean, you know, he's used to schmoozing. He's he's one of the world's best schmoozers, and so he's easy to get along with.
It's not personal. But that doesn't mean, like, you guys with each other. It doesn't mean you can't you know, as different things happen over time, you can't go back and forth. And, you know, he did the same thing, so the whole history of it was back, right when, we went public at broadcast.com no. Right after we announced the sale in 2000, was it 2,000?
Yeah. After we announced the sale, in January 2000, the he threw a Super Bowl party at Mar a Lago. And one of my buddies, who, knew him invited me, and I was like, cool. I'll go. Mar a Lago, hadn't seen it.
Donald Trump, maybe I'll meet him. And so, you know, you guys have seen Mar a Lago in a beautiful pool, beautiful view. There's a brand up there, and he had, like, a bunch of, Hooters and, what's the suntan lotion that always had girls, whatever.
Oh, tropicana?
Tropicana? No.
Yeah. But you Suntropic. Suntropic.
Suntropic. One of those. Right?
So yeah.
And so they were all dressed in orange, and they were walking around, and it was just like a big deal. And it was funny as hell. And so not that that's a bad thing. It was actually kind of entertaining. And, so he comes up to me, and I'm with the, VP of Visa, my buddy, and Jerry Yang, I think it was.
Maybe it wasn't Jerry, but,
and he of Yahoo.
Yeah. Yeah. Cofounder of Yahoo. And, he was like, hey, guys. Nice to meet you.
And I'm like, hey. I'm Mark, Donald, da da da. And he just you know, not to be mean, just in a flipping way, he was like, hey. Someday, you'll be able to sit up there with the rich people pointing to the veranda, and walked away. And I was like, okay.
Fine. You know? Whatever. And so, then, not long after that, through my friend, he got back in touch with me. And, you know, this is the early days of the Internet, early 2000, and, it's still, I guess, still 2000, and, I get an invitation to go to his office in Trump Towers.
And I'm like, this is cool. Of course. And, you know, he wants to talk to me about business, and I'm like, you know what? Donald, I'll help you all I can. He you know, he's getting donaldtrump.com, and he wants to sell tchotchkes and merchandise.
I guess some things never change. And so, you know, so I'm in there trying to tell them about what you can and can't sell online and what works, and that was all fine and good. Met Ivanka. It was all really cool. But the the one thing that left me, if you've ever been or seen pictures of his office, every inch of his office is covered with pictures of him, Every single inch of the office.
What's it like meeting celebrities? Right? Stuff like that?
Yeah. Yeah. Or, you know, whatever, covers he was on and just whatever. Right? And I just remember walking through there.
And afterwards, you know, it was a it was a nice meeting, and we had some follow-up calls and everything, but it never went anywhere in terms of the online stuff. But I just remember thinking to myself, if I ever become, you know, visible or famous, you know, to that level, don't let me get so caught up in just having pictures of myself, and, you know, I'd had conversations with my buddies about it just like, you know, you guys would. And so then in 2004, I got a chance to do a show called the benefactor. ABC called me and said
Okay. Wait. Let's show this. We have this, this was got tweeted. So So
so, this is do we got canceled?
You did Oppo research, Sachs? You got Oppo research
on that? This is this is on Twitter. Every
this is
on on ads.
Well, people tried to talk with me on on Twitter. They tried to. So So anyway, so when I got the gig, he was like, congratulations. Good luck and everything. I was like, thank you and whatever.
And then when I got canceled, he sent me that letter basically saying you suck. And so
Well, he was he was dancing on the grave of your show, but so you're saying you didn't have beef with him before that letter? No. It was not a beef.
No. Yeah. It was not a beef, but it was just like, that's what it was, and so it was just like, okay. Whatever. And,
Okay. But then when he ran in 2016, you were supportive. Can we show that? Let's show the 2,000 16,000. But There's more in between.
There's a lot more in between. Okay. K.
So that's 2,004. 2,007, Eric reaches out to me and goes, hey. There's no hard feelings with my dad or anything. And I'm like, no. I don't care.
He goes, we're working with, these Russian MMA fighters, this guy named Fedor Emilyenko, who was, like, one of the best ever at that point in time, and Josh Barrett. And kind of the irony of all this is we were competing with Dana Dana White and the UFC in some respects because a lot of fighters felt like they weren't getting paid enough. There was no health care. There was no nothing. Right?
And so I had a TV network. We had started the first all high definition TV network called HD Net back in 2000 back when TVs cost $20,000, and everybody thought we were idiots. But slowly but surely, it was taking off. And so they came to me and said, we'd like to put, we're partnering with these guys who are putting on this MMA fight, with Fedor and Josh Barrett and some other folks, and we'd like to broadcast it on on HDNET because we had a show called, This Week in MMA, so we were promoting. We had fights that we were already putting on every Friday night, so it actually was a good fit.
So you'll see pictures of me sitting with them, and actually and I couldn't find it. I was so pissed because I was gonna with him some more. What he said in the in what you know, during the time we were sitting at that podium was everything Mark Cuban touches turns to gold. And so I was like, that would have been so great to to have
out there.
And so and, anyway, so we're friends again. And so it's 2007, and we're friends, and nothing happens between then until whenever he started going crazy on Twitter and, all the Obama stuff and everything and the birth certificate and the birth birth stuff. So he's on Twitter, and he started with me. I say that so let me just preface this by saying, I golfed once in my life in 1989, and I hated it so bad. I was throwing clubs because I'm one of those really super competitive guys.
I'm like, never again. But I went and worked, I auctioned off myself to be a caddy at a golf tournament that he also was at. But he starts tweeting that I saw Mark Cuban, and he swings like your girl and this and that. He swings like your girl. Like, nobody saw me swing because I don't golf.
And so I started back with him, and so we went back and forth on Twitter for years for years. And then he comes down the, escalator in 2015, and I'm like, alright. This guy's got no chance to win. But I think it's great because I don't like traditional politicians. I'm not you know, there's nothing about me that thinks that the way we do politics or the way the government is run is a good thing.
Not at all. I mean, I my heart is libertarian, but I realize you can't libertarians are not problem solvers or ideologues. You know? Like, you look at Rand Paul. Everything's only one way.
He doesn't try to solve problems. So, anyways, I digress. So he comes down the I'm like, that's cool. Right? He doesn't have a chance to win, but, I'm like, he's the best thing ever.
You know you know how you know, I I forget where I was, but I was like, he's the best thing that ever happened to politics. He's not a politician. He's not gonna be a step forward candidate. I may not agree with his positions, but, you know, just the fact that he's not a politician is a good thing. And so from there, he called me, and we talked a lot, probably 10 to 15 times on the phone.
He would call me, you know, and and he tweeted one time, Mark Cuban was trying to come. I never had a number. There was no way for me to call him. Right? He would you know?
And you know the way he emails. He refuses to send an email because he doesn't want any proof of anything that he's done. Right? And so, you know, he would write it up like you had one of those pictures. So bring up the one on the CNN where he says, what happened?
So right there, CNN, nasty. What happened? See see what he does there. His email, he writes on a piece of paper, and then someone scans it and sends it as a image via email. And so what happened
So just so the audience can understand. So you the the email is from you to him saying, tell the boss I said congrats on his sweep. And then and then his assistant printed it out and then wrote back to you and like, I'm
not one of many emails that that we went back and forth on. This there were yeah. To be just as
a weird point, he literally prints out his emails, writes on them, has them scanned in, and sent as an image to you. Mark, wow. Sore you on CNN. Nasty. What happened?
Send this to you? He emailed this to you or or what?
He emailed it in image file.
He doesn't use email. I mean, the guy No.
No. His assistant emailed it back. Right.
As So he writes on the piece. Assistant prints it out. He reads it. Hilarious. He writes on it.
She scans it. She scans the sends the
image to
me. Okay. Now the big question there be you can't just let that slide. Why do you think he does that?
Is this a different generation? No. At least that's my interpretation.
No. Absolutely not.
Nope. I'm with Mark. He don't want paper trails on anything. He because he's doing so much shady stuff, man.
I I think you're reaching there. Obviously, there's a paper trail.
If he if he writes on if he writes
it on
a piece
of paper hold on. If I write right now on a Post it note, scan an email to you, there's a paper trail.
No. No. You can't search for it, and it's not his. He you know? Yes.
To your
point He signed it.
I'm just telling you. He won't send emails at all. He doesn't want any
He just created an electronic record. What's the difference?
You have to ask him on that, but he said it out loud.
Generational this is my interpretation. I think it's a generational thing.
Out loud, David. He has literally said it out loud that he doesn't want a paper trail. But, anyway, so let's go back. So so now we're talking back and forth, and we're having legit conversations. I remember asking him, you know, you realize as president, you're gonna have to make decisions where people can die.
And he really wouldn't respond. Yeah. I get it. I get it. I'm like, Donald, you don't have a ground game.
What are you gonna do? How are you gonna get through this? Yeah. I got the evangelicals doing all that. I'm not worried about it.
I'm like, Donald, you know, and we would I would bring up things about there was this one thing where, the FBI used used this device to break into an iPhone, and there was a big thing about, you know, privacy. And I tried to engage him on a conversation on it, and it's just like, I don't know. I, you know, just didn't wanna talk about that at all. And that would that would happen multiple times where I would try to engage in conversations about some some type of policy, and there just it never got anywhere, and there was never a conversation. And I said to him I'm saying there's another email where I said, Donald, at some point, you have to learn these things.
You literally have to learn these things in order to be president, and he didn't respond to that. And that's when I went on CNN, and I said, basically, look. I like the guy, but he he's not learning. He doesn't make any effort to learn anything. And I think that carries on till this day because you can't look at things he says and say, that's really an in-depth response, so that's a nuanced response.
And so that's what I said on CNN, and that led to the, image that you you guys posted.
So that was the falling out?
That was the falling out. Yeah.
Or maybe
But it wasn't a complete fall.
Just to finish the sentence.
You want me to continue. So it's not a complete falling out because
Okay.
After that, he gets elected. I send him a congratulatory message, and I say congrats. You know? You know, if I can ever help, I'm happy to. And so when they were starting to look at replacing the ACA, I was starting to get into health care and and be excited about health care, and so they invited me to the White House, and I spoke to Jared.
I spoke to this woman named Brooke Rollins, I think her name is, and I spoke to a whole group of people. I went to CMS, and I spoke to the head of the agency. I spoke to the head of CMS, all talking about this thing I created called the 10 plan, which is a means tested ability to support anyway. And so they brought me back in. And then when the pandemic hit, I sent him some ideas on, you know, backstopping bank accounts and credit card accounts so everybody doesn't just default, and he had Mnuchin call me.
And then when they had with the pandemic, he connected me with with Peter Navarro, and I worked with him and actually found a company here in actually outside of Fort Worth that, I put together with them, and I helped that company increase their output. And Peter Navarro worked with them closely, and we, you know, really made a dent in all the PPE issues. And, you know, he invited me to the White House, and then I went to the White House one time, went into the Oval Office, and there's pictures of me talking. And, again, I tried to explain the health care stuff. He just wasn't having any type of in-depth conversation.
He wanted to tell me about how much money he saved on, on from Boeing, you know, how many billions and this and that. And then it was a short conversation, and then I was leaving. He goes, look. Are you still on that show? And he goes I'm like, yeah.
Shark Tank? He goes, yeah. That's Barron's favorite show. And then as I'm leaving further, he goes, wait a minute. I really like that suit.
So, you know, and and, you know, he's called me since, not since he left the White House, but, you know, in the you know, later in his tenure at the White House and invited me to dinner. I mean and so it's not like we left as foes, and it's not like I don't like him. I just don't think he's the best person to be president. I don't
think he was a good one.
Let's just stress test that. What How would you think about the 4 years that he was president? In hindsight, what what would you say was done well? What would you say was done poorly? Just those two things.
§03Trump's performance as President: what he got right and wrong
I think the way he dealt with the zeitgeist isn't the right word. Just the vibe of the country was really, really, really bad. I think the hate that he conveyed, I think the fact that what he tweeted negatively, you know, so companies didn't know what was coming next. You know, he tweeted negatively about me. He tweeted negatively about other people.
I thought that was a real bad thing. When the BLM, protests happened and turned into riots, when they went into Minnesota, he was like, when the looting when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Who the says that as a president? And so we had more people die during riots during his term than than Biden by a long shot, and I think he misrepresented where he stood in terms of being antiwar. If you go back to 2019, and look at the war in Yemen, there were a 100 at least a 100000 people plus died, and there was a bipartisan resolution to say, we're not selling any more to the Saudis.
We're not selling any more weapons to the Saudis, and a bipartisan resolution, including Mark Meadows and Rand Paul and others, said, you know, passed it. And it went to his desk, and he said, we're still going to sell these, munitions and these, these weapons to Saudi Arabia even though these people continue to die. So when we talk about it's, you know, it's not all that much different than Ukraine in in some respects, only Saudi Arabia got the Glengarry leads, and Ukraine got our old stuff, and we replaced it. And so if when he talk comes out now and says, look. You know, I'm against all wars.
