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The following is a conversation with Mark Cuban, a multi-billionaire businessman, investor and star of the series Shark Tank, longtime principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and is someone who is unafraid to get into frequent battles on X, most recently over topics of DEI, wokeism, gender, and identity politics with the likes of Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson.
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And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
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Check them out in the description.
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It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast.
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We got Listening for, well, listening to things like research papers, Cloaked for protecting your personal information, Notion for taking notes and collaborating on those notes with your team, Eight Sleep for naps, and Shopify for shoppin  or creating shops on the internets.
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Choose wisely, my friends.
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Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we re always hiring, or if you just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact.
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And now onto the full ad reads.
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Never any ads in the middle.
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I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, please do check out our sponsors.
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I enjoy their stuff.
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Maybe you will too.
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This episode is brought to you by listening.
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an app, a website that allows you to listen to academic papers, listen to a bunch of stuff.
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I think you can listen to emails, to websites, all of that.
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I haven t tried that aspect of it.
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I should, probably, to listen to emails.
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I wonder how that would work.
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They have a Chrome extension, but I don t think it s through the Chrome extension.
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Anyway, the way I use it, and I think the original use case, which I think is awesome, is listening to research papers.
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And this includes super, super technical papers or more narrative-driven philosophical papers.
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For example, you can take the Turing paper on the Turing test.
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Obviously the paper title is not The Turing Test.
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I think it s called Computing Machinery and Intelligence.
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And of course you can go to super technical papers, and I use it for that as well.
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I often do the following.
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I ll print out the paper, because the haptic feedback of a sheet of paper is really powerful for me.
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So I ll take notes on that with a highlighter with a pen.
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I will also take notes on a PDF, and I will also listen to it over and over and over.
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So for me, the process of reading an academic paper is one that requires returning to it over and over and over again, unless I m doing a quick skim.
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So for skimming, I can look at the PDF and quickly skim and then listen to certain parts that I find useful.
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So sometimes related work is really powerful because it summarizes in a nice way where the field stands.
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I ll listen to that.
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Sometimes the abstract is good to listen to.
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Sometimes the abstract introduction related work, jumping to the conclusion.
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If there s a methods in the paper, you listen to that.
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Anyway.
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I will basically use the listening function while I m walking over to get some coffee or I m on a run, and I ll listen to different parts of a paper to get a sense of what that paper contains and the main idea and so on that can build on.
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Or, as I said, to review a thing I ve already returned to many, many, many times.
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And I have a large number of favorite papers that I ve returned to many times.
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It s super easy to upload a paper.
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They have really nice AI voices that pronounce stuff well.
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And also just at the sentence paragraph level, the kind of narration style they have is really, really nice.
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And obviously as AI improves, they will keep improving.
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So jump on board now and enjoy this whole process.
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I highly recommend it.
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Normally, you would get a two week free trial, but listeners of this very podcast get one month free.
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So go to listening.com slash Lex.
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That s listening.com slash Lex.
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This episode is also brought to you by cloaked.
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As I mentioned last time, it s the thing that I always thought and hoped would exist.
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And now I know it exists and it is awesome.
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It s a platform that lets you generate a new email and a new phone number every time you sign up for a website.
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So you can hide your actual email and your actual phone number from the world.
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I think of it as a kind of privacy layer that protects you from the wild, wild west of the internet where many, many services and companies desperately want your data.
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and the in, the contact, the way to contact you.
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So Cloaked allows you to take the power back to give you some control of this relationship to where your email remains a private email address.
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But this aspect of it is just a kind of super awesome feature.
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It s also a password manager, and I highly recommend you use a password manager.
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And so this is combined password manager and the ability to generate as part of the usual generation of a new password when you sign up to a thing.
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It also generates emails and phone numbers.
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And soon I read, which is interesting, they can generate credit cards.
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Sometimes places require credit cards for a sort of quote unquote free trial.
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So if they can actually pull that off, which I don t know how they re going to do, it s pretty awesome.
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And in general, I m just a big supporter of companies innovating how to maintain people s privacy in this internet age where there s so much money to be made from people s data.
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So it s an interesting sort of technological and
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business challenge of how to protect the data.
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So hats off to Cloaked for doing a great job.
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Plus the interface I should mention is super nice, which is really important because the kind of signup process to a new website should be effortless and Cloaked doesn t get in the way.
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Go to cloaked.com slash Lex to get 14 days free or for a limited time use code LexPod when you sign up to get 25% off an annual Cloaked plan.
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This episode is also brought to you by Notion, a note-taking app that I ve been using forever, but they have awesome team collaboration tools.
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Man, it must be forever ago that I first saw Notion recommended to me, but it was always the cool kids that were using Notion.
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And when I started using Notion, it was the first time I really sort of deliberately
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updated my note-taking process to be more 21st century-like.
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So to use technology for the first time.
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So I m really happy I did that.
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Obviously now with the new wave of larger language models, Notion is probably the best way to go.
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best integration of large language models into the note-taking process that I ve seen.
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It can do all kinds of stuff like summarize text, it can generate the first draft of text, it can do bullet points, all that kind of stuff.
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Now for the team collaboration part, you can ask it questions about the stuff it knows, and it can look across all the documents, the notes, the wikis, the projects,
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and it can answer questions based on everything it knows across those documents.
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And it can generate sort of summaries and reports about those documents.
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So I think it s an incredible team collaboration tool in that regard.
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You can try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex, that s all lowercase, notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today.
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This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and the beautiful, wonderful power of naps.
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I m now back in Austin, I was traveling a bit and it s one of the things I really look forward to when I come back home.
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It s a cold bed surface with a warm blanket.
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You can control the temperature of the bed on each side separately.
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A nice nap is truly heaven.
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I could be in the worst mood and a nap just kinda
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helps that mood, whatever that is, to dissipate, to just disappear into the ether.
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Wherever my mind goes, it returns quickly refreshed, renewed, and ready to take on the day once again.
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I m a huge supporter of naps, I don t care.
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I don t care what anybody says, naps are huge.
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Actually, it s funny you mentioned that when I was at Google, they have these nap pods.
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I m sure a lot of tech companies have nap pods.
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I feel like Google invented the nap pod.
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But I think a lot of people weren t sort of confident enough or were a little bit embarrassed to use the nap pod.
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I did, too.
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It felt kind of weird.
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So I would just like put my head down on the desk and sleep right on the desk.
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I really didn t care.
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But when I did use the nap pods, they were pretty epic.
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Because it kind of keeps out the rest of the world, so there s a sense of privacy in it.
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It s pretty cool.
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But nothing compared to Eight Sleep.
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You can check it out yourself and get special savings when you go to eightsleep.com slash Lex.
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This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed by anyone to sell anywhere, anything with a great looking online store.
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Even I, friends, can figure out how to do it in a few minutes.
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I create a store, alexgerman.com slash store, I think it is, where there s a bunch of shirts.
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Now, that store is super minimalist, and I m a big fan of minimalism, but you can get super fancy, and it integrates with a lot of third-party apps.
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I use it for on-demand printing of the shirts.
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So it s another service that does the printing and the shaping of the shirts, so you don t have to think about anything.
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You can sort of outsource all of it.