There were no wars. That bull Right? The mainstream media
Well, okay. So there's 2 things there. So
Uh-huh.
Just just on the 2020 riots, I don't know how you blame Trump for the BLM riots of summer 2020.
Blame him
for the riots. What I said was how he dealt with it.
Okay. I I get you don't like the mean tweets. I get I totally get
the No. Don't diminish it, David. Don't diminish it as just mean tweets. People pay attention to what happens. And when you are have people whose lives are
I think I think it's far worse to actually have riots going on in the streets. That's what needed to be controlled.
How many people He
wanted to hold on. He wanted to send in the National Guard to Minnesota. It was actually Waltz who rejected the National Guard.
He had no problem
And there were plenty of ties between oh, and there were plenty of ties between democratic activists and the BLM organizers of those riots. Time Magazine did a story on that.
I'm not saying he's at fault that the riots happened.
I understand, but I can't believe that you're using the the riots throughout the summer of 2020 as an argument against Trump when it was the left No. I think what he's saying
is the leadership that he shows is of low moral character.
Did he do anything right, Mark?
Well, I'm not done with the wrong stuff. Okay. But wait. There's more. Right?
Okay.
Well, let's just but let let let's go back to the the the foreign policy for a second. Uh-huh. Trump is correct that he did not start any new wars during his presidency. You agree with that. Right?
That no new war started, or he didn't start any,
He didn't start any. He was, like, the first president in 20 years not to start a new war.
Well, he inherited some for sure. And
He inherited Syria and Afghanistan, and he wanted to get out, and the generals didn't let him.
And there wasn't really a war that happened in Turkey. And then when we got shut down, he didn't no. There wasn't really a war. I'll I'll agree with that. He did start
a war. Is that And
and but that's start
any new wars.
Has Biden started Eddie?
Well, I would argue that Biden provoked the proxy war in Ukraine. Yes. I mean, you can disagree whether he provoked or not, but there's no question the US has been deeply involved in a war with Russia in Ukraine.
And I'm saying what I'm saying is the corollary that the analogy to that is what happened in Yemen, and that we had a chance to get out of Yemen and reduce the deaths in Yemen, much like they're talking about getting us out of the u out of Ukraine now. And we had the opportunity to stop selling, weapons, but he looked best I could tell, he looked at it as a sales opportunity to sell to MBS all these weapons, and he thought that was a positive. So a lot of people died, and we're still in there today. So it's not he had a chance to get us out, and he did not. So I'm not arguing that he's perfect and Biden's perfect and it's tit for tat.
It just is what it is. I'm just saying may state making this statement of fact. You know, and that's it.
Yeah. Okay. Well, look. We did we did support we did support the Saudis in their war with with with Yemen.
So wait. Let me give you the one last thing, and then we'll Yeah.
Keep going.
So then I'll go to some positives. So the the next thing, you can actually trace that Yemen war. I I can't say you actually. I'm I'm a little bit of hyperbole, but I can trace that from that Yemen war to the start of inflation. Mhmm.
And here's how I explain that. And so in Yemen, he did a deal with for his boy in Saudi Arabia and sent them all the weapons in 2019. Fast forward 1 year, and you're in May, no, April, let's say, of 2020. And you're looking at the price of gas, the lowest it's ever been. The price of oil just collapsing at one point.
People were paying you to take their oil. And so there was an opportunity. He made a decision because there was a situation that came up. The oil companies came in and said, this price of oil being so low is killing us. Right?
We're losing a lot of money. We anticipate losing more because with the pandemic now starting, demand is dropping like a rock. And so he and that was coming from the oil companies. And so what he did, he said, okay. MBS owes me a favor over in Saudi Arabia.
That's the connection. And Putin's my boy. I'm gonna go to them and ask them to reduce production. Now what happens to the price of gas when the largest producers of, largest producers of oil and energy decrease their production? The price starts going up and up and up, and so you can track the increase in the price of gas and how that impacted the price of goods the entire time that the production from the 10% reduction until they they increase it, like, 300,000 barrels a day for 2 years.
What is your argument here? You're saying that somehow Trump caused the inflation?
Yes. And I'm I'm explaining it to you. Again, the mainstream media 3rd,
also, by the way, the the war in Yemen started on March 26 2015, according to chat GPT, which is under Obama. No. I get it. I'm not saying under Obama.
That's fine. But he had a chance he was asked to end it by Congress. He was at he we were sending he was selling $660,000,000,000 I I don't know the number. I I can't remember exactly. In weapons to Saudi Arabia, and he there was a record
the fact that we had 9% inflation in 2022, so 2 years after Trump's office
glad you asked
that, sir.
In the world is Trump responsible for that and not Biden Harris?
So glad you asked that because the mainstream media never talks about this stuff. And so she had a little dig there. So Trump goes in and says, we're gonna cut the production by 10%. Demand is still relatively low, but, you know, in April, May, June, as people start venturing outside their house until the end of 2020, the end of his term, the there's an increase in demand. But the increase in demand the increase in production doesn't match the increase in demand.
They limited as part of this deal that Trump put together between, Russia and, Saudi Arabia, and, that led to other people in OPEC Plus, participating, they only increased the the production of oil by 300,000 barrels a day, which didn't keep up with the amount of demand that was happening. That started increasing the price of gas. That price of gas continued to increase for the 2 years this program was in place. This program wasn't like, let's just cut it for 60 days and go back at it. It wasn't, let's just do this for 90 days.
Let's just do this during the Trump administration. No. No. No. No.
No. This deal went before they got it took 2 years before they got back to pre pandemic levels of production. And so listen to what Trump says about drill, baby, drill. Why does he say drill, baby, drill will lead to lower costs? Because oil and energy costs are part of everything.
And you know what matches up perfectly? What matches up perfectly is that 9.1% in 2022 and the day that that agreement ended where MBS and Russia limited production, that agreement ended like this. If you did your little Venn diagram, it like and increase production, decrease production. Bam.
And so
that is the answer to your question.
So just to summarize what you the argument that you don't like about him is you got to know him like many people do. You worked with him on projects. And like Pence, Barr, Matthias, Tillerson, Bill Barr, and Mike Cohen, and the moosh, Omarosa, you realized this person is out for themselves. They don't care about the people they work with, and you fell out of friendship with him or whatever.
What even is it? There's a long
list of people who don't who worked with him, who think he's an idiot and don't like him now. You're on that list.
Yeah. I mean, I don't think he's an idiot.
Saying that's my position. I'm just summarizing it.
Look. I
don't think he's an idiot. Your position.
No. He's worked with He's one of
the greatest salespeople ever. He's one of the greatest, you know, motivators in terms of crowd motivation ever.
But Can I I just want to
be Gary? Junior. He's Roy Cohn junior. That is who he is. If you read books about Roy Cohn, everything Roy Cohn says to do, tracing back to the McCarthy hearings in 54, everything Roy Cohn says to do, that is exactly what Donald Trump does.
Let me I just wanna I just wanna paint this thing, and then I'd I'd like to hear the glass half full version to the extent you have one. But, basically, I just I just wanna understand. So my understanding was in 2020, what happened was not that Saudi Arabia and Russia were cooperating to cut prices, but they got into a fight because it wasn't really it wasn't really Saudi, but it was OPEC, which includes OPEC plus. And Yeah. OPEC plus.
Which in versus Russia, and we initiated against them, which they counteracted a price war.
They they they initiated against so Saudi Arabia initiated against Russia.
But what but what I'm so what I'm trying to understand is there's a war in Yemen.
Right.
We don't stop the armaments of Saudi. And I guess what you're saying is that then triggered
an OPEC No. No. What I'm saying is
MBS owe Trump 1. MBS owe Trump 1. So MBS starts a price war with Russia 1 year later, and the oil companies come to Donald and say, look. We're getting destroyed. Demand is dropping.
They've increased because of this price war between, Saudi Arabia and Russia. Saudi Arabia decides to take it to Putin and increases their production significantly. So in order to keep their revenues up, Russia's got to do the same thing. Meanwhile, all the all the demand is dropping because of the pandemic, And so Donald gets asked by the insurance comp the, oil companies to go to MBS and to Putin and say, we need to stop this price war. We need to reduce production.
And to his credit, if that if you think that's a positive, to Trump's credit, he did it. And so by reducing production over a plan of 2 years and you can go look at the production numbers. Right? And when that stopped, by doing that, that increased the price of gas, the price of oil, the price of energy, and that was bad for American consumers who utilized who, you know, paid paid for gas for their cars, really bad form, but he decided to work with his oil company buddies and protect them. You can say that's a good decision or bad decision.
Maybe it's strategic. We really he really felt they could go out of business, and he wasn't willing to give them money to help them. But the bottom line was that that matches up exactly to that 9.1% that David Sacks mentions. It also mentions up matches up to, okay. Does he fully support the oil companies over the price of gas, and will that influence what he will do as president again?
So when he says, I'll just get out of Ukraine, depends on who's making the money and where it is. When he says, I'm gonna get people to drill, baby, drill Okay. Well, we already learned a lesson. Wait.
Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Sorry.
Okay. So, like, this is very hard to hold on a second. This is very hard to fact check-in real time because I've never heard this theory before.
Oh,
wait. Well, no. No. We can't. I haven't.
We can have a theory on the pod. I just have a free bird get involved. Free bird hasn't asked a question yet, so let me try to The
point the point is that Yeah. You know, this is, like, totally novel. I don't even think I've heard you make this theory on x before. I
was waiting.
Okay. So here we go. So you're dropping
a whole
whole ass of your hasn't been able to get involved. Let's have Freeberg
ask you a question. Basically cite this nonsense, and then I'll get to interrogate it a little bit.
Nonsense, David. You oh, wait. So No. No. But I
just wanted to include Freeberg in this discussion before he gets any
sense and any response. Question. Let me ask you a question.
Go chat GPT it. Go Google it. Go look it up however you want.
Okay. What about the fact that Biden's first day in office, he cancels the Keystone pipeline and a bunch of leases. He makes it harder to drill in the United States, so he reduces the ability for domestic producers to produce. You don't think that that would have an impact?
Yeah. But it wasn't on the price it wasn't on the price of gas because this the price of gas is a global phenomenon. Right? The price of oil, rather, is a global phenomenon. It's we we are the largest producer of energy in the world, but we're still only about 13%, I think it is.
Don't quote me on that, but that's that's a range. And so the other 87% has more of an impact. And even to that, there was still an unlimited amount of drilling available on public lands and leases available that weren't fully used. Now that said, I think Biden did mistakes, did make mistakes.
We stopped shipping. Okay. Guys, hold on. Look. Let's let's just finish one thing before the other.
I would just like an answer of what is the good and the bad of Donald Trump? And then what I was gonna ask you is what was the good and the bad of Biden? I just want those
Sure.
4 I
appreciate it.
Guys, just just just give me one sec can I just ask make one comment? I've been here for, like, 40 minutes.
Yeah. Try to gauge it.
I I wanna respond to the inflation point, Mark. I, you know, I just shared 2 images. 1st was the US crude oil production chart, and more than half of this oil is exported. So you can see the the the reduction in production, but the the domestic oil production capacity remained high relative to our consumption. So US consumption, if oil was the biggest driver, it really would have affected the profits of the exporting companies, not necessarily the cost of energy domestically.
I will, however, point out that the federal balance sheet the Federal Reserve's balance sheet swelled during COVID from $4,000,000,000,000 to $8,000,000,000,000.
Pull up charge. Know,
there was significant fiscal stimulus, meaning the fed the federal government
bought a contract charge. David, I didn't say it was the only cause. I didn't think it was the
exclusive cause. Well, I
I would argue that flooding the world with dollars, which is what the Federal Reserve did because they bought up all the bonds as the federal government started to issue money in lots of different ways, caused the supply of dollars to go up, which causes the cost of anything that's dollar denominated to grow up. And I think many economists would argue and make the case that the fiscal policy and the monetary policy of the federal government and the Federal Reserve is largely to account, and I'm not gonna use the word blame, but to account for the inflation we saw in the cost of everything from energy to production to labor
Yes.
To assets. And so But they're
not mutually exclusive. They're not mutually exclusive. They're not.
But there was also significant, as we can all acknowledge, massive in a dynamical system. Global supply chains are a dynamical system. Stuff is made in one place, moved to another place. When one thing breaks or it slows down Yep. It all breaks.
And we had a massive shortfall Agree.
To the ability
to move goods around the world. And that was the biggest driver of the inflationary effect that we saw on the
top of the numbers. Percent. But even if you go back to those the first two charts you put up, it matches up with exactly what I said. Production went down, demand went up, and the net result was that price of gas went up, and price of gas is in everything. Is it the only cost
No. Production went down in everything, not just energy, but everything, and not because of energy, but because of a lot of other reasons. And then Exactly.
And then
and then we had a whiplash problem where we had over demand relative to the natural and none of the production systems could keep up with demand. I agree.
I agree. I agree. Stimulus.
I agree a 100% with you. All I'm saying, you can try to trace it back to maybe it's 1% of the price. Maybe it's 3% of the price. Maybe whatever the percentage is. I'm not saying it's exclusive, but you can trace it back to the decision being made to support the energy companies and say, we are going to reduce production rather than just letting the market play out and saying, we'll let gas prices stay as low as they are based off of supply and demand.
Now are do I agree with you that supply chain disruption, transitory? Yes. Of course.
And and fiscal and monetary policy.
Yeah. For
sure. World economy by pouring a ton of money out that's never happened in history. Right?
For sure. A 100%. The question is that before Do you
think Larry Summers was wrong when in q one, the Q1 of the Biden Harris administration, Larry Summers warned that if you pass another 2,000,000,000,000 of COVID stimulus, like they were planning to do, that could set off inflation, that we were on the brink. He said that.
He did make that declaration against against his own party, Mark, and he said, this is the wrong thing. As a Democrat, he said, this is the wrong thing to do. And they went forward with what they plan to do for various reasons. Some would argue political. Some would argue that they thought it was the right thing to do.
And the effect was precisely as Larry had predicted.
Yeah. And look.
Kamala Harris cast the tie breaking vote for that inflation explosion act, otherwise
known as the American rescue Inflation. Otherwise known
as the
American rescue plan.
So Here's the actually I I I agree with I I agree with Friedberg a hundred
the cause of this massive 20% inflation we've had over Biden's 4 years But
that's but that's
the secret deal between Trump and MBS and, like, Putin's in there somewhere?
You can dismiss it all you want, David. Just
look at the data and
look at the numbers, and they match up. Now to Freiberg's point to Freiberg's point, is it the only thing that caused inflation? Of course not. When you spend too much money, when you inflate the economy, when you have supply chain disruption, all of those things contribute. But we're also not having the conversation to say, okay.
How much of the supply chain disruption contributed to inflation? Was it 3% of that 20%? Was it 5%? Was it 7%? Was it 1%?
We don't know. It's impossible to
fund supply. The supply hold on. The the supply chain was constrained during COVID, and it was healing. It was getting better, and then they pumped all the stimulus, and everyone got these
stimulations. Level 7 pieces. Let me just let out let out level 7 pieces
of your opinion. Let's leave the opinion. I'm just really curious. I just want the high level report card on the last 2 presidents. What is the high level report card, Mark?
To put a
cap on this, just for the audience, here is our national debt over the two presidencies, the two terms. And as you can see, with the taking out the bump for COVID, it's pretty much they're both wild spenders. I think we can all agree. They both are spending too much money, and we need to have more fiscal discipline. We all agree on that.
Yep. Now to Chamath's point, Steelman, anything you like about the Trump presidency? And then we'll go to Kamil.
I mean, I think, yeah, there was good elements of the tax cut. I think he went too far, but I think they needed to come down from 35%. Yeah. What whatever the corporate rate, 35%, I think, was corporate. That was too expensive.
It made us difficult for us to compete globally. I thought 20, and I thought bringing down cap gains, again, I forget exactly what they were, maybe 29%, I forget, was also smart, but I think he went too far. But you can argue that. There's no right answer on what that is going to be. It's a guess.
Right? You just put it out there, and you hope what you what you plan and what you propose and what is implemented works, and you don't know until it does. So I didn't I didn't have a problem with him trying that.
Yeah. 35 to 21. You got it exactly right.
Yeah. You've acknowledged that Kamala's unrealized gains tax is a disaster.
Well, I'll acknowledge that it's not real, and you're making it up, that you've never heard her say that.
I made it up?
Yeah. You made her up her say that.
In the Biden the last Biden Harris budget. It was in the Harris platform at the DNC. It was the that was
the Biden platform at the DNC. Well, the president made it up.
Talk about it. They did a search of place on his name and put her name in there.
But you're you're you're reaching, David. You're reaching. Right? You've never heard her talk about it at all. Searching.
She's been very specific that cap gains goes to 28%, that tech, that
So, Mark, what is what has Biden what has Biden done well, and what has he not done well? And then the follow-up question is, if it were an open democratic primary, would you have voted for Kamala Harris?
§04Party nominations: Kamala vs. Trump
I don't know. But then again, if Donald Trump participated in the debates on the republican primary and the republican primary, would you have voted for Donald Trump? You know, there's
a whole way of You're you're saying you're saying it's analogous. The Republicans had an open primary.
No. But they did. The scientists competed. They did. They did.
Competed.
Nikki Haley competed. They did open primary. Trump was 50 hold on a second. Trump Trump was 50 points ahead. Maybe he should have debated.
I don't know. Maybe? But no. I mean, look. I would've been in favor of him debating, but he was 50 points ahead, and everybody had a chance to run.
Yeah. But they didn't really have a chance because they wouldn't debate.
Pretended hold on. Let me finish, and you can get your response.
Okay.
The democrats pretended that Joe Biden was just fine, that he was sharp as attack, that he was the best version of Joe Biden. And when the primary came and you had, outsiders like Bobby Kennedy, try to compete. Not only did he not only did Biden not debate, they basically used lawfare to keep Bobby Kennedy off the ballot. They did not allow him a fair shot at the nomination, which is why he had to leave the party and run as an independent. Then we find out after the debate that actually Biden is not fine.
He's actually appears to be in significant cognitive decline. So somehow Nancy Pelosi gets him out of there, and then Kamala Harris is anointed. She's never won a primary vote ever. She in 2020, she ran and dropped out before the first primary. And then this time around, she never had to compete in the primary.
And somehow she's in the next the candidate. The question is, I don't think well, the question is how can you liken this to what the republicans did, having an open and competitive primary?
So first of all, the republicans did not have an open and competitive, keyword competitive, primary because if one of the candidates refuses to participate because they have a lead, look what happened to Joe Biden. For all we know, Vivek Vivek would've destroyed Trump as much as Trump destroyed Joe Biden. Nikki Haley would've destroyed Trump as much as Joe, Donald Trump destroyed Joe Biden. I don't I think that's
I was supporting DeSantis at that time, and it was definitely And I
think DeSantis would've crushed him too. Right? They they all they all were just defeat
their names were on the ballot. You're talking about a very Zack,
would you do you think DeSantis, Nikki Haley, or Vivek would have beaten Trump in a in a debate?
No. I think when if you look at that
them. Okay.
Well, hold hold on. I'm saying it's unclear. I don't think you can just say that they would have won. I mean, Trump
you. So that means it's not a truly competitive
Listen. When Trump when Trump was in a crowded Republican field and debated, he crushed everybody. So I just don't know what would have happened.
That was 26 of 20.
You're right. That was 26 of 16. Debate. This is just debate. Okay?
What about the point that the Democrats kept other contenders off the ballot that used lawfare, and moreover, they lied about Biden's cognitive condition, and then they anointed Kamala Harris through a process that is opaque, and we still don't know what happened.
Okay. So here's my answer. Right? 1st, going back to republic. It wasn't a competitive primary if the contender doesn't participate.
And, yes, he did well against 15 other candidates in 2016, but I'd be willing to bet that he's also had cognitive decline. Everything he says and does is reflective of that. If Joe Biden had said the same thing, we would be having a a lot of we would We don't judge Donald Trump and his cognitive ability the way we did Joe Biden. Okay. So we'll put that behind.
Now let's go to Joe Biden.
Can you see democrats lied about Biden's condition? Let's just put
that back. My personal experiences with Joe Biden. Right? I didn't talk to him a lot twice during that period, and I can tell you from the first time I saw him a year before the last time I saw him, which was, you know, probably in March or April, I forget, there was a decline. But the decline was in his sharpness, right, his quickness of response.
If you sat down and you listened to him speak about something, which I did, he wasn't forceful. He wasn't you know, he looked like a walking corpse. He looked awful. Right? But in terms of content, it was there.
And so I understand why they positioned him the way they did. It's just to sell it was impossible. So that's part 1. So I don't think the decline is nearly what you're saying it is, but I do agree
that get rid of him? Why are they
Well, okay. So that's now we're moving forward. Right? His ability to respond in real time, you slow down. We all slow down.
Right? I'm 66 years old, and I've slowed down versus where I was at 45. You so you know at 81 and at 78, you are going to be slower. Joe Biden in just was not as quick. That was a real problem.
He got destroyed in the debate by Trump because of that. Not because he didn't know the the materials and the content, but he just couldn't respond and think fast enough. So I think that's where the the misunderstanding is. It's not that he had cognitive decline in the purest sense. It's that his ability to respond quickly was gone, and he looked like he had cognitive decline.
So now let's go forward to the Democratic National, Convention where, and right before that where they replaced it. I was curious about the just the, mechanics of the whole thing. So being the curious person I am, I went and pulled up the bylaws and the rules of the Democratic Party and the Democratic National Convention, and they reset those every 4 years prior to them pulling out. And it's very, very clear that the only mission and the only task and it's pretty much the same in the Republicans. I looked at theirs too.
The only mission is to win. You wanna win the presidency. You wanna have control of congress. That's all they care about, and they give themselves every bit of flexibility to do whatever they damn well please to put themselves in that position. They are
a private organization. Are they the party are they the party then of democracy as they claim to be, or are they the party of winning it
all off? So now you're trying to, you know, play branding games. Right? It started No.
I'm really saying that their rhetoric is that opposite. What they actually did. Hold hold on just a second. There were 14,000,000 primary voters in the democratic primary.
That's the mainstream media discussion of this. Right? They said there's 14,000,000 voters. I say Trump didn't debate at all. There was 0 debates with Donald Trump.
Which one was the
primary, though? People got to vote for their candidate.
It's not an open primary because it's Donald Trump's family business. He controlled what happened. And the What? Yeah. Look.
Listen.
I mean, I was, again, I was supporting someone different during the primary, and the reason why DeSantis lost is he didn't get enough votes. Okay? The Republican primary voters
Missed a number too.
Donald Trump.
That's why
I bet you won the primary fair and square. Whether he debated or not, he was up 50 points on everybody else.
And I bet and I don't know
what was his chance. What happened with Biden. What happened with Biden is Biden
Biden is just Let me finish, David. Let me finish.
Biden won the democratic primary. He got 14,000,000 votes, and then they threw out that threw out that result and put in Kamala Harris because they didn't like his defense. Fraternity. What's that?
Were you ever in a fraternity? Were you ever in a fraternity? No. Okay. In a fraternity, they get to vote on all kinds of But at the end of the day, if the chapter the the national organization says no, right, doesn't matter who won the election.
Right.
So you're saying the Democrat party is a click. I get it. This is not regarding the caucuses. Let me get
let me regain control here just to just to re just to recap.
David, you're just talking branding. You can brand it however you want. No.
The Democrats said they were the party of the party to see. The Democrats
said I'm
not a Democrat. I don't care what they do. I don't care what they do.
But you're supporting them. You're supporting us. So I'm supporting congresses. Can you acknowledge hold on. Can you just acknowledge that their rhetoric is hypocritical?
I don't care what the rhetoric is. I don't pay attention. I don't pay attention to their rhetoric.
We're not gonna get progress. I really wanna hear what Mark thinks. Yes.
Okay.
Here we go.
Move forward. Move forward.
2 okay.
2 things seem to, be true at the same time if I'm recapping your position here. Mark, 1, you would have liked to seen Trump debate. 2, I think you would have loved to seen a speed run primary, perhaps. Maybe Kamala, you know, battled it out.
I honestly didn't care. I want once Donald Trump was the candidate, I wanted the best person to beat Donald Trump. That's what I cared about.
Let me go back to my question. So I'm just gonna give you a succinct summary of Mark Cuban's position, his evaluation of the Trump presidency. The positives were tax cuts
And warp speed and operation warp speed.
Speed. The negatives were continuing the war in Yemen when they had a chance to, and then this,
And actually the negative wasn't so much that. Sorry, Chamath. Okay. South Africa. The negative wasn't so much he continued it.
§05Biden's performance as President: what he got right and wrong
The negative is the hypocrisy in his approach.
Okay. Right. In the style. Okay. Now In
the tone and style of how he governed.
Can we do Biden? What are the things that Biden and Harris did well that have helped the country, and what are the things that they could have done better, did not do well?
So I'll start with the negatives first. So just so you know that there's a lot of them. 1, the way they handled the border was horrific. There's no way to, you know, to say it any differently. Now I understand why they took the approach they did.
Literally, if if I were in a central, a Central American company country and my family was at risk of getting shotgunned because there's a drug war, I'm doing everything I can, and I reckon I recognize, you know, that if I just set foot on American soil, I have a chance for asylum, and I get that. And I get why Biden and his administration might say, just for humanitarian reasons, we're gonna increase the number of people that we allow to do that. I understand why he would do it. But at the same time, he opened the door too wide, and he made it so that there were too many people that came through, and that created cascading problems. Now to his credit, down back in June, I think it was, he he signed an executive order, which he now has made permanent or as permanent as you can as president, that changed, that there's no longer the option to just set foot on American soil and be eligible for, a hearing for asylum.