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But, you know, you can use Shopify to basically sell anything.
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And it s cool to have this thing.
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that enables the efficient, accessible way of creating a node in the capitalist machine, in the capitalist network, the living, breathing network of capitalism, where the invisible hand of the market does its work.
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Yes, there are downsides to capitalism, but there s a lot of upsides.
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Given the power to the individual creators and the makers, the builders, to build and sell their stuff, I love it.
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One of the most beautiful things that humans can do is to create, and I will continue to celebrate their ability to create.
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and I m glad Shopify is making it easier for them to make money off of their creations.
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Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex.
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That s all lowercase.
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Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here s Mark Cuban.
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You ve started many businesses, invested in many businesses, heard a lot of pitches privately and on Shark Tank, so you re the perfect person to ask, what makes a great entrepreneur?
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Somebody who s curious, they want to keep on learning because business is ever-changing, it s never static.
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Somebody who s agile because as you learn new things and the environment around you changes, you have to be able to adapt and make the changes.
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And somebody who can sell because no business has ever survived without sales.
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And as an entrepreneur who s creating a company,
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whatever your product or service is, if that s not the most important thing and you re just dying and excited to tell people about it, then you re not going to succeed.
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But it s also a skill thing.
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How do you sell?
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What do you mean by selling?
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Selling is just helping.
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I ve always looked at it about putting myself in the shoes of another person and asking a simple question.
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Can I help this person?
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Can my product help?
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And from the time I was 12 years old, selling garbage bags door to door and just asking a simple question, do you use garbage bags?
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Do you need garbage bags?
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Well, let me save you some time.
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I ll bring them to your house and drop them off to, you know, streaming.
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Why do we need streaming when we have TV and radio?
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Well, you can t get access to your TV and radio everywhere you go.
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So we kind of break down geographic and physical barriers and, you know, cost plus drugs.
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You know, what s the product that we actually sell?
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We sell trust.
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In a simplistic approach, we buy drugs and sell drugs, but we add transparency to it.
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And bringing transparency to an industry is a differentiation and it helps people.
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Trust in an industry that s highly lacking in trust.
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Exactly.
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Okay, so what s what s the trick to selling garbage bags?
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Let s go back there at 12 years old.
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What I mean, is it just your natural charisma?
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I guess a good question to ask.
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Are you born with it?
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Or can you develop it?
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Oh, you can definitely develop it.
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Yeah.
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I mean, because selling garbage bags door to door was easy, right?
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Because like,
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12-year-old Mark going, hi, my name is Mark.
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Do you use garbage bags?
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You know what the answer s going to be, right?
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Can I just drop them off for you, you know, once a week, whenever you need them, you just call, and I ll bring them down?
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Sure.
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So that was easy.
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But I m sure you ve been rejected.
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Oh yeah, of course.
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Not everybody says yes.
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What was your percentage?
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I don t remember, but it s pretty close to 100%.
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Oh, okay.
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So that s why you don t remember.
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Yeah.
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Right.
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Cause he s going to say no to a 12 year old kid who s going to save him time and money.
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But you know, typically my career where I ve started companies, it s to do something that other people aren t doing, whether it was connecting PCs and to local area networks and at micro solutions.
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And you know, the salesmanship was walking into a company and just,
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saying, look, talk to me and I can help you improve your productivity and your profitability.
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Is that important to you?
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And the answer is obviously always yes.
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And then the question is, can I do the job and can I do it cost effectively?
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And so you didn t have to be a born salesperson to be able to ask those questions, but you have to be able to be willing to put in the time to learn that business.
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And that s the hardest part.
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I m sure there s a skill thing to it, too, in how you solve the puzzle of communicating with a person and convincing them.
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Yeah, I mean, there s skill from the perspective that I read like a maniac.
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then like now you can give me an example of any type of business and it ll take me two seconds to figure out how they make money and how I can make it more productive.
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And I think that s probably my biggest skill, being able to just drill down to what the actual need is, if any, and then from there being able to say, well, if this is what this company does and this is what their goal is, how can I introduce something new that they haven t seen before and is that a business that I can create and make money from?
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So figure out how this kind of business makes money in the present and then figure out, is there a way to make more money in the future by introducing a totally new kind of thing?
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Correct.
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And you can just do that with anything?
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Pretty much, yeah.
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And you think you re born with that?
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No, I worked at it because, you know, going back to what I said earlier about curiosity, you have to be insanely curious because the world is always changing.
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My dad used to say,
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We don t live in the world we were born into, you know, which is absolutely true.
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If you re not a voracious consumer of information, then you re not going to be able to keep up.
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And no matter what your sales skills or ability are, they re going to be useless.
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What d you learn about life from your dad?
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You mentioned your dad.
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My dad did upholstery on cars, you know, got up, went to work every morning at seven o clock, came back five or six, seven o clock exhausted.
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And I learned to be nice.
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I learned to be caring.
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I learned to be accepting.
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Just, you know, qualities that I think he really tried to pass on to myself and my two younger brothers were just be a good human.
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You know, and I think, you know, he didn t have business experience.
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So as I got into business, he would just, you know, say, sorry, Mark, I can t help you.
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You know, I don t understand what you re doing.
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He never went, neither one of my parents had gone to college.
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You ve got to figure it out for yourself.
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But he was also very insistent that, you know, he worked at a company called Regency Products where they did upholstery on cars.
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And he would bring me there to sweep the floors, not because he wanted me to learn that business, because he wanted me to learn how backbreaking that work was.
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I mean, he lost an eye in an accident at work, a staple broke, and the only thing he wanted from my brothers and I was for us to never have to work like that, to go to college, to figure it out.
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He said to be nice.
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That said, you also said that when you were first starting a business, you were a bit more of an asshole than you wish.
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You would have been absolutely.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Because I was more of a yeller.
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I was, you know, I don t know.
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Really?
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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What you see on the sidelines, you know, with me at a Mavs game, maybe a little bit, but I also didn t have any patience for somebody.
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I thought,
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wasn t using my kind of common sense, right?
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Because I was always on the go, go, go, go, go, when I, particularly when I was younger, just trying to be successful, trying to get to the point where I had independence.
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And I would tell this to people, you know, either you re speeding up and getting on the train or, you know, we ll stop and drop you off at the next station, but let s go where you go.
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Did you have trouble with the hire fast, fire fast part of running a business?
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Yeah, always, because I hated firing people, because it meant, one, it was an admission of mistake in the hiring, and two, the salesperson in me always wanted to come out ahead, and I was always horrible at firing.
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But I always partnered with people who had no problem with it, so I always delegated that.
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Well, that s the tricky thing.
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When you re working with somebody and they re not quite there,
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And you have to decide, are they going to step up and grow into the person that s the right or they re not?
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And in that gray area is probably where you have to fire.
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It was hard.
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Yeah, for sure.
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Because there is obviously a failure somewhere in the process.
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What did we do wrong?
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And when I would interview people for jobs,
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I think 99% of the people I ve ever interviewed, I ve wanted to hire, because in my mind, it was like, okay, I can figure out how to make this person work, right?
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And then they wouldn t, and then, you know, people at the company would be like, Mark, you suck at this, you know?
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And so I always delegated the hiring.