You can't do that any longer. And to her credit, she worked with the, head of, the Mexican government, and they have taken steps to reduce the flow of people to the border. And so now the number of encounters at the border is about the same as what it was right before the pandemic under the Trump administration. So while he was too long to do it, while he, handled it incorrectly overall and the messaging was horrible, I think they got to the right place. But now we have a problem, right, that he created where we have too many, noncitizens, illegal aliens, however you wanna call them, however you wanna brand them, and we have to understand how to deal with them.
I think that they have talked about Kamala has talked about first and even JD Vance said this. 1st, we're gonna get rid of the criminals, which makes sense. But Donald Trump says, we're just gonna deport everybody. Any illegal, we're just going to deport them. Now Obama was the deporter in chief.
He deported more people than Trump or Biden, over 3,000,000 people, but he had a specific process in place that everybody could understand. And I think with Trump, remember, that or Orion Gonzales kid, the 6 year old kid in Miami?
Elian Gonzales.
Gonzales. Right? Where you all of a sudden, you had these these cops with, you know, riot gear on and machine you know, and r AR fifteens or whatever they used, pointing them at a 6 year old kid cowering in a closet. If Donald Trump does that, and that's not contrary to how he approaches things, we could have another series of riots and protests that go really, really bad. And so while I think Biden handled things completely wrong at the beginning, I think with Harris now and she's saying she'll support the, the immigration bill that was bipartisan, etcetera, etcetera.
You guys know that. I think she has a more common sense approach to dealing with deportations and getting people through the asylum system, and the asylum that bill, I think, said that it would reduce the amount of time to adjudicate asylum to 90 days, which means that there's a chance to get control of this before it turns into a riot.
Okay. So that that was border was bad. Anything else bad, or should we shift to the good?
I
think the spending was bad. I think, that we overspent, and I think we went through a period where, and I'm not trying to make excuses for him. I just think, you know, you guys mentioned this before. He did overspend, and I think the infrastructure bill was good. I think the broadband bill was good, and everybody says we spent $42,000,000,000 on broadband and got nothing.
We should have gone to Starling. But the reality is the money went to the states, and they could buy, Starling from Elon all they want. So that's just kind of the mainstream media poo pooing something they shouldn't poo poo. But the EV stuff, the EV chargers, that's a cluster. Of, you know, and there's no way around that.
And so I think that was bad.
So pork barrel spending, basically, unaccountable spending.
Yeah. No. I think, you know, what they did in health care, you know, you can take Lena Khan and say what she's doing for the mergers. You know, Albertsons and Krogers, I think, is too much. I think, you know, and I even told her this.
I sat on a panel sitting right next to her, and I said the most important thing from a technological perspective in this country today is that we win AI. That is going to find everything militarily for us and economically for us and that when you try to break up companies like Google and Facebook, you diminish our ability to compete globally with AI. And she told me, now that she didn't didn't impact her at all, that she understands that, and she's heard that before. I think their approach to that is wrong. I think that what she's done with the FTC against pharmacy benefit managers has been good.
Right? Pharmacy benefit managers are ripping off more companies and costing and increasing the cost of medications more than anything else that's happening in health care. And she's called them on the carpet with a recent report and just sued them. I think that's good. I think in terms of other negatives, like Kamala Harris now, I think, the filibuster, I think that's a mistake to try to get rid of the filibuster because then somebody else gets rid of it for something else, and it's just cascading problems.
On spending, we talked about I think he spent too much work.
And what have they done well?
I think he changed the tone of the country. I think that was really, really important. No one woke up. You know? And David calls it mean tweets, but not waking up concerned about mean tweets is important.
Not waking up concerned about there being some random, tariff on your company that you didn't expect, not waking up being accused of of doing something, I think those were all huge positives. I think, supporting workers. I think, you know, just having just a sensibility of, okay. We're we're not in the middle of everything. There there just wasn't this uncertainty, like, every single day that every business woke up with with Trump.
Just removing that was the biggest positive of all.
§06Should Kamala share blame for Biden's failures?
So let's look forward now to Kamala Harris' candidacy for president. Of the things so we know the Donald Trump track record because he gets the credit for the things he got right, and he has to take ownership of the things.
But but how it's been defined, I'll use the Yemen example again. I'll use the price example on oil again. The you know, we have Trumpniesha. Right? We presume that what he did in terms of the economy and everything and no wars, you know, no everything was just rosy under Donald Trump.
And I think that's another thing that's
I'll be honest. I've never heard this specific theory. I'll take the time to look and figure it out for myself, and I'll let you but what I'm curious about is that track record is there. Now how much of the and do you think it's important for us to give credit for the good things to Kamala and responsibility for the bad things to Kamala in that so that you have an equivalent a b comparison? Do you think about it that way or no?
No. I don't. And I'll tell you why. Okay. I'm assuming all you guys have had a boss at one point or another.
Yes?
Yeah.
Yeah. And do you all agree with everything that that boss did all the time? No? No. No.
But you had to do what the boss told you to do. Yeah. And that's Kamala's job.
But I like I like to take credit for when the boss tells me I'm owning something, and then I do it.
Well but at the same time, you you get credit for doing it, but it doesn't matter. You know, if it turns out to be wrong, it's still the boss that's on the hook for it.
What about the border, Mark? Because you made a comment about the border, and she was declared the borders are.
Yeah. Again, that that's Brandy. I mean, we play Brandy games with politics all the time. If you look at what her specific responsibility was, I alluded to it earlier, her job was to go to Central America and talk to the heads of the countries there and try to reduce the reasons why people were leaving their countries to go to the United States.
Why do you think they, opened the border so much? I'm wondering, Mark. There is a conspiracy theory or theory. You can you can pick how you wanna frame it, that this is to increase the number of Democratic voters. At the same time, we hear that a lot of the folks coming in who are the working class, that the Republican party is now the populist party, so those votes would go to the Republicans.
So, you know, I've heard this argument from both sides. What is the key thing?
There's another theory, an economic theory, Mark, which is that it increases the base of workers when we're at our lowest unemployment rate in history and inflation is raging. So by bringing in low cost workers at that you're that you're able to get to work at a lower wage rate, you actually have a deflationary effect and a stimulatory effect because it may end up being
suspended as well. The logic there. I don't think there I think maybe they might have thought of that earlier, and that's why they let too many people in. But I think they realize now that they screwed up.
And that that shouldn't be an executive authority. Right? I mean, that should be like a legislative congressional authority that makes that decision and that determination on whether to change immigration policy. Do you think that the executive branch should be able to unilaterally determine who comes into the country without following laws?
No. I prefer that the congress does it. Unfortunately, that's just not what worked. Look at the SEC with Gary Gensler. The guy's a moron, and but, you know, they Here we go.
But I think we can be told
that that, actually. Yeah. So that's an area we can we can agree on. But before we get to that, so so your claim on board
We finally found ground truth.
Here we go.
No. We we can agree on we can agree on that. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. But but before before we do that, I just wanna finish up on border here.
So your claim is that Kamala Harris really wanted to seal the border, but she was prevented
No. That's not what I said. No. By Joe Biden. Didn't say that.
David, you're really good at trying to position things so you have, you know, you have talking points to go out with.
No. I'm just you said that You Burton said that case of a VP who was thwarted by her boss or
being on board. Not what I said. That is not what Okay.
So you admit that she's on board.
Virtue signaling, David.
You are the chief of
the chief of the chief of the chief of the chief of the chief of the chief of the chief of
the chief of the chief of the chief of the chief of the chief of the chief of the chief.
I don't know. She's doing what she was fucking told to do. Which
one is it?
There's no. You're creating false choices, David. You're creating
false choices.
So, David, if you do the job your boss told you to do, does that do you make a declaration before you do it if I agree or disagree? And
how do you know she disagreed with Joe Biden about these policies?
I see what she's doing now. Well, because
she changed
the policy. Right? She has a different policy.
Election year conversion. She realizes what a disaster it's been.
So so when Trump does it, it's brilliant
when she's proof. Okay? Her own words. Okay?
So she flipped her position.
She called Trump's border wall un American and medieval and mocked it, and this is before she became Biden's vice president.
The same time.
Hold on. When when she was in the senate and Trump was trying to build the wall, remember, democrats tried to thwart that. They subjected him to years of litigation to prevent him from building that wall, and she, multiple times, was on record saying the wall was un American, medieval, mocked, and so forth. She also compared ice to the KKK. She said that images of border patrol agents evoked slavery.
K. This is her rhetoric. I don't think Joe Biden made her say that. She suggested that we abolish ICE and start from scratch. K?
And now she wants to talk about how tough she is on the border.
Maybe she talked maybe she talked to JD Vance back then and was taking his positions. People changed their mind for whatever reason. People learned. Your positioning as
Okay. So for so hold on. So so throughout her all time in the senate, she was arguing against a border wall, okay, in the strongest possible language. She then becomes border czar or you could call it point person for the Biden administration. And for 3 years, they gaslit us that the border was not a problem, that it was not an open festering wound, like the videos were constantly coming out.
I remember on this show, we talked about it, and I was told when I raised the issue of the border that was a conspiracy theory, that Fox News was just cherry picking videos. Remember that, Jason? In any event Yeah.
Well, people were actually it was interesting you bring that up because people were sharing people were sharing videos and playing them on Fox that were from, like, 10 years ago. So there was a lot of misinformation.
The Democrats, the whole
Democratic Party. David, all those caravans never made it to the border. How many caravans did we hear about?
Something like 10 over 10,000,000 migrants have entered the country during the Biden Harris administration. The first thing they did hold on.
1st thing Biden no.
When Biden when Biden no. We do know. No. No. We do know.
Those those 10,000,000 are just the border encounters. Those are the recorded crossings that they led into the country. The number we don't know is whether how many more were not recorded. Counters are not included. 20 or 30,000,000.
Well, you can look up
on a calendar. Why why did this happen? I'll tell you why. When Joe Biden took office, he repealed all of Trump's executive orders. No.
He did not. What is it? Section 42? What's the question? Of them.
Title title 42. Title 42.
The most important one
is until the end of 23.
And in addition, they got rid of Trump's Remain in Mexico policy, and they changed the meaning of asylum so that anyone who went to the border and said that they were suffering economic hardship, which is basically the whole world, okay, could now qualify for asylum. And they were giving they were given, like, a ticket to appear in court one day, like, 3 years, 5 years, and they were ushered into the country. And then there were, like, nonprofits working with my administration to put them on buses.
David, I agreed that they screwed up all over the country. I agreed they screwed up on the border. I I you're not I'm not arguing you wanna screw up. No. Fine.
They screwed up, but now we are back.
The cops defended it.
So yeah. But she she changed just like Donald She changed. Like JD Vance. JD Vance called him Hitler. JD Vance in 2020 and and after diminished Donald Trump.
That was that
was in private communications in 2016, and JD Vance explained, including last night, why he changed his mind about that.
Right. And that's fine. So he talked to people so so so does she representing the state of the people's
repressed position, like, 6 months ago, and now all of a sudden she's the nominee, so she's
gonna be fighting for the bus. No. You're you're trying you're virtue signaling like a mother. Right? You're trying to put you're trying to brand anything you tried to brand anything that you disagree with, that you think is a negative, and just put it on her, which is politics 101.
Right? But you're not looking at what she's actually doing. What she's actually doing person
for the administration. Okay. Look. When What I say,
does it matter if she was if if she was in charge, does and she said, you know what? What you want her to do is like JD Vance said about, abortion. Right? I talked to somebody and my you know, they proved it. Great.
That was a smart move by him. Would it be smart for her to say I was wrong? Now I I've learned more, and I've picked up more information.
Now I'm question for you, Sachs. If JD Vance can lobby and want a national abortion ban and then change his mind as the number 2 for Trump, can Kamala change her mind when she is is no longer running for, you know, in the number 2 seat as Biden? I mean,
he's I think JD explained why he changed his mind about that. He said that there was a referendum in Ohio, and his side lost. And he
So he can change his mind. Can Kamala and do you have the grace for Kamala to change her mind or not?
Hold on
a second. He's taking a learning from that. Kamala Harris has never explained why she changed her mind. It's not
that you changed her mind.
Hold on a second. When will the media even ask her this question? She doesn't submit for interviews, and certainly the the debate moderators, like on ABC, never asked her a question. Mark, if she's gonna change her mind or she's gonna have this election year conversion, why does the media ask her? What is the basis of this?
When did you change your mind? Was it 5 minutes ago? Why then did you, support Biden throughout your entire last three and a half years? Why don't they ask her these questions? If you were part of the Biden administration, why do you volunteer to be the border czar if you disagree with Joe Biden about these policies?
When exactly did you change your mind? Those are the questions that she should be answering. Why won't
she Those are the questions that
you submit to an adversary or whatever?
Those are the questions that you want so that you think you can put her on the defensive and get and have I guess, what's the point of
information to know.
No. Look. You want to know, but let me just tell you what's important. Put yourself put yourself in the shoes. Let's just call this a business.
Right? And the business of this business is getting votes and winning this election. And you came in, and the the product that you originally had, New Coke, failed. Right? Buy this New Coke in this example.
And you come in, and you say, you know, I'm bringing it back. This is the new New Coke, and we're we're gonna test to see if that's working. Well, when you brought in Kamala Harris, she had no favorable ratings whatsoever. She was behind in all polling right where Joe Biden was. And now she's either even or ahead or a little bit behind in every single poll.
And why do I bring it up? Because it means what she's doing is working.
You don't have to be agree. I think we actually have found a point to agree on, which is I think Kamala Harris is just saying whatever it takes to
get elected. You can say the same thing about the campaign. Belief.
Hold on. She stated her true belief years ago and throughout the Biden administration, which is she never believed the border was a problem. She thought the border wall, Trump's wall was un American and medieval, and she thought that ICE needed to be abolished. I think that was her true belief. Now if it's not her true belief, I would like her to explain when she changed her belief and why the same way that JD Vance did.
And I think the American people are entitled to know that, and I think if the media was doing its job, they'd be asking her those questions. She they she's never been asked that. Stephanie Ruehl
Let's so.
Latest interview did not ask that, and the debate moderators did not ask that.
§07International conflict, national debt, crypto regulation
Let's just go outside of America for one second because, Mark, you're Jewish. You're of Jewish heritage. I would really like your opinion on what's happening outside of America. There is some crazy pictures over the last few weeks coming out from the Middle East. There's still all this complications complicating stuff with China.
Where do you stand on all of these things? Where do you stand on the Mearsheimer Sachs, Jeffrey Sachs kind of school of logic that there's a military industrial accomplice that tends to just push us towards these war zones and these forever wars? Where do you just stand on those issues, and how do you think about that?
I mean, honestly, I don't have enough information to give you a call qualified response. I'm I'm pro Israel to the core because I'm Jewish. I'm anti Hamas to the core. I think, you know, they're terrorists. They are terrorists.
I want to see Israel to succeed. I wanna see Israel succeed. I wanna see the United States support them and help them in that. But, you know, when Israel was going into Gaza, I thought it was too blunt an instrument, But when they went after Hezbollah, I thought they did it the exact right way. And so, you know, I'm I'm always only gonna respond
to opinion of this. Yeah.
And Ukraine?
Yeah. Ukraine, I I don't wanna see American blood spilled. And as long as there's a NATO, and I agree there should be a NATO, I'd rather see us spend money than put soldiers in harm's way. And so,
Does does the Harris campaign agree on that point,
or do they have a I
haven't I haven't had that conversation. I haven't had that conversation with them. I don't know. So Mark,
let let let me ask you just a point on arithmetic which I think is the most important arithmetic we should all be talking about. Today is the first, yesterday was the 1st day of the, federal
Fiscal year.
Fiscal year. Right? And, here's a little, image for us to all look at together as a group, an image that everyone should wake up every morning in the United States and look at. The first thing they do instead of looking at Twitter, they should look at the image that I'm sharing on the screen right now, which is federal debt in the United States.
Although, should be the screen of you taking a bath. This is just
On the first day on the first day of the new fiscal year, federal debt jumped by $204,000,000,000 in one day. Federal debt now stands at $35,700,000,000,000. And the biggest challenge we have in the year ahead is that 10,000,000,000,000 of the outstanding debt comes up for refinance. It's gonna refinance at around 4%. So we're gonna be adding another $300,000,000,000 in new interest expense next fiscal year, plus the Biden administration has proposed a $7,200,000,000,000 budget for next year, which will inevitably lead to another $2,000,000,000,000 of deficit spending, which means that by the end of 2025, we could be staring at $40,000,000,000,000 of federal debt.
And if you do the math on that at 4% interest, it's 1,600,000,000,000 a year of interest expense a year just on interest expense on the outstanding debt Yep. Which effectively begins to eclipse the entire federal budget very quickly and gives us no ability to maneuver to meet the needs of all the policy demands that are being described and shaped in all of these elections and all of these debates and all the bullshit that's going on is really not fundable. What does the Harris campaign say about the situation with respect to deficit spending and debt? And I don't know how high you can raise taxes and not cut spending to even make a dent in the challenge ahead without driving a massive recession. What is what do you think, like, the Harris versus the Trump campaign's kind of intentions are as we look at this abyss that we're now kind of
jumping off.
Speak for them. I can only tell you the conversations I've had and what they've said to me. Whether or not they take these directions is completely up to them, and I don't know. But I've said the exact same thing. They know that the, the deficit's a problem.
It won't be a budget buy a a Biden budget. There's no Biden administration to happen. They've already come you know, just the tax rates are completely different than the Biden budget proposals where there's no, you know, unrealized capital gains, etcetera. They went to 28 28%, so it's not gonna be what was proposed by Biden.
There's a limit on tax, basically. Right? Like, that that that people will Yeah. There's only there's
a point of diminishing returns and raising taxes. Men realize it. Right? So when we talked about unrealized capital gains, and I gave them a thousand reasons why not, they're like, we already know this, yada yada. Now to David's point, why don't they just come out and say it?
Because the 1% of high information voters don't know the difference of unrealized capital gains or not and don't care. The 99% wanna hear about the things that they're talking about, so that's why people like me can go out there and talk about it. But to your point and the bigger point, David, that they've realized that there's only a couple ways to reduce the deficit. One, you get inflation under control, and that reduces interest rates, and that's gonna work in our favor, and I think that's happening now. If it's $1,600,000,000,000, then, you know, if interest rates go below 4%, that saves a lot of money and probably the most you can save.
They realized efficiency is an important element. In her last speech in Pittsburgh, she talked about how long it took it only took 1 year to build the Empire State Building. That is crazy. There's too much friction in the government to be able to do building the right way. They're gonna reduce friction.
I've had conversations with them about AI as a service and being able to, optimize integrating artificial intelligence into all these processes so that they don't have to keep on hiring people. I don't think their mindset again, I'm speaking for myself and my perspective of my conversations with them. I don't think their mindset is to just go out there and just cut a ton of people, but I do think the mindset is, how can we implement technology to become more efficient so that we can provide more value to the citizens of this country at less cost? I think that's important to them. I think, you're gonna see a lot of I'm trying to think of the best way to say it.
She knows that technology is the ultimate driver of success, and if she supports new technologies, and you heard that again in Pittsburgh, she wants she mentioned blockchain, but more importantly, she mentioned AI and how AI is key to us being a dominant military, having our, our military be dominant and to have our economy grow. Because the other way to get results isn't just to slash and burden like Vivek wants to do, but to grow the economy, and that there truly are ways to grow the economy without just more spending.
But do you yeah. Do you support a e Elon Musk going in? Like, if you're saying shed regulatory burden, shed inefficiency, improve productivity, don't we need an Elon Musk style model that, you know, Trump has talked about with Elon? Send someone in, and let's go fix the inefficiency across all of the administrative efforts run by
the federal government.
1st of all, when you just cut when you do a Vivek Vivek type, just cut the Department of Education. Right? Whatever it is, we don't know what Elon would actually do.
Well, I think that triggers a recession because then you got a lot of people unemployed. Right?
Yeah. Well, exactly right. And there's contracts. And so that means the United States of America is violating all these contracts with small businesses and medium sized businesses. And maybe Elon put Doge in the the treasury.
Who knows? And that's how we make it all up. But but you can't just crack and slash and burn to your point, Dave. I mean, it just won't work. And so what you can do, though, is introduce technology.
We have yet to have a president that fully understands technology. I'm not here to tell you that Kamala Harris is a geek. She's not. But she understands the impact, and she has a lot of people who truly are geeks around there around her. And she truly believes that implementing technology is a way to improve efficiency.
But the whole idea is you can't take the libertarian approach. That's ideologic. You have to take a problem solving approach. How do you look at any specific problem we're trying to solve? How can you apply technology to that?
I think you will get that from the Harris administration as opposed to Donald just talking about the AI and how much energy it consumes.
Mark, you you said of all the roles, if there's a Harris administration, you said you wanna run the SEC. Why I
was I was just trolling Gary Gensler. Yeah.
I was
just trolling Gary Gensler because it's fun to do. Yeah.
Okay. Okay.
So do
you think just And particularly wise Gensler, has he done a particularly bad job?
Are you just trolling are you just trolling are you just trolling David Sacks when you say your
trolling me now. Right?
Well, I
I can't keep
up with
the trolling. And I think I hate to ask him to
control the trolling.
Who I agree with Mark.
Nested trolling. Nested trolling.
No. So Mark you controls them.
Mark Mark is actually supporting Trump. He's just trolling sacks and coming on the show. He's been going on
for weeks. I know he's not supporting
Trump, but but I tell you one, one Republican that, as I understand, that you are supporting is John Deaton who is running against Elizabeth Warren in the Massachusetts senate race.
Yep.
So, I'm curious about this because I think this is an area we could agree on. You're not a fan of Elizabeth Warren. I didn't I didn't know that.
That's pretty that's pretty interesting.
Yeah. I mean, I'm not a fan of Elizabeth Warren's. I've talked to her about crypto. I I mean, I understand her position. Her basic position is, you know, bad nation states use crypto to fund their operations, the bad stuff.
And she just wants to throw the baby out with the bathwater as opposed to using, you know, like I proposed, a a blacklist from OFAC that can be implemented and all kinds of I need to get into the details. Right? But it just it wasn't going to happen. And so when John, not just being pro crypto, but, you know, his background, his character, I thought really was a positive. And so even before he got through his hat in his ring, I was talking to him, supporting him, giving him feedback and helping him.
So again, I'm not a Democrat. I have no problem, and I think John Deaton will be better for the country, better thirds of citizens of Massachusetts than Elizabeth Warren would be.
What would be common sense crypto regulation? Obviously, you don't want people bilking people out of their money. Of course. Yeah. Of course.
So what would be a way to balance accredited investors versus the non sophisticated investors, if that's even a thing.
So I've got a company called
people running amok. You know? Right.
So I've got a company called lazy.com. And, like, if you go to lazy.com/mcubin, you'll see all my NFTs. And all it is is a is a way to display your NFTs. It hardly makes any money, but I wanted to see if we could release a token. So first thing I did was I had one of our people call the SEC and say, hey.
What steps do we have to take to release the token? They went through this whole rigmarole about getting securities lawyers and this and that. There's no way a company with a $100,000 in revenue is gonna be able to afford to do that. So then I said, okay. I'm gonna go right to the sec.gov and see about reg a and see if I could just fill out the forms myself and, you know, just see what so you start filling in name, address, and then you get to the type of business, and the only category is other.
And once you follow that other, connection, there's just no way to put the, round the just there's no way to make it work. You can't you can't make it work. And I actually said that directly to Gary Gensler. And so to answer your question, you have to make it easy to follow the rules, and you can't and in terms of everything being a security, Gensler says everything applies to Howie. Right?
There's a Howie rule and everything. You know? But the reality is there's also a a rule that came after, a ruling that came after, called Reeves, Reeves versus Ernst and Young, that had to do with interest. And if you think about it, have you guys ever shorted stocks or done stock loan where you can make some money off a stock loan?
A borrower. Yeah.
Yeah. So but, you know, you can make a share you can make one of your shares of stocks available to the borrower and get paid a VIG. Right? You might get 10 or 12%. And so doing that is the exact same thing as loaning out Bitcoin for somebody else to borrow.
And there's no they don't call that a security. So I asked I asked Gary Gensler. If it's not a security to loan out, a share of stock, and why is it, you know, a security to loan out a Bitcoin to somebody else? That didn't didn't have an answer. And the point there is he has an approach that is regulation through litigation.
He's gonna sue you first, ask questions later, and hope that the result of that litigation becomes a rule that everybody else has to follow. I literally say what's that?
Well, I was just saying, wouldn't a more common sense approach here be to say if we had an accreditation test, a sophisticated investor test, we've talked about it here on the program.
You do. Yeah. Which Yeah.
And Which there is. Well, there's not one for the populace to take like a driver's license where they could say, hey, I've taken this test. I understand diversity, diversification, etcetera. Yeah.
If you were able to register with the securities, and exchange commission for your company for the release of your token, then depending on how many people you were trying to sell it to, you would only be able to do that with qualified investors. Right. But what happens is Gary Gensler is making it so difficult to register, and what he what he should be doing is saying, here's the bright line regulations. If FTX wants to loan out all their Ethereum, you have to do what they did in Japan. You have to have 95% collateral, and 95% of anything needs to be put in cold storage.
If he had followed the same rules for crypto that Japan did, FTX would still be in business. Sam Bankman Fried might still be in jail, but FTX, 3 arrows capital, they they'd still be in business because he did the wrong thing. Now I've literally talked to Kamala Harris at lunch about this specific topic of litigate regulation through litigation. And as a lawyer, she got it immediately, and she knows it's a problem. And they know and she's even mentioned it in one of her speeches that that's something that they're going to deal with.
Can I Right? Before we get your
reaction to the story from The Washington Reporter, there was a a story. I don't know if it's true or not.
Washington Post?
But no. Washington Reporters. So according to some senate sources, Kamala Harris was considering Gensler for treasury secretary.
I would call that bullshit.
Okay. What's the Washington report? About that? Or
I I I haven't asked her about any position at all, but what I was told and and look. Talking to people who are, like, always in the same room with her, the response to me about Gary Gensler was, have you heard anybody say anything positive? That's intentional.