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Yeah, I mean, I m the same.
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I see the potential in people, I see the beauty in people, which is a great way to live life, but when you re running a company, it s a different thing.
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It s different, and you gotta know what you re good at and what you re bad at, right?
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I was good at,
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I was a ready, fire, aim guy, and I always partnered with people who were very anal and perfectionist, because where I could just go, go, go, go, go, go, they would keep me inside the baselines.
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They would do the due diligence, I suppose.
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Yeah, the detail work, the dot the I s and the cross the T s.
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What does it take to take that first leap into starting a business?
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That s the hardest part.
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It really depends on your personal circumstances.
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Like, I got fired.
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I mean, I was sleeping on the floor, six guys in a three-bedroom apartment, so I couldn t go any lower.
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So there was no downside.
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Yeah, there was no downside for me starting a business, and it was just like, you know, I was 25 when we started MicroSolutions, and, you know, I d just gotten fired, and it was like, look, I m a lousy employee.
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I m going to just start going to some of my prospects that I had at my job and ask them to front the money that I needed to install some software and found this company, Architectural Lighting, who put up $500 for me.
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That allowed me to buy software and have 50% margins.
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That s how I started my company.
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But by way of advice, would you say?
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I mean, it s a terrifying thing.
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Yeah.
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I mean, you ve got to be in a position where you re confident.
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I get emails and approached by people all the time, what kind of business should I start?
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That tells me you re not ready to start a business, right?
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Either you re prepared and you know it or you don t.
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In the United States, with the American dream, everybody kind of
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always looks at themselves and say, okay, you know, I have this idea, right?
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And then you go through this process of saying, okay, you know, you talk to your friends or family, what do you think?
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SPEAKER_00
And then almost always it s, oh, it s a great idea, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Then you go on Google and you say, oh my God, no one else is doing it without thinking, you know, 10 companies had gone out of business trying the same thing, but okay, it s on Google.
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SPEAKER_00
And then people stop.
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Because that next step means, okay, I have to change what I m doing in my life.
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And that s not easy for 99% of the people.
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Some people look at that as an opportunity and get excited about it.
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Some people get terrified because it s, okay, maybe I m comfortable, maybe I have responsibilities.
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And so whatever your circumstances are, if you want to take that next step,
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SPEAKER_00
You have to be able to deal with the consequences of changing your circumstances.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that s the first thing.
1
SPEAKER_00
Do you save money?
1
SPEAKER_00
If you have a job, do you have a mortgage?
1
SPEAKER_00
Do you have a family?
1
SPEAKER_00
You ve got to save money.
1
SPEAKER_00
You can t just walk.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, they ve gotta eat and they ve gotta have shelter.
1
SPEAKER_00
But on the other side of the coin, if you ve got nothing, it s the perfect time to start a business.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, desperation is a good catalyst for starting a business.
1
SPEAKER_01
But in many cases, the decision, as you re talking about, you re gonna have to make is to leave a job that s providing some degree of comfort already.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I suppose when you re sleeping on the floor and there s six guys, it s a little bit easier.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s really easy, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Particularly when you get fired and you don t have a job.
1
SPEAKER_00
And you re looking at bartending at night to try to pay the bills.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so it wasn t hard for me, but to your point, it really comes down to preparation.
1
SPEAKER_00
If it s important enough to you, you ll save the money.
1
SPEAKER_00
You ll give up whatever it is you need to give up to put the money aside.
1
SPEAKER_00
If you have obligations, you ll put in the work to learn as much as you can about that industry so that when you start your business, you re prepared.
1
SPEAKER_00
And you can always, you know, at night, on weekends, whenever you find time, lunch, start making the calls to find out if people will write you a check, you know, transfer you money to buy whatever it is you re selling.
1
SPEAKER_00
And by doing those things, you can put yourself in a position to succeed.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s where people just think, okay, you know, Geronimo, I m leaving off the edge of a cliff and I m starting a business.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s tough.
1
SPEAKER_00
But sometimes that s like the way you do it, though.
1
SPEAKER_00
There s always examples of any situation.
1
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
1
SPEAKER_00
Right, right.
1
SPEAKER_00
But, I mean.
1
SPEAKER_00
Anecdotal evidence for everything.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but if you re going into a new business, you re gonna have competition unless you re really, really, really, really, really lucky.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that competition is not gonna just say, okay, let Lex or Mark just kick our ass.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so you ve gotta be prepared how you re gonna deal with that competition.
1
SPEAKER_01
What do you think that is about America that has so many people who have that dream and act on that dream of starting a business?
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, I think we ve just got a culture of consumption and more.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, and to get more, you ve got to, you know, creating a business gives you the greatest potential upside and the greatest leverage on your time, but it also creates the most risk.
1
SPEAKER_01
So that capitalist machine, there s a lot of elements.
1
SPEAKER_01
By contrast, the respect for the law, like an entrepreneur can trust that if they pull it off, the law will protect them, there won t be a government.
1
SPEAKER_00
Hopefully that s still the case, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
There s always, uh, yeah, other countries.
1
SPEAKER_00
Right.
1
SPEAKER_00
Right.
1
SPEAKER_00
So us versus other countries, like Joe Biden, of all people said to me, um, it was at an entrepreneurship conference that when he was vice president, he had put together and.
1
SPEAKER_00
We had gone up there from a bunch of us from shark tank to talk to young entrepreneurs from around the world.
1
SPEAKER_00
And he said to me, Mark, you know, the one thing that separate, I ve been to every country around the world.
1
SPEAKER_00
And the one thing that separates us is entrepreneurship.
1
SPEAKER_00
We re the most entrepreneurial country in the world and there s no one else who s even close.
1
SPEAKER_00
And when you look at the origin of our biggest, you know, the biggest companies in the world, for the most part.
1
SPEAKER_00
there s an American origin story somewhere behind there.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I think that just gets perpetuated on itself.
1
SPEAKER_00
We see those Horatio Alger stories.
1
SPEAKER_00
We see examples of the Jeff Bezos of the world, the Steve Jobs of the world, and those are the types of people we want to copy.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we wanna be really careful and try to really figure out what that is because we don t wanna lose that.
1
SPEAKER_01
For sure, we wanna protect the whatever, and that s a lot of the discussions about what s the right way to do government, big government, small government, what s the right policies, but also culture, like who we celebrate.
1
SPEAKER_01
One of the things that troubles me is that we don t enough celebrate the entrepreneurs that take risks and the entrepreneurs that succeed.
1
SPEAKER_01
It seems like success, especially when it comes to wealth,
1
SPEAKER_01
is immediately matched with distrust and criticism and all that kind of stuff.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s changing for sure, because you can go back just 12 years, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Traditional media dominated, let s just say, through 2012.
1
SPEAKER_00
That was the peak of linear television.
1
SPEAKER_00
Newspapers weren t as strong, but they still had some breadth and depth to them.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then social media comes along, and everybody gets to play in their own sandbox and share opinions with people who think just like them.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it also gives them the opportunity to amplify those feelings.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I think that s where celebrating entrepreneurs really started to subside some.
1
SPEAKER_00
There were always people who were progressive that were like, billionaires are bad, or millionaires are bad, depending on the time period.
1
SPEAKER_00
But you didn t really see it on an ongoing basis, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t gonna be on the evening news.
1
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t going to be in the front page of the newspaper.
1
SPEAKER_00
It was going to be if you read a book and someone talked about it, or you read a magazine and there was an article talking about this progressive movement or that progressive movement, whatever it may be, or political parties.
1
SPEAKER_00
All of that is front and center in social media.
1
SPEAKER_01
And we re trying to figure out how we deal with the mobs of people and the virality of it all.
1
SPEAKER_01
I think we ll find our footing and start celebrating greatness again.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, I mean, that s the whole reason I do Shark Tank.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s true, that show celebrates the entrepreneur.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s the only place where every single minute of every single episode, we celebrate the American dream.
1
SPEAKER_00
And the reason I do it is we tell the entire country and it s shown around the world even.
1
SPEAKER_00
We re amazing advertising for the American dream in I don t even know how many countries.
1
SPEAKER_00
But every time somebody walks onto that carpet from Dubuque, Iowa or Ketchum, Idaho, that sends a message to every kid who s watching, seven, eight, nine, 10, 12 year old kid, that if they can do it from Ketchum, Idaho,
1
SPEAKER_00
you can do it.
1
SPEAKER_00
If they can have this idea and get a deal or even present to the sharks and have all of America see it, you can do it.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that, I mean, I m proud of that.
1
SPEAKER_00
Um, the 15 years of that is just, it s just been insane.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, now kids walk up to me and go, yeah, I started watching you when I was five or 10 and I started a business cause I learned about it from Shark Tank.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so, you know, I think
1
SPEAKER_00
It celebrates it and we convey it, and I don t think it s going away, but there are different battles we have to fight to support it.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I love even when the business idea is obviously horrible.
1
SPEAKER_01
Just the guts to step up.
1
SPEAKER_01
To be there.
1
SPEAKER_01
To believe in yourself, to really reach.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s what matters.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, because some of the best business ideas are probably
1
SPEAKER_01
maybe even you and Shark Tank will laugh at.
1
SPEAKER_00
Oh, for sure.
1
SPEAKER_00
Without question.
1
SPEAKER_00
The good ones, we re not gonna recognize every good one, and then sometimes we ll just motivate people to work even harder to get it done because of what we say to them.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that s fine too.
1
SPEAKER_00
There s been great success stories that we said no to.
1
SPEAKER_01
What stands out as a memorable business you ve been pitched on Shark Tank?
1
SPEAKER_00
What s the best one that stands out?
1
SPEAKER_00
There s no best one, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
They re all different.
1
SPEAKER_00
They re all best in their own way, I guess.
1
SPEAKER_00
There s stupid ones, and we haven t had any world-changing, earth-shattering ones, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
aren t gonna apply to Shark Tank, they don t need us, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
So we typically get businesses that need some help at some level or another.
1
SPEAKER_00
But there s ones I ve passed that I wish, like Spikeball, do you know what Spikeball is?
1
SPEAKER_00
So it s this rebounding net that you can put on the beach and you have these yellow balls and you play a game of, it s just competitive game, but they re killing it.
1
SPEAKER_00
So if you go,
1
SPEAKER_00
to beaches in New York or LA, you ll see kids playing it all the time.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it was a fun game that I wish I had done a deal with.
1
SPEAKER_00
And there s been others.
1
SPEAKER_00
And you passed.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I passed.
1
SPEAKER_00
They were getting some traction and they wanted to create leagues, spike ball leagues.
1
SPEAKER_00
And they wanted me to be the commissioner.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I don t want to be a commissioner of a new spike ball league.
1
SPEAKER_01
So you have to kind of have this gut feeling of, will this scale?
1
SPEAKER_00
Will this click with people?
1
SPEAKER_00
Of course.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
Can it be protected?
1
SPEAKER_00
Is it differentiated?
1
SPEAKER_00
Is it something that makes me think, you know, why didn t I think of that?
1
SPEAKER_00
Or is it just a good, solid business that s going to pay a return to the founder and may not be enough of a business to return to an investor?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and I guess the question you re trying to see, will this scale, this promise, will the promise materialize into a big thing?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, see, I don t even care if it s gonna be a big thing, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Because it s all relative to the entrepreneur.
1
SPEAKER_00
We had a 19-year-old from Pittsburgh, Laney, who came on with a simple sugar scrub.
1
SPEAKER_00
And there was nothing outrageously special about it.
1
SPEAKER_00
I didn t see it becoming a $100 million business.
1
SPEAKER_00
I thought it could become a $2, $3, $5 million business that paid the bills for her.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that was good enough.
1
SPEAKER_00
And six months after the show aired, she called me up.
1
SPEAKER_00
She goes, Mark, I ve got a million dollars in the bank.
1
SPEAKER_00
What am I going to do?
1
SPEAKER_00
I m like, enjoy it, put aside money for your taxes, and go back to work.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, and so it doesn t have to be a huge business.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s just gotta be one that makes the entrepreneur happy.
1
SPEAKER_00
But then there s the valuation piece.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, do a lot of the entrepreneurs overvalue business?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, of course.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, that s the nature of it, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, and that s really where the biggest conflicts in Shark Tank happen.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s in the valuation.
1
SPEAKER_00
They, you know, they think this is the best business ever.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, we had one lady, couple that came on, and they had this scraper for cat s tongues.
1
SPEAKER_00
Right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Nice.
1
SPEAKER_00
Bizarre.
1
SPEAKER_00
One of the most bizarre pitch ever.
1
SPEAKER_00
I love it.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, and they had this insane valuation and it was on because it was corny and fun TV, not because it was a good business.
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh, really?
1
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
1
SPEAKER_01
You didn t see the potential.
1
SPEAKER_00
None.
1
SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of cats in the world, Mike.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes, there are.
1
SPEAKER_00
They ll go do very well without me.
1
SPEAKER_01
So how do you determine the value of a business, whether it s on Shark Tank or just in general?
1
SPEAKER_00
It s actually really easy, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
So if you take, just to use an example, a business that s valued at $1 million, and I want to buy 10% of that company for $100,000, then in order for me to get my money back, they ve got to be able to generate $100,000 in after-tax cash flow that they re able to distribute.
1
SPEAKER_00
Can they do it or can they not, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
And if it s a $2 million valuation, whatever the valuation is, that s how much cash, after-tax cash, they have to generate to return that money to investors.
1
SPEAKER_00
Or the other option is, do I see this business potentially having an exit, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Do they have some unique technology or do they have something specific about them that some other company would want to acquire?
1
SPEAKER_00
then the cash flow isn t as, I don t want to say important, but isn t going to guide the valuation.
1
SPEAKER_01
And how do you know if a company is going to be acquired?
1
SPEAKER_01
So it s the technology, like the patents, but also the team?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it could be any of the above, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
It could be a super products company that I think is going to take off.
1
SPEAKER_01
And how do you know if they can generate the money?
1
SPEAKER_01
You made it sound easy.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, can the person sell?
1
SPEAKER_00
And if not them, can I do it?
1
SPEAKER_00
Or someone on my team do it for them?
1
SPEAKER_00
So you re looking at the person?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, for sure.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s where Barbara Corker is the best.