Well, I mean, the reason he's in that role is because he is Elizabeth Warren's
Right.
Ally, and she has been enormously powerful during the Biden administration.
Right. Have you heard her say one word?
Mark. Mark, boil it all up. Like, what's your general sense of her? Like, how should we all think about her?
§08General sense of Kamala Harris, why she's been avoiding adversarial interviews, why Sacks supports Trump
So here's the way I look at Kamla. Right? She is open minded. She's smart. She does the work.
She digs in and learns. She's ethical. She's honest. She cares. She wants to bring the country to the middle.
She knows that when she was far left, that might have been great for the state of California, but it doesn't solve the problems of the United States of the of America today. And that's why you've seen her go to the middle, and that is truly I know, David, you might not believe this. It is truly honest and through and through her. When she gave gives speeches now, she says, I'll take ideas from independents. I'll take them from Republicans.
I don't care. We have a lot of problems to solve in this country. I I would be shocked if if she wins, she talks to Elon Musk, if Elon would talk to her. She doesn't care where the
IT has come from. Interviews with unfriendly or challenging folks. This seems to be, like, you know, a a really valid criticism. We got Trump here. We got JV Vance here.
Yeah. Sheldon here. Shine. Yeah.
I don't disagree. Look. It is not Why
does she why does she hide, do you think?
I don't I don't think she's hiding. There's 2 elements there. Right? One, I think she understands the assignment, which is to win the election. And the best way to reach the most number of people and get them to change their mind is not the 1% of people who are high high information voters.
It's all the people who are showing up at rallies and screaming and yelling. Those are the people's who people whose mind she has changed so far, and that's how she's caught up and who she wants to change. And that's where she's putting her focus. And 2, and this is really honest, she has too long a wind up in answering every single question, and that makes interviews difficult. She wants to inspire everybody with everything that she answers and tries to get people all excited about what she's going to do, and so she takes too long to get to that.
If you cut out the wind ups, her answers aren't so bad. Her answers are absolutely legit, but that wind up makes it seem like the whole word salad thing.
You don't think it's relevant that she was born to a middle class family as the answer to Yeah. How she's gonna solve it. And I said
she's gotta drop that. Yeah. But on the flip side, I mean, if you list I I literally because I knew I'd be talking to you guys, I listened to Donald Trump's speech in Milwaukee. Did any of you guys listen to that?
Yes. I was there. You were
there, Sachs?
I was there.
Last one. No. No. Not Milwaukee. Not the No.
No. No. Not the RNC.
Not the RNC.
2 days ago. This week. Oh, no.
I'm talking to you. No. 2 days ago.
That's why I'm talking about the RNC.
So Kamala might have a long wind up. Donald Trump has an eternal wind up where all he does is get to his slogans and talking points and then talks gibberish the rest of the time. Let me fill you in in some of the gibberish.
About a rally? He will speak ex extemporaneously for over an hour.
Yeah. But what he says should matter
any day over someone on a teleprompter for 19 days.
So what you're saying, it doesn't matter what he says?
No. I think it does matter, but I think that Okay.
So let's talk about
what he says.
Hold on.
I've watched enough Trump rallies, including his speech at the convention where I was there listening to understand what he's what issues he stands for.
Okay. Well, tell me what issues he stands for when he diminishes Jimmy Carter, who just has his 100th birthday. Tell me what issues
he stands for.
I've I've heard him say good things and bad things about Jimmy Carter.
Okay. Sorry.
Let's put that aside. Everyone makes fun of Jimmy Carter.
Okay. So let's put that aside. Let's just say it is what it is, even though it's aside. We'll go that put that under the the character. He started talking about apartments with no windows, that builders under Kamala Harris are gonna start are being forced to build apartments with no windows.
I haven't heard that bit yet.
Yeah. Oh, I listened to this today. And then he also said
that Well, I also know that people take a lot of what Trump says out of context to make it seem a lot worse. If you actually listen to if you listen to if you listen to what he says and you don't try to, you know, shade it in the worst possible way, a lot of what he says makes sense. I believe that if you if you wanna know why I support Trump, number 1, the border. Okay? Okay.
Unlike Kamala Harris's election year conversion, he has been very consistent ever since he came down the escalator Yes. He has. That we needed to have a wall and that, really, that was just the first part of our border security. We needed to have a border. Democrats, not just Commonwealth, pretty much all the Democrats fought him on that for the last 8 years to the point where
we got Understand. So the border is one thing with
So you get that. Okay. So I think that he and only he has credibility in the selection on that issue. Number 2
That's fine.
On the on the foreign wars, we talked about this. I mean, I don't think his record on foreign policy was perfect, but it is true that he did not start any new foreign wars.
Joe Biden. And
and and the set no. What war did
Joe Biden do?
The Ukraine war. We coulda ended that before he
invaded? Ukraine?
I've argued on the show many times.
They might have been arguing
with civilians. Come on.
You he provoked it. Okay. He provoked it.
Okay. So you're assigning whatever to Joe Biden. Adam, man. I'm gonna have no problem with that.
Putin's Hold on.
So he got put he forced Putin to invade Ukraine?
Got it.
Come on. Stop acting dumb. You understand that we tried to convert Ukraine into a giant NATO base. That was the Russians said over and over again that that was a red line to them. It was the brightest of all
red lines.
Blame it on Biden's and Fraser.
Bill Burns, our current CIA director, said it best. It's the brightest of all red of all red lines for the Russian elite, not just Putin. Okay? Okay. That has been a consistent Russian policy.
You think
he contributed to the war?
And moreover hold on a second. Even if you don't believe, even if you disagree with me, and you say that Biden didn't provoke it, we had the chance to end the war in its 1st month with a deal in Istanbul. Okay? And, you know, the mainstream media denied it for a year. It was only an alternative media, and then finally, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal wrote stories about it.
It is the truth. Victoria Nuland just admitted it. We could have agreed to a deal in the 1st month. Depleted its stockpiles of weapons and artillery ammunition in Ukraine on a war that is futile.
We sent we sent them our old, David. We didn't give them anything new. We sent them our old. Israel gets the A 100 and Gary leads.
A 155 155 millimeter artillery shells are 155 millimeter artillery shells. It's not about new or old. Okay?
They get the Glengarry lead. Israel gets the Glengarry leads. Right? And and look. And on top of that, Zelensky's
only so much air defense. There's only so many patriots to go around.
Alright. So they can have
the final solin do you agree that Zelensky could have said yes to that deal?
The the one in Istanbul? Yeah. He could only say yes to it if the US supported it, and instead, we encouraged him to fight. We threw cold water on that deal. We blocked it.
He said the final thing.
We should've told Zelensky, you know what? Just make that deal. We don't need another war right now. Okay? This NATO thing's not happening anyway.
Okay? Because we're not letting Zelensky into NATO.
Well, no. The guy from Norway, the guy who just took over NATO says otherwise.
We're not gonna let in Zelensky was just here in the US last week with his so called victory plan. You know what his victory plan was? Let us into NATO immediately so that you can fight our war for us.
Or no. I get that.
With the Biden administration, to its credit, rejected that. K? I give Biden credit for that.
The good news is Biden is not running in this election.
Whenever it's inconvenient, you wanna pretend that Harris has nothing to do with this administration. Giving you real commitment. I'm giving you real incumbent.
When I've had people who worked for me and started went out and started their own companies, like Shamath and and and Facebook. Right? They're not people have different opinions. The people who work for me do what I say. Period.
End of story. Maybe they do
a better job. Following orders, basically, the Nuremberg sense.
Do you think j do you think JD Vance is gonna do anything contrary to Donald Trump if he wins?
There's an abundant record. I know what JD Vance stands for. There was an abundant record of That's
not the question.
Kamala Harris as a senator before she even
That's not the question.
She was not
the question.
Rated the most liberal member of the senate by GovTrack.
Well, why don't you
answer Mark's question?
It is. The question is, what does she really stand for? What does
she really No. Yes. She would like JD Vance. Your your
question. Sorry. What what's your question? I'm happy to answer it.
Would JV Vance ever go against Donald Trump?
No. Obviously, I understand that a VP cannot go against what their
personnel was. In a nutshell. That's it. Periodontist.
Now we can cut half the episode out. Now moving on.
Hold on a second. That fact does not prove that Kamala Harris has a different policy than Joe Biden whenever it's inconvenient for you to admit
that Biden's policy solved. No. You you're doing the exact thing you're saying you're saying that I'm doing. You're trying to position her so that everything from the Biden administration is she has ownership of it, and what I'm saying is just look at what she's doing. Look at what she's saying.
You're you're what see, here's the here's the the Trump derangement. Here's the antithesis of the Trump derangement syndrome syndrome. Right? You tell whenever Donald Trump says something stupid, everybody explains it for him. When Kamala Harris says something smart, everybody tries to explain why it's stupid and not true.
I think
she says something smart. I mean, seriously. What's the last since she said it was smart? Just so smart. Curious.
Jason, you wanna fact check the windowless? By the way, the windowless the the windowless thing, Mark, just so you know, because Nick's shared it with us. It's an Architectural Digest article. Apparently, Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, proposed windowless bedrooms as a way to change the building codes to incentivize more apartments being built I think it's also fix the housing crisis.
Converting the problem with converting the place See,
this is where all happens. This is the gaslighting. They try to make
Well, I mean, he also I mean, Trump lies constantly. Let's be honest.
Then you find out that there's a real basis to his
Then in some cases, he just lies. Anyway
Trump can't ever explain it himself. Why is it that the guy that you like can never come out and say, hey. You know, this is crazy. This is the most ridiculous thing. Eric Adams suggested.
Everybody else has gotta do the research and explain what Trump really means because he is losing it. He is cognizant You're
the one
who raised
it as as some executive as an example of
Trump. Okay.
Do you
think he's a cognitive client, Sachs?
No. I think he's very sharp. We met
him personally. So let's wrap let's wrap the politics section with just a final question because no. Wait.
I I
have a question. Yeah. Let's leave politics. Mark, very Okay. Very pointed question.
§09Selling a majority of his Mavericks stake, changing business landscape of the NBA, what he's working on at Cost Plus Drugs
Why did you sell the Mavs at this moment?
So
I sold 3 quarters of them, not the whole thing. I still own 27.7%, for a couple reasons. One, when I first bought in in 2000, I I was the tech guy in the NBA. I was the media guy. You know?
Broadcast.com just sold it. HD Net just created the very first ever high definition television network. I had every edge in every angle. Now fast forward 24 years later, in order to sustain growth to be able to compete with the new collective bargaining agreement, you have to have other sources of revenue. And so you see other teams in all scores for that matter, you know, talking about casinos, talking about creating doing real estate development all
this here.
Hotel. That's just not me. I wasn't gonna put up $2,000,000,000 to, you know, to get an education on building. Same. So that was 1.
That's part 1. Part 2 is my kids are now 15, 18, and 21. And over the next 10 years, that's a lot of pressure on them to have to take over the team or deal with the trust. You know, God forbid something happens to me, deal with the trust fund issues. And so by selling 3 quarters of it, I took all that pressure off of them because you you guys see the hate.
I mean, Jason could tell you all day long about Jimmy Dolan. You know?
He's MIA right now, and
the Knicks are doing great. Do you think valuations peak more?
I don't think they've peaked yet because it it for the reasons I just mentioned. If we're able to build a Venetian type casino in Dallas with an American Airlines center in the middle of it, the valuation is $20,000,000,000, but I own 27% of that.
Well and you bought it for under 300, and you sold it 33.25. Just not not everybody's keeping the records. I think, Chamath, you bought a 300 and sold at 3,000,000,000 as well. So congratulations, boys.
Actually, let me ask you a question about that. When you did it, did you just do it for fun and it worked out to be a great business, or did you think it was gonna be a great business
for all of it? For fun. So, you know, it's a great question, David. From 2,000 to 2010, the the actual valuations went down. And in 2010, we were not even able to sell the New Orleans Hornets.
The league had to buy it.
Right.
That's right.
It was right around then that the sixers got purchased for 200 for the same price I paid. And, you know, the, the cap, the NBA, salary cap is a reflection of the total revenues of the NBA. There were multiple years when the salary cap went down, meaning our overall revenues went down, which is great for me competitively because I would buy 1st round picks for $3,000,000. I would buy players from other teams that couldn't afford to run their teams, and that's why we went on this, you know, 15 year streak of never having a losing season and winning 50 games in a row for for for 10 years in a row. So, you know, it worked against me.
It worked for me competitively, but that just shows you that things can change. And so I did do what's that? What TV deal. So when when, cable and satellite and, over the air became very competitive and they started to grow and subscriptions grew to a 130,000,000 people, or subscriptions. That's a lot of money, and they had to compete for content so that there would be less churn.
And I I literally remember in 2,000 and 1 when we first signed our 1st cable deal, they NBC had the deal, and they were going back to David Stern saying, we need fewer games. And I sat there in one of our board of governors meetings, and I'm like, look. TBS just signed a deal to pay a $1,000,000,000 per episode for repeats of Seinfeld. If you do that on evaluation per hour, ours is fresher. Our ratings are actually better.