1
SPEAKER_00
She can look at a person and hear them talk for 20 minutes and know, can that person do the job and do the work?
1
SPEAKER_01
Can you tell if they re full of shit or not?
1
SPEAKER_01
So one of the things with entrepreneurs, they re kind of, like we said, overvaluing, so they re maybe overselling themselves, but also they might be full of shit in terms of their understanding of the market, or exaggerating what they re thinking to do, all that kind of stuff.
1
SPEAKER_01
Can you see through that?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, for sure, just by asking questions.
1
SPEAKER_00
So if they are delusional at some level,
1
SPEAKER_00
or misleading at another level, I m gonna call them on it.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you get people trying to sell supplements that come on there, and it s a cure for cancer or whatever it may be, or there s this latest fad that increases your core strength without doing any exercises.
1
SPEAKER_00
Shit like that, I m just gonna bounce, I m gonna pound on them, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
I still love that.
1
SPEAKER_01
I still love the trying.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, give them credit, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Because they know all of America is going to see it.
1
SPEAKER_00
And they re deluded themselves to believe this story so strongly.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s a delusional aspect to entrepreneurship, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
Like you just...
1
SPEAKER_00
That s a great question.
1
SPEAKER_00
Do you have to be ambitious and set aside reality at some level to think that you can create a company that could be worth $10, $100 billion?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, at some level, because you don t know.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s all uncertainty.
1
SPEAKER_00
But I think if you re delusional, that works against you.
1
SPEAKER_00
because everything s grounded in reality.
1
SPEAKER_00
You ve got to execute, you ve got to produce, you know, you can have a vision, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
And you can say, this is where I wanna get to, and that s my mission, or this is my driving principle, but you still gotta execute on the business plan, and that s where most people fail.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you have to be kinda two-brained, I guess.
1
SPEAKER_01
You have to be able to dip into reality when you re thinking about,
1
SPEAKER_01
like the specifics of the product, how to design things, like the first principles, the basics of how to build the thing, how much it s gonna cost, all of that.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, because if you can t do the basics, you re not gonna be able to do the bigger things.
1
SPEAKER_00
And at the same time, you ve gotta be able, one of the things that entrepreneurs do that I always try to remind any that I work with on is we all tend to lie to ourselves.
1
SPEAKER_00
Our product is bigger, faster, cheaper, this or that, as if that is a finite,
1
SPEAKER_00
situation that s never going to change, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
And there s always somebody, I call them leapfrog businesses.
1
SPEAKER_00
Whoever s competing against you, if you do A, B, or C, they re going to try to do C, D, and E, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
And you better be prepared for that to come because otherwise they re out of business.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you re never in a vacuum.
2
SPEAKER_01
You re always competing against sometimes an unlimited number of entrepreneurs that you don t even know exist who are trying to kick your ass.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the tricky part of all this, too, is you might need to frequently pivot, especially in the beginning.
2
SPEAKER_00
Hopefully not.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you think, like, in the beginning, the product you have should be the thing that carries you a long time.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, because, I mean, that s your riskiest point in time, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
And so if you ve done your homework, which includes going out there and testing product market fit,
2
SPEAKER_01
You should have confidence that you re gonna be able to sell it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now, if you didn t do your homework and you go out there and you sell whatever it is, and you ve raised money or whatever,
2
SPEAKER_01
just to pivot, you ve already shown that you haven t been able to read the market.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so it s not that pivots can t work and always don t work, they can, but more often than not, they don t.
2
SPEAKER_01
You pivot for a reason, that s because you made a huge mistake.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, I also mean like the micro pivots, which is like iterative development.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, let s not put, yeah, just iterations.
2
SPEAKER_01
Entrepreneurship, having any business, is just continuous iteration, continuous.
2
SPEAKER_01
Your product, your sales pitch, your advertising, introducing new technology, how do you use AI or not use AI, where do you use it, what person s the right person.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s just a million touch points that you re always reevaluating in real time that you have to be agile and adapt and change.
2
SPEAKER_00
But especially in software,
2
SPEAKER_00
It feels like business model can evolve really quickly too.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like how are you gonna make money on this?
2
SPEAKER_01
Software for sure, because anything digital, because it can change in a millisecond.
2
SPEAKER_00
Speaking of which, how did you make your first billion?
2
SPEAKER_01
So my partner Todd Wagner and I would get together for lunches, and we were at California Pizza Kitchen in Preston Hollow in Dallas, and he was talking about how we could
2
SPEAKER_01
used this new thing called the internet, this is late 94, early 95, to be able to listen to Indiana University basketball games, because that s where we went to school.
2
SPEAKER_01
And he was like, look, when we would listen to games, we would have somebody in Bloomington, Indiana, have a speakerphone next to a radio, and then we would have a speakerphone in Dallas, and you know, six pack or 12 pack of beer, and we sit around listening to the game, because there was no other way to listen to it.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I was like, okay, my first company, MicroSolutions, you know, I d written software,
2
SPEAKER_01
done network integration, and so I was comfortable digging into it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I was like, okay, let s give it a try.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we started this company called AudioNet and effectively became the first streaming content company on the internet.
2
SPEAKER_01
And we were like, okay, we re not sure how we re going to make this work, but we were able to make it work.
2
SPEAKER_01
And we started going to radio stations and TV stations and
2
SPEAKER_01
you know, music labels and everything, and evolved audionet.com, which was only audio at the beginning, to broadcast.com in 1998, which was audio and video, and became the largest multimedia site on the internet, took it public in July of 1998.
2
SPEAKER_01
It had the largest first day jump in the history of the stock market at the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then a year later, we sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in Yahoo stock.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I owned right around 30% of the company, give or take.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so after taxes, that s what got me there.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, there s a lot of questions there.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the technical challenge of that, you re making it sound easy, but you wrote code, but still in the early days of the internet, how do you figure out how to create this kind of...
2
SPEAKER_00
product of just audio at first and then video at first.
2
SPEAKER_01
A lot of iterations, right, like you talked about.
2
SPEAKER_01
We started in the second bedroom of my house, set up a server.
2
SPEAKER_01
I got an ISDN line, which was a 128k line, and set up, downloaded Netscape server.
2
SPEAKER_01
and then started using different file formats that were progressive loading and allowing people to connect to the server and do a progressive download so that the audio, you can listen to the audio while it was downloading onto your PC.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, was it super choppy?
2
SPEAKER_00
So you were trying to figure out how to do it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, for sure, for sure.
2
SPEAKER_01
It would buffer, it was, yeah, it wasn t good, but it was a start.
2
SPEAKER_00
But it was good enough because it s the first kind of- Yeah, because there was no other competition, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
There was nobody else doing it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so it was like, okay, I can get access to this, this or this.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then there were some third party software companies, Zing and Progressive Networks and others that took it a little bit further.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we partnered with them and I started going to local radio stations where literally we would
2
SPEAKER_01
set up a server right next to it.
2
SPEAKER_01
I had a $49 radio, the highest FM radio that I could find, and we take the output of the audio signal from the radio with these two analog cables, plug it into the server, encode it,
2
SPEAKER_01
and make it available from audionet.com.
2
SPEAKER_01
Then I would go on UUNET bulletin boards, I would go on CompuServe, I would go on Prodigy, I would go on AOL, I d go wherever I could find bodies.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I d say, okay, we ve got this radio station, KLIF in Dallas, it s got Dallas sports and Dallas news and politics.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if you re in an office or you re outside of Dallas,
2
SPEAKER_01
connect to audionet.com, and now you can listen to these things on demand.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s how we started.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it started with one radio station, and then it was five, then it was 10, then it was video content.
2
SPEAKER_01
The laws were different then, so we could literally go out and buy CDs and host them and just let people listen to whatever music.
2
SPEAKER_01
and we went from 10 users a day to 100 to 1,000 to hundreds of thousands to a million over those next four years.
2
SPEAKER_00
How did you find the users?
2
SPEAKER_00
Is it word of mouth?
2
SPEAKER_00
Word of mouth.
2
SPEAKER_00
Just word of mouth.
2
SPEAKER_01
Didn t spend a penny on advertising.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the thing you were focusing on is getting the radio stations and all that?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, radio and TV, anything, any content at all.
2
SPEAKER_00
to pick up the phone?
2
SPEAKER_00
How d you?
2
SPEAKER_01
I would, wherever I could, like everything that was public domain, I d go out and buy a video or a cassette, whatever it was, you know?
2
SPEAKER_01
And this was before the DMs, the Digital Minimum Copyright Act of 90, whenever it kicked in.
2
SPEAKER_01
So literally anything that was audio, we would put online so people could listen to it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if you think about somebody at work, they didn t have a radio most likely.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if you did, you couldn t get reception.
2
SPEAKER_01
Definitely didn t have a TV.
2
SPEAKER_01
But you had a PC, and you had bandwidth available to you.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the companies weren t up on firewalls or anything at that point in time.
2
SPEAKER_01
So our in-office listening during the day just exploded.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because whoever s sitting next to you, what are you listening to?
2
SPEAKER_01
And that was the start of it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then in early 98, we started adding video and just other things.
2
SPEAKER_01
And we ended up with thousands of servers.
2
SPEAKER_01
There was no cloud back then.
2
SPEAKER_01
And just pulling together all those pieces to make it work.
2
SPEAKER_01
But where we really made our money was by taking that network that we had built and then going to corporations and saying, look, it s 1996, 97, 98.
2
SPEAKER_01
And to communicate with your worldwide employees, what they would do is they would go to an auditorium that had a satellite uplink.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then they would have people go to, like,
2
SPEAKER_01
theaters or ballrooms and hotels that had satellite downlinks and then would broadcast, you know, the product introductions, whatever.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so we said to them, look, you re paying millions of dollars to reach all your employees when you can do it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Pay us a half a million dollars and we ll do it just on their PCs at work.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we did, you know, when Intel announced the P90 PC, we, you know, charged them $2 million or whatever to do that.
2
SPEAKER_01
When Motorola announced a new phone or a new product, we would charge them.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so we use the consumer side to do a proof of concept for the network.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then we would take that knowledge and go to corporations and that s how we made our revenue.
2
SPEAKER_01
And there s some selling there with the corporations.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, a lot of selling there, but we re saving them so much money.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they were technology companies.
2
SPEAKER_01
They wanted to be perceived as being leading edge.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so it was win-win.
2
SPEAKER_00
How much technical savvy was required?
2
SPEAKER_00
You said a bunch of servers.
2
SPEAKER_00
At which point do you get more engineers?
2
SPEAKER_00
How much did you understand could do yourself?
2
SPEAKER_00
And then also,
2
SPEAKER_00
once you can t do it all yourself, how much technical savvy is required to understand enough to hire the right people to keep building this innovation?
2
SPEAKER_01
I did all the technology and then we hired engineer after engineer after engineer to implement it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so, wow, yeah, from putting together a multicast network to software to just
2
SPEAKER_01
all these different things.
2
SPEAKER_01
Was this like a scary thing?
2
SPEAKER_01
It s terrifying, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because as we were growing, trying to keep up the scale, and literally we re buying off-the-shelf PCs and then, you know, server cards as the technology advanced, and hard drives, and things would fail, and we would have to, you know, we didn t have machine learning back then to do an analysis of, you know, how to distribute server, you know, resources.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, like there was,
2
SPEAKER_01
There was a time when Bill Clinton and all the Monica Lewinsky stuff happened, they released the audio of their interviews of him or something like that, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
And we literally, I knew at that point in time when that was released, everybody at work was gonna wanna listen to it, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
So we had to take down servers that were doing Chicago Cubs baseball, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
And just make all these on the fly decisions because there was no, we didn t have the tools to analyze or be predictive.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it was all technology-driven and marketing.
2
SPEAKER_00
The acquisition by Yahoo, can you tell the story of that, but also in the broader context of this internet bubble?
2
SPEAKER_00
This is a fascinating part of human history.
2
SPEAKER_01
So on the acquisition side, we were the largest media site on the internet, and it wasn t close.
2
SPEAKER_01
There was nobody close.
2
SPEAKER_01
We were YouTube, and relatively speaking, we would be 10x YouTube relative to the competition, because there was nobody there.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so it became obvious to Yahoo, AOL, and others that they needed a multimedia component.
2
SPEAKER_01
And we had the infrastructure, sales, all that stuff.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so Yahoo, when we went public in 98,
2
SPEAKER_01
or right before I think it was, they made an investment of like $2 million, which gave us a connection to them.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then after we went public, they decided they needed to have multimedia.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so in April of 99, we made a deal, and then July of 2000 is when it closed.
2
SPEAKER_00
And can you explain to me the trickiness of what you did after that?
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, the collar?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so when we sold to Yahoo, we sold for $5.7 billion in stock, not cash.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I looked at, you know,
2
SPEAKER_01
After microsolutions, when I sold that, I took that money, and initially I told my broker I wanted to invest like a 60-year-old man, because I wanted to protect it.
2
SPEAKER_01
But then he started asking me all kinds of questions about all these technologies that I understood, like networks I had installed.
2
SPEAKER_01
We had become one of the top 20, let s say, systems integrators in the country.
2
SPEAKER_01
At one point in time, we were the largest IBM token ring installer in the country.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was crazy, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Banyan, then Blast from the Past.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, so anyway, so these Wall Street bankers, or analysts rather, that were the big analysts of the time would call me up because they would ask my broker, what does he know about this product, this product?
2
SPEAKER_01
And I knew them all, what was working and not working, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
And so the ones that worked,
2
SPEAKER_01
you know, I say that it s working, I see the stock, they say something, the stock would go up 20 bucks, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
So I m like, well, and my broker s like, you need to, you know this better than they do, you need to invest.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I started buying and selling stocks and this was in 1990 and was just killing it.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was making 80, 90, 100% a year over those next four years to the point where guy came in and asked to use my trading history to start a hedge fund.
2
SPEAKER_01
which we did, and I sold within nine months.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was great, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
But the point being, as it goes forward, so when we sold to Yahoo, I already had a lot of experience trading stocks.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I had seen different bubbles come and go, a bubble for PC manufacturers, a bubble for networking manufacturers.