Don't think of it as as, less, avail less product will lead to more demand. It's the exact opposite. We're so inexpensive. We can charge more, and that led to the Next TV deal, and that led to the explosion.
Mark, you have a lot of fingers and a lot of pots and other businesses. You have a really important thing you're doing in drugs that you may wanna talk about.
Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up to my
If you look at the next 10 years of your life, so you're 66 between now 14 years. Between now and 80, 81, what's your goal? Like, what are you working on? What are the things that you care about? Where are you putting your capital?
What are you trying to do?
The number one's family, obviously, but beyond that is costplusdrugs.com. We're up the health industry like you wouldn't believe. If you've seen
Just explain it for the folks that don't understand it.
So let's just say guys our age, or you guys are close enough to my age, we use a drug called tadalafil, right, for those of you who know what it is. And you it's generic Cialis. Cialis. Cialis is great to spark.
Guys. Cialis today, but
Wait. Wait. Wait. Hold on. We gotta double click on this.
Heard from Sachs. So you've heard from Sachs. Right?
Are
you a Cialis or a viagra guy, Sachs? What's going on here?
It ain't here.
Or both.
So It
seems Cialis just seems better value for money. Wait.
What what are those?
Sticks around
on your watch list.
Never heard of him.
Sacks like, what is that?
Never heard of him.
He's turning red, actually. So if you go to costplusdrugs.com and you put in tadalafil, when it comes up, we show you our actual cost. And then we mark it up by 15%, and if you buy it via mail order, then we add $5 for a pharmacy fee to review everything and $5 for shipping and handling. The net result of that is you guys have a general idea of what the price is now from all the ads? You can buy a 90 pack of Tadalafil for about $9.90 plus shipping and handling.
So for less than the price of a bag of M and M's, you could put up a a a little cup or jar next to your bed of either M and M's or What is the name
of this website? So just
dotcom. She might be right back. $9 for 90 days.
Right? We're like, let's go.
For Shamat. That seems free.
It's an incredible deal.
So and but you apply that to the 25100 drugs that we have. And now all of a sudden, you see what's wrong with these things called pharmacy benefit managers and the problem of an industry that's opaque, and I'll give you another example. There are drugs that are called specialty generics, and the only thing special about them, they're actually just pills, is that they're they were traditionally more expensive. So there's a drug, called ematinib, which is a chemotherapy drug. If you just walk into, a CVS as an example, and a big, big pharmacy, and just you you were a cash payer or a high deductible payer, and you just needed it, they'll charge you anywhere from 200 to $2,000.
You have no idea what you're going to pay. If you get it from cost plus drugs, depending on the the number and the strength, it might be 21 to $30. There's another drug, droxidopa. One of my buddies came to me and said, I'm losing my insurance. They wanna charge me, the pharmacy wants to charge me $10,000 a quarter for this medication called droxidopa.
Alright, Landon. Let me check. Then, initially, it was $64 a month. Now it's in the $20 per month because as our cost goes down, we pass it on. And that's just changed the industry because think about what happens when you get a prescription.
What's the pushback? But, Mark, I mean, what is the pushback you get? Because that's that's None. Count gets counter to the trend. Right?
So is it just infinite growth, or how does the industry respond when you create that price differential?
So it's the innovator's dilemma. They can't just give up all of this margin. They so most of the business of pharmacy benefit manage not most. So a big chunk of the businesses comes from corporate, from corporations, right, and self insured companies. And they go to them, and they put together the thing called the formulary,
which is
all the drugs. Right? That's available to them. And they say, we're gonna price this so that we get rebates, and we'll pass on the rebates we get from the manufacturers to you. Now they say they're gonna pass on a 100% of that rebate.
They don't. They create all these subsidiaries and everything that skim 10% or whatever off the top, but they know that they can continue working with these companies because the core competency of a CEO is not to know their health care costs. And literally, for any CEOs that are out there, audit your PBM contract. Audit it right now. I promise you that that PBM is gonna tell you you don't need to audit.
And then you can say, we wanna add cost plus drugs to our pharmacy supply contract, and they're gonna say, no, you're not allowed to do it because they know our prices are so much lower that it's disrupting their industry. Are you
doing this as, like, a for profit business? Are you losing money on this and doing it just to help society? What what's your plan here?
Right now, I'm losing money, and most of that was because we built a factory, a whole robotics driven factory that manufactures, sterile injectables that are in short supply. So now, like with the hurricane, you know, we're using our robotics to switch over to sterile water, of all things, and some other things so that we can manufacture it and get it to them at, you know, a reasonable price as opposed to price gouging, which Kamala has talked often about. So you know, because there will be price gouging in in pharmacy, and we're here to be an alternative. So to answer your question, I've spent a whole a lot of money on these robotics and putting this together, but our path is hockey stick, double, triple hockey stick. And so we're taking business from them, and I think the traditional legacy companies and
insurance Did something happen to you or somebody around you that motivated you to go after the PBMs, or was just this clinical business analysis of, like, this just doesn't make sense and it can be done better?
So both. What happened was I got an email from my partner, cofounder, doctor Alex Oshmyansky, and he wanted to create a compounding pharmacy in Denver that made drugs that were in short supply because there's always, for whatever reason, some generic drug that is on a shortage list. And I'm like, you're thinking too small. And this was right around the time that the pharma bro was going to jail. And I asked him, you know, how is it that this dude buys up a 1 year supply of Daraprim, the drug he bought, and just jacks it up?
And how does that happen? And he goes, it just happened. I'm like, well, let me do some homework and dig in, and the reason was obvious. The industry was completely opaque. The first line in every single pharmacy contract and health care contract for that matter is you're not allowed to talk about it.
You are restricted from talking about this to anybody, anybody at all. So we had a completely opaque market. So we put together the website called costplusdrugs.com, but, really, the smartest thing that we did, and it was unintentional in terms of impact, we created a full price list. So you can get our 25 100 drugs, the actual price list, and we release it every week because we're on a roll now where we've had since last a year ago, more than a year ago, every weekday, we've lowered a price on a drug. And so we just put that out.
And what's happened as a result is now companies can just get the price list and do comparisons to approximately what they're paying because their PBM won't tell them exactly what they're paying.
I got I have one suggestion for you there, Mark. You can make this a nonprofit. When you sell the Mavs, you could donate money to this. Then, like, 6, 7 years later, you could flip it into a for profit and take it public. There's, like, a strategy here, and this could work out really well
for you. Exactly the point. And, you know, Sam Altman is an investor. No. I'm just kidding.
And so, so we put out this price list, and all of a sudden, Harvard Medical and Vanderbilt and, the all these research institutes took our pricing and compared it to what Medicare was paying for the same drugs. And it was like, well,
it's This is what I was gonna ask you because CMS is now empowered to negotiate.
Yeah.
And this is sort of maybe ties together with the governmental efficiency and just do the obvious right thing, but shouldn't they just work with you as an example, and and why don't they?
They are, and it's just started.
They are.
Right? So here's again, I'm I can't speak for her to say what she's going to do, but here was the conversation, I've had with her team. When it comes to reducing out of pocket cost to deal with inflation, what I have told them is one key area that impacts most families at some level, nobody dies healthy, is the cost of health care and pharmaceuticals. And by working by requiring transparency in all contracts signed by anybody, anywhere in terms of pricing, you are gonna see the same impact on across the board pricing of a decrease of 30, 40%. And so all that is going to reduce out of pocket spending for everybody, reduce government spending for everybody, and have a net positive impact.
They see that
And have you had the had that conversation with the Republicans as well so that they I mean, it seems it makes sense for everybody.
I had the converse a similar conversation, like, as I mentioned to you in the White House when I went there, and it just didn't resonate.
Boys, any any final questions for Mark here as we,
ask about about Elon and why I troll Elon and any of that good stuff.
I wanna I wanna know about
§10Thoughts on AI, what's next for him
are you investing in AI technology? Where are you investing in the stack? How do you think about that? Are you an active venture investor, Mark? I mean, I know we've obviously done some stuff together, but I'm curious, like, how how you look at stuff.
So now I've kinda slowed down. I invested in Grok, right, with Chamath. Right? Chamath is, yeah. Let's go.
Right? And he can tell you all the reasons.
I think we all I think we all have a piece of that now.
Okay. Well, good. So you guys know the whole story. Right? And so I think that that's great.
Picks and shovels, I think, are important. I think the problem, and this happens with all new technologies, is we're seeing the gold rush right now where everybody calls everything AI, particularly with agents. And I think you can put all these vertical agents together to do all these different things, but agents are just gonna be a feature, not a product. Because inherently, in AI, as it advances and gets smarter, then it's gonna be able to create its own agents for its users and go forward from there. So I've been really hesitant now because, you know, you're not gonna invest in in the foundational models.
I mean, through a fund I have part of, OpenAI but and some others, but it's that's just so expensive. You don't know who the winners are going to be, but yet everything that everything that happens is gonna be a derivative of
what you're selling. What's your business intuition tell you about that, actually? So you have this crazy capital raise between closed and open. How do you think that plays out?
I think there are going to be, tens of millions of models. Everybody's gonna have a model. Your kids are gonna have models. You know, their little, invisible friend is going to be a model that's in a, you know, a teddy bear, that they grow up with. So there's gonna be an unlimited number of models, but we don't know who the winners are going to be to host those models.
I have no idea. And if you go back over the history of technology, it's that's always the case. Everybody there's always a race to be the winner for the foundation, whether it was broadband, whether it was networking, whether it was whatever it's streaming, and everybody battles it out. And so it's okay. And I for me now, I'm just like, let me just wait.
Let me just
there's, you think there's gonna be or a chance at job displacement? What do you think of, like, this, universal basic income, cataclysm?
I think it's I think it's the exact opposite.
Okay.
Explain.
Yeah.
So I think that in order to train a model, you need access to information, and the Internet ain't what it used to be in terms of being a source of information.
Right.
And so IP is becoming more valuable. You're not I think everybody by this time expected, all the foundational models to have all this health care information. But if I'm Mayo Clinic, I'm not giving Microsoft or Google or OpenAI my IP because that's what brands me, and so there's gonna be a lot of money available there. And I think, that there that has gotta be a way to there's gotta be a way to figure that out. Right?
First, how does IP work, and how is it distributed? And then how are we using it just in general? We really don't know how we're going to implement it or use it or what the interface is going to be, and all that will be figured out by some kid somewhere.
So maybe just to wrap, Mark, so these these next 10 or 15 years, is it about doubling down on these current things, making cost plus thing huge, like harvesting essentially, or are you gonna do new things, or is just the bar
getting off?
Health care.
I you know what? When I'm gone, I wanted to say, mother he did it. Was expensive when we were sick. It ain't expensive no more. And to me, that's that's the ultimate mission.
Now it's fun to learn AI and, you know, build models and do all that stuff. Right? But when it's all said and done, to me, that's where you are. Mark.
That's what I want.
Let me ask you a final final question then. That's great. We've, you've you've done a reality show, just retired from that, cashed out of 3 quarters of the Mavericks check, did that, helping people with, this cost plus drugs and and saving people money. It's a pretty noble mission. Kinda adds up to you're gonna run for president.
No.
No. There's no way. No?
Why not? It would be a great thing to do. You've checked off all the boxes. Why wouldn't you cheat?
Too old now. Too old now. Right, Mark?
He's not what are you talking about? 20 years younger
than Trump and Biden.
Wikipedia's wrong. I changed I'm a sock puppet in my spare time. I changed the No.
4 years from now. 8 years from now, would you would you even consider it, or if you were gonna consider it
Yeah. Right to our era.
Right? Yeah. How would you process making that decision?
My kids hated the idea. My wife hated the idea. They want you know, it's hard enough for them to have a normal life as it is. Mhmm. And that just takes it to a whole another level.
Plus, you'd have to run as a Republican because Democrats hate billionaires like you.
No. I see they Bloomberg. Right?
You saw it happening at Bloomberg.
Yeah. But that's a huge change.
Made it to the first question of the first debate. Boom. Elizabeth Warren knocked him out.
But let me just tell you this, and we don't have to talk more about politics. Parties don't exist anymore. They don't. There there's fundraising vehicles, and they have procedures in place, but this is Donald Trump. He took over the Republican party.
They do what he says, and Kamala Harris has learned from Donald Trump. Give him credit. She has learned what worked for him. They're not stupid. She has learned that she has got to be that personality that takes over, and they've got to do what she says.
You haven't heard a word from Bernie or Elizabeth Warren, and that's not unintentional. She is doing it her way. Now whether or not you agree what she's doing or her approach to win, everybody can argue, and that's what makes a market. But there are no political parties anymore, and the idea of the the ideology of a party on the Democratic side is no more in place than on the Republican side.
Alright. So, with that, my Knicks got a shot this year? What do you think?
Yeah. I thought the trade was great.
I thought that one was trade was great. Yeah. The trade was great.
Cap I think Cap's great.