2
SPEAKER_01
They went up, up, up, up, up, and then they came straight down after the hype, or somebody just leapfrogged.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so when we sold to Yahoo, I was like, I ve got a B next to my name.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s all I need or all I want.
2
SPEAKER_01
I don t want to be greedy.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I d seen this story before where stocks get really frothy and go straight down.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I knew that because all of what I had was in stock, I needed to find a way to collar it and protect it.
2
SPEAKER_01
So understanding stocks and trading and options and all that, my broker and I, we went and shorted an index that had Yahoo in it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so the law at the time was you couldn t short any indexes that had more than 5% of that stock in it, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Of the Yahoo stock.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I took pretty much 20 some million dollars, everything I had at the time, and I shorted the index.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is fascinating, by the way, because it s based on your estimation that this is a bubble.
2
SPEAKER_00
Or just mind not wanting to be greedy.
2
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the foundation of this kind of thing is you don t want to be greedy.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, how much money do I need, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, where other people were saying, oh, I think you can go up higher, higher, higher.
2
SPEAKER_01
I went on CNBC and I told them what I had done.
2
SPEAKER_01
And Yahoo Stock had gone up significantly from the time I had collared.
2
SPEAKER_01
And one of the guys, Joe Kernan, was on there, don t you feel stupid now that Yahoo Stock has gone up X percent more?
2
SPEAKER_01
I m like, yeah, I feel real stupid sitting on my jet.
2
SPEAKER_00
But so, I mean, there is some fundamental way in which bubbles are based on this greed.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, for sure, for sure.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and I d seen it before, right, like I just said.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so what I did was we put together a caller where I sold calls and bought puts.
2
SPEAKER_01
And as it turned out, when the market just cratered, I was protected.
2
SPEAKER_01
And over the next two, three years, whatever it was, it converted to cash, paid my taxes, et cetera.
2
SPEAKER_01
But it protected me.
2
SPEAKER_01
And as it turns out, it was called one of the top 10 trades of all time.
2
SPEAKER_01
And what was even more interesting out of that period, my broker at that time was at Goldman Sachs.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I had asked him to see if there was a way to trade the VIX, the volatility index.
2
SPEAKER_01
And there wasn t.
2
SPEAKER_01
one of the people that Goldman that we were working with to try to create this actually left Goldman and created indexes that allowed you to trade the VIX.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s not trivial to understand that it s a bubble.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you re kind of lessening
2
SPEAKER_00
your insight into all of this by saying you just didn t want to be greedy, but you still have to see that it s a bubble.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, yeah, obviously if I thought it was going to keep on going up and there was intrinsic value there, I would have stayed in it.
2
SPEAKER_01
But it wasn t so much Yahoo, it was just the entire industry.
2
SPEAKER_01
Back then, you know, like we re looking at the magic seven or whatever it is stocks now, and people are asking, is it in a bubble?
2
SPEAKER_01
And when
2
SPEAKER_01
I would get into cabs and people would just start talking about internet stocks.
2
SPEAKER_01
There were people creating companies with just a website and going public.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, that s a bubble, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Where there s no intrinsic value at all.
2
SPEAKER_01
And people aren t even trying to make operating cap profits.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re just trying to leverage the frothiness of the stock market.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s a bubble.
2
SPEAKER_01
You don t see that right now.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s not companies, you don t see hardly, you don t see any IPOs right now for that matter.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, I don t think we re in a bubble now, but back then,
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes, I thought we were in a bubble, but that wasn t really the motivating factor.
2
SPEAKER_00
Do you think it s possible we re in a bit of an AI bubble right now?
2
SPEAKER_01
No, because we re not seeing funky AI companies just go public.
2
SPEAKER_01
If all of a sudden we see a rush of companies who are skins on other people s models or just creating models to create models that are going public, then yeah, that s probably the start of a bubble.
2
SPEAKER_01
But that said, my 14-year-old was bragging about buying Nvidia with me in his Robert Hood account.
2
SPEAKER_01
He tells me the order I place it, and he was like, oh yeah, it s going up, up, up.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I m like, yeah, we re not quite there yet, but that s one thing to pay attention to.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we re flirting with it.
2
SPEAKER_00
You said that becoming a billionaire requires luck.
2
SPEAKER_00
Can you explain?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, there s no business plan where you can just start it and say, yeah, I m definitely going to be a billionaire.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can, you know, if I had to start all over, could I start a company that made me a millionaire?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, because I know how to sell and I know technology and I ve learned enough over the years to do that.
2
SPEAKER_01
Could I make 10 million?
2
SPEAKER_01
Probably.
2
SPEAKER_01
100 million?
2
SPEAKER_01
I hope so.
2
SPEAKER_01
But a billion, just something good has got to happen, you know.
2
SPEAKER_01
Timing.
2
SPEAKER_01
Timing, you know, internet stock market was going nuts right when we started, you know, and that certainly I couldn t predict or control.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like AI right now.
3
SPEAKER_01
AI has been around a long, long, long, long time.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the NVIDIA processors, or GPUs rather,
3
SPEAKER_01
You couldn t predict that now s the time that they were going to get to that cost effectiveness where you could create models and train them.
3
SPEAKER_01
And although it s expensive, it s still doable.
3
SPEAKER_01
We had ASICs for custom applications, and we had CPUs that were leading the way.
3
SPEAKER_01
But GPUs were more for gaming and then crypto mining.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then all of a sudden, they were the foundation for AI models.
3
SPEAKER_00
Luck being essential to becoming a billionaire is a beautiful way to see life in general.
3
SPEAKER_00
First of all, I personally think that everything good that s ever happened to me is because of luck.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think that s just a good way of being.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like you re grateful.
3
SPEAKER_00
That said, there s some examples of people that you re like, they seem to have done a lot of, they seem to have gotten lucky a lot.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, we mentioned Jeff Bezos.
3
SPEAKER_00
It seems like,
3
SPEAKER_00
He did a lot of really interesting, powerful decisions for many years with Amazon to make it successful.
3
SPEAKER_01
But he was really able to raise money, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
A lot of money and people were really dismissive of him because they weren t making, they weren t profitable.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we were in an environment where it was possible to raise that money.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, what about somebody you get sometimes feisty with on the internet, Elon, but we couldn t even look at Zuck and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
3
SPEAKER_01
Look, Zuck was just trying to get laid, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And it took off and he wrote some good stuff.
3
SPEAKER_00
Aren t we all?
3
SPEAKER_00
Right, it s that level, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
The foundation of human civilization.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, but yeah, so more power to him, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
You can t take anything away from him, but yeah, Snapchat, same thing, took off.
3
SPEAKER_01
Apps didn t take off in 2007 when the iPhone came out.
3
SPEAKER_01
Apps took off in 2011, 2012.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if you were there with the right app at the right time, and even Facebook, you know, in 2004, the bubble had burst and, you know, the price for computers had fallen enough and kids in school all needed computers or laptops.
3
SPEAKER_01
If he had tried to do something like that, you know, five years earlier, I mean, it was too young, but you know, five years earlier or five years later,
3
SPEAKER_01
you know, or Friendster might ve been the ultimate, or MySpace.
3
SPEAKER_00
Friendster, I remember Friendster.