I mean, he's a little on the defense, but he's But
but with KP, right, that's what they're doing. How do they match up with Boston? And so KP and Kat match up, and that's why
So you
got a shot. You're saying there's a chance. Yeah. My my Knicks might get there.
I'm saying you and Jim Carrey have a lot in common.
There's a chance. Alright, everybody. This has been another amazing episode. Thank you.
I was always on. Thanks, guys. I really appreciate it.
Time. Come back anytime, Mark, and we'll see you all next time. Bye bye.
Thanks, guys.
That was awesome. They'll give you instructions on how to upload, and, I'll see you That was great. A game soon.
Appreciate it. You guys were awesome.
Cheers.
And I don't mind arguing, David. I love to argue this stuff right now.
I know. I know. Look. I give you credit. You're fun to
talk with
and argue with, and you obviously don't take it personally, and I appreciate that. And, yeah, I give you credit for having fun with it. I know too many depressed billionaires,
so Yeah. I give you I
give you a lot of credit.
Yeah. I I don't get that. But you know what? If you were if you were when you were poor, you're up when you're rich. Right?
And and just doesn't change anything. I was hoping you we talked about Elon also. Largely.
Well, we could still go there. Where's Jake on?
We can still go there. You can ask the question if you want.
§11Relationship with Elon, re-evaluating the Twitter deal, OpenAI's new fundraise
Alright. 2 of my besties, the last 25 years, you and Elon. Is this, you guys just, goofing on each other? You got an issue with Elon that's sincere? Or is it just playful fun trolling?
So 2 things. 1, as an entrepreneur, Elon's, like, the shit of the shit of the shit. Right? Yeah. There's I'm I'm a huge fan.
What he's been able to accomplish is insane. It's incredible. I would never diminish anything he's done as an entrepreneur. As a Twitter user, he's a troll, and, I mean, he just trolls to troll to troll, and every good troll deserves a foil, right, somebody to troll back. And it's just so easy and so much fun.
Yeah. Now, you know, I get some of the underlying principles, I think, at least in my mind. Like, when he talks
about think about the first amendment principle that he's doing here of, like, radically changing Twitter from, like, it's pretty controlled to, hey. Anything goes.
I think that's a fear
anything goes.
I think that's a fear of losing, users. So I think that within the conservative community, they are more joiners and heavier, social media users.
Participants. Yeah.
Yeah. Participants. So they they subscribe to more things. They listen to more podcasts. They're more active, and I think he recognized that.
And that was a fundamental underpinning of why he kind of connected to them on the free speech thing because he still has his limits. Obviously, it's his platform, and what he doesn't want doesn't get shown. So I think that's why, and I can't blame him. I wish you would call me. I'd help him on on his his revenue and all that.
And then I think on the immigration side, here's my theory, and you guys can tell me if you agree or disagree. I don't think he's anti immigration like he says, you know, anti illegal immigration, where anybody who's in the country should be deported. I think as an immigrant himself and I'm 2nd generation. You guys are, you know, immigrants at some level. We all are.
But I think as an immigrant himself, he thinks that the number of illegal immigrants in this country and the hate that's pushed towards them carries over to legal immigrants, including himself. And I think he by he believes that by diminishing the illegal or the noncitizens in this country and asking for their removal, it improves the standing of the legal immigrants, including himself. And so that's kind of my theory on on both of those things. Interesting.
Yeah. It's, it's certainly different place.
I I
don't think you need much of a theory to explain Elon's use because he's just so transparent about what he believes. I truly believe that his core conviction and the reason he bought Twitter X is because he wanted to unlock it as a free speech platform.
Yeah. I don't I don't think so.
I don't think so. I don't know how much more money he can lose in pursuit of that goal.
See, here's why here's why I disagree. You don't take other people's money to do that. If he put
I don't think he knew. He didn't know that he would get boycotted by all these advertise
advertisers. He knew he knew that I think he went in open eyes, carried the sink in the door to run it with some improvements operationally, which he did a great job of, and to And taking out
a huge amount of the cost structure, which he did. But j Jason and I were there on the 1st day. The 1st day he took over, there was an organized boycott of advertisers, and they called him anti Semitic, which is ridiculous, before he even had a chance to You know, I've heard from the about that site.
So I've heard from a lot of those folks, and it's not so much look. When you talk about free speech, free speech applies to advertisers as well. They get to associate with whoever they want to no matter what. So Sure. So there there are,
repercussions Unless there's a unless there's a a a collusive effort going on to sort of organize No.
No. I get that organization just resolved immediately, so there weren't. But look. I get from my own self. Right?
I don't understand why you won't give him credit for believing in free speech. That's clearly
the principle of the I don't have no problem with free speech. Look. I've always said people are like, get rid of the anti semitic people. You get anti semitic tropes. I get, you know, zillions of anti semitic tropes, you know, in my in in my replies.
Just nonstop. I mean, I'm not white. You know? My grandparents changed their name to from Jabinsky to Cuban, not even intentionally, And so it's always your real name is Jabinsky. Why?
There's just the hate there is insane. And my attitude has always been, I wanna know who the morons are. I have no problem with them still being allowed on the platform. But the trade off is for advertisers. They don't wanna be associated with that.
There is no upside for being on Twitter right now or x on right now. And you add to that the porn. Kids 13 years old can go on that site, and you can find any insane thing you want on x right now. And that also is a problem for advertisers. That's part of free speech, but you gotta pay the bill when you're willing to accept that.
I don't think he realized just how deep users will go in order to use their free speech, and I think that really surprised him. And so that's why I don't think that he bought it specifically for free speech because I think he's always one of the things I really admire
I don't know. I mean, he said he said before he bought it that he was gonna open it up as
a free speech platform.
I mean, this is why hold on. This is why the left immediately started boycotting him before he even changed one policy. Jacob, help me out. You were there.
Well, no. I freaking day. Know for a fact that this was a free speech mission for him. I do think, you know, multiple things can be true. Mark, you are correct that if you have spicy content, advertisers don't want anything to do with it, and they have choices.
And it's also one of the smaller platforms that have choices that have more scale, so that makes it even easier. And it's also true that they're boycotting him and specifically targeting him. But all these things are happening at the same time.
And that's fair.
And I think, you know, when you look at what he's done there, we'll look at it historically as this place that was very controlled and clean and owned by the press and the elites became this chaotic thing, but also ultimately the one place where at scale you cannot be canceled. And, you know, if you look at cancellation as a concept, the number one place to get canceled was Twitter. You said something even slightly off, man, they came down on you. They destroyed you. And now now that we've gotten rid of cancel culture and people can say what they believe and people can make them
say lies necessary to find it.
I do think it's
I will
just finish the thought. I do think that that will be looked at as a beautiful thing that he gave to society as a gift, and it will be looked at as a a really challenged business because it was an ad business that lost its advertising base. And Apple and Disney have choices.
I don't
see the need here to look past or or to look for an ulterior motive in what Elon's doing. Elon believes in free speech. It's very clear. He's run the platform that way, and it's cost him money. So what else could the motivation be except his principles, obviously?
So But he was also addicted to it. I can tell you that as the person who got him I
know, but that's not that's not why he's running as
a free Yeah. No. That's not why he's running
as a free speech model.
Give you my counter to that. You know him better than I do. I believe Why
why are we even having this debate? Who cares? I mean Oh, no. I'm just curious. I think he's running yeah.
I think is a free speech platform.
Yeah. And then that's fine. Obviously, it's his choice. That that's free speech by definition.
Actually, let let to me, this debate is is kinda pointless, but let's let's talk about actually the the issue. There's a news story this week where open AI just raised was a 6,000,000,000 Yep. At a $150,000,000 valuation. They originally started that enterprise with 50,000,000 or so from Elon. It was a nonprofit.
Then they became a for profit. Now there's a report saying that they're telling investors in this round that they can't invest in any other AI companies, so they're acting like I mean, they've gone from nonprofit philanthropy to piranha for profit company.
That's pretty sharp elbows.
Sam yeah. It is a sharp elbows. Sam said he wasn't gonna take compensation. Now he's getting compensation.
Yep. 10,000,000,000.
About this?
I mean, look. It's their company. They get to do what they want. Period.
False pretenses. I mean,
it's But but don't invest. I mean,
they just invest. He gave him a donation.
Let me which leads to something I wanna say very positive about Elon. Put aside his genius in coming up and running these companies. The one thing I I respect the most about Elon Musk, and he does more than anybody I've ever seen, and that is he goes all in. He doesn't just you know, he takes every cent he has, and he believes in it, and he goes all mother in. He never hedges his bet at all, till Twitter.
Right? That's why I say, you know, he brought in investors. You know, he brought investors to Tesla and everything, but, initially, he went all in himself. You know, I think with Twitter, I think he was kinda surprised. But going back to OpenAI, I don't I wouldn't do business with people like that, and there are people who just look for what they think is the next big thing, and I certainly could have given them money, didn't give them money.
I said one of our funds that I'm in did give them money originally, didn't give them money another time. To me, that's just wrong, and that catches up to you. When people over investors and whatever, it always comes back. Karma's a bitch in business too. Now, you know, Gemini with Google, I've done a lot of stuff with them.
Notebook is insanely good. Gemini 1.5 is insanely good. Meta as open source, and what they're doing is getting better and better. There is no you know, there's nothing that says that OpenAI is going to win, nothing at all. And so I don't feel bad about what they're doing.
And to me, it tells me they're more scared than anything by trying to restrict what people are doing.
Yep. That's your super is it says it's more a reflection of Sam than anything else is Right. You're is is what you're saying.
Yep. Well I
mean, that would be reflected in the fact that so many people who are the cofounders have left.
Yeah.
That that's a really big red flag. This thing is gonna change the world. Yeah. Every call, the cofounders leave.
I heard 40 of the 44 cofounders left.
Yeah. With the original employees. Yeah.
I mean, I don't know if
that's true, but that's 100%.
And then
if you well, I mean, if you also think about this business, Chamath, and where it's headed sorry. There were 3. There were 44
cofounders opening. The Donald Trump cabinet members thing.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. But, I mean, if you if you we did a joke about it last week.
But if you just look at the competition set that they're up against, they're losing 5,000,000,000 a year. They're making 3a half. They put this thing at 150,000,000,000. It's 40 times, 50 times revenue. To fill in that valuation on a price to sales basis, you know, is kinda crazy.
Here's the one thing that I'll say, and I think Mark said this in a different way, but I'll just I don't think you can underestimate how companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon will react when they feel cornered. And I think in in the last 20 to 25 years, what you've seen is those companies when their backs are against the wall, they use money, They're sharp elbowed, but the consistent thing is they've won. And so the real question is, do people look at the chart of the users? Because typically what happens is it's users what tilts these companies when something some upstart you remember when Snapchat was about to explode
Yeah.
There was a decision. We're gonna decapitate this company. Facebook effectively did that. They relegated it to
the store.
Yep. Zynga. There's many accounts like
that. Yeah.
So the real question is when they see that this app is gonna be at 3 or 500,000,000 MAU and they appear on some list where they're bigger than, I don't know, pick your favorite app inside of Meta or
Google. Ever. Yeah. Ever.
Will they freak out? And if they do freak out, what do they do?
Oh, I could tell you they're freaking around now.
Oh, yeah. It's an ex it's an existential risk to them. Right. And the craze I mean, look what Microsoft did. They bought 3 Mile Island, the nuclear reactor.
They bought it. Everybody is looking for the angle, and the crazy part is move.
It's really crazy.
Yes. There used to be Moore's law that everything followed. Right? The price performance curve always went like this, you know, and power goes up. Now because you don't know.
You don't know what you don't know and what you need to do next. That's part of the challenge that, Elon has with Tesla in terms of full service driving. You don't know what you need to do next to get there to
solve that problem.
Do you have a Tesla, Mark?
I do. And I do also I also have a Kia EV. I have a Tesla EV, and I have a Kia EV.
Do you use the FSD? And if so, how is it? What do you
I have, but I I stopped using it just because it terrified me, because it doesn't know what adversarial things it doesn't know. Because, you know you know, anything that's adversarial, that something they have to train on something it's seen, and it's not smart enough to, figure out what it hasn't seen and whether or not it's a risk. And I've said this before. My my, 4 year old as mini Australian Shepherd, I can put it in a risky situation to cross the street and trust it'll get across the street no matter what it is. It doesn't have to be pretrained.
You can't do that with, full service driving yet. And so until that gets to where it needs to be where adversarial issues aren't an issue, I'm not gonna fully trust it.
I have the 12
questions. I got a I got a 12.
Sorry. Yeah. David. Mark, thank you.
You've been, really fun to talk to, So Yeah.
Good talking to you. This has been Overtime with the all in podcast with
Mark Cuban. We'll see you all
next time.
Guys. Thanks so much. Season. Love you,
boys. Bye. Bye. We'll let your winners ride. Rain Man David Sacks.
And it said, we open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.
Robbie West. Queen of kin wah. Besties are gone. Go 30.
That is my dog taking it. I wish your
driveway's in the house.
Oh, man. My habitat
We should
all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like it's like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.
Let your feet be. Let your feet be. Where did
you get