3
SPEAKER_01
Or MySpace, I had a MySpace account and it was before Facebook.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, the timing s important, but there s like the details of how the product is built, the fundamentals of the product.
3
SPEAKER_01
But that s what gets you, when the opportunity is there, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s what allows you to take advantage of that opportunity and the kismet of it all, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
You ve gotta be, because it wasn t like any of the people I mentioned, there weren t others trying the same thing, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
You had to be able to see it, you had to be able to visualize and put together a plan of some sort, or at least have a path, and then you had to execute on it.
3
SPEAKER_01
and do all those things at the same time, and have the money available to you, because it wasn t like, whether it was Google or Facebook, they raised a shitload of money.
3
SPEAKER_01
It wasn t bootstrapping it that got them there.
3
SPEAKER_00
And raising money is not just about sales, it s about the general feeling of the people with money at that time.
3
SPEAKER_00
And proximity.
3
SPEAKER_01
If Chuck wasn t at Harvard and he was at Miami of Ohio University or he was at Richland Community College, same idea, same person, same execution and nothing.
3
SPEAKER_00
I believe in the power of individuals to find their
3
SPEAKER_00
to realize their potential no matter where they come from, but.
3
SPEAKER_01
I agree, I agree 100% with that, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
But luck is required.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, scale is, the only delta is scale, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
We re not all blessed with the access to the tools that you need to.
3
SPEAKER_01
to hit that grand slam.
3
SPEAKER_00
But then also, a billion is not the only measure of success, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely not, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Everybody defines the success in their own way.
3
SPEAKER_00
How do you define success, Mark Cuban?
3
SPEAKER_01
Waking up every day with a smile, excited about the day.
3
SPEAKER_01
People always say, well, when you get that kind of money, does it make you happy?
3
SPEAKER_01
And my answer always is, if you were happy when you were broke, you re gonna be really, really, really happy when you re rich.
3
SPEAKER_01
But you gotta work on being happy when you re broke, I guess.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, you re just being happy, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
If you were miserable, you know, in your job before, there s a good chance you re still gonna be miserable if that s just who you are.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s a pretty good definition of success, by the way.
3
SPEAKER_00
Thank you.
3
SPEAKER_00
How do you reach that success by way of advice to people?
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, we talked about my dad, my parents.
3
SPEAKER_01
I never looked at my dad and said, okay, you re not successful.
3
SPEAKER_01
He busted his ass.
3
SPEAKER_01
And when he came home, you know,
3
SPEAKER_01
He, we enjoyed our time together, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
There was nothing at any point in time where I felt like, oh, this is miserable, we re awful, we re, you know, we don t have this, we don t have that.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, we celebrated the things we did have and never knew about the things we didn t have, you know?
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I think, you know, you have to be able to find your way to whatever it is that puts a smile on your face every day.
3
SPEAKER_01
Some people can do it and some people can t.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s not always about the smile or the smile on the outside.
3
SPEAKER_00
It could be a smile on the inside.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, whatever it is, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Whatever makes you feel good.
3
SPEAKER_00
The struggle, even the struggle, like with your dad, the really, really hard work can be a fulfilling experience because the struggle leading up to then seeing your kids.
3
SPEAKER_00
Exactly right, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because that was my dad s grand slam, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Seeing three kids go to college, be successful, you know,
3
SPEAKER_01
be able to spend time with him.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that was the other thing, you know, he really made me realize is the most valuable asset isn t the money, it s your time.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s why, you know, from a young age, I wanted to retire because I wanted to experience everything that I possibly could in this life.
3
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, he got joy from us.
3
SPEAKER_01
I get joy from my kids.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s the most special thing you ever can have.
3
SPEAKER_00
Beautifully said.
3
SPEAKER_00
You have made some mistakes in your life.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, a lot of them.
3
SPEAKER_00
One of the bigger ones on the financial side, we could say is Uber.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we call that not doing something.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it wasn t a mistake, it was just, I mean it was a mistake.
3
SPEAKER_01
I always try to look at mistakes, the things you did that didn t turn out, as opposed to things you did to, you know, the negative.
3
SPEAKER_01
But can you tell the story of that?
3
SPEAKER_00
And maybe it s just interesting, because it is illustrative of how to know when a thing is going to be big and not, and what are the fundamentals of it, and how to take the risk and not, and all this kind of stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the backstory of that is Bill Gurley came to me and said, Mark, there s this guy, Travis, that has this company, Red Swoosh, which is a peer-to-peer networking company that I think you can help.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I invested and would spend a lot of time with Travis.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s funny, because back then, that was like 2006, I was an investor at Box.net with Aaron Levy.
3
SPEAKER_01
And oh, there was one other company
3
SPEAKER_01
But there were three of them where there d be emails between, you know, where I d introduce them and we d all talk in these emails and they d all gone to have astronomical success, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
But so Red Swoosh had its issues, you know, because I was looking at peer-to-peer as kind of stealing bandwidth from the internet providers when bandwidth was a scarce commodity.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so, you know, what Travis did with that, though, was great.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, he convinced gaming companies who wanted to do downloads of the clients for those games to use his peer-to-peer on Red Swoosh.
3
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, he busted his ass, and I think he sold it for $18 million.
3
SPEAKER_01
So he did well.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so it was natural for him to come to me, and I still had the emails, you know, and asked me about Uber Cab.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I thought, okay, this is a great idea.
3
SPEAKER_01
I really, really like it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I said, you re going to, and he showed me his budgets and I think they were raising money at 10 or $15 million or whatever.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I m like, your biggest challenge is going to be, you re going to have to fight all the incumbent taxi commissions.
3
SPEAKER_01
They re going to want to put you out of business.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s going to be a challenge.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think you don t have enough money designated for marketing to get all that done.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I said, I d invest, but not quite at that valuation.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_01
Never came back to me.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, there s some lessons there connected to what you re doing now.
3
SPEAKER_00
We ll talk about it, cost plus drugs.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like looking at an industry that seems like there s a lot of complexity involved, but it s like hungry for revolution.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the cabs are that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, for sure, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
They were dominated by an insulated few.
3
SPEAKER_01
They were not very transparent.
3
SPEAKER_01
You didn t know the intricacies.
3
SPEAKER_01
They were very politically driven and old boy, incestuous network.
3
SPEAKER_01
And like I told him, Travis, the best thing about you is you ll run through walls and break down barriers.
3
SPEAKER_01
The bad thing about you is you ll run through walls, even if you don t have to.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and there you kind of have to see, is it possible to raise enough money?
3
SPEAKER_00
Is it possible to do all this?
3
SPEAKER_00
Is it possible to break through?
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s kind of a fascinating success story, what Uber is.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think he tried to go too big.
3
SPEAKER_01
He had too big an ambition, which cost him in the end, not financially and personally, but just in terms of being able to stick it out with them.
3
SPEAKER_01
But, you know, that s what makes him a great entrepreneur.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s a fascinating success story.
3
SPEAKER_00
You have like certain companies like Airbnb just kind of go into this thing that we take completely for granted.
3
SPEAKER_01
And change it all.
3
SPEAKER_01
Just change it all.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, Belinda Johnson, who worked as our general counsel at Broadcast.com, was, you know, was Brian s GC and chief operating officer.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, yeah, they had a smart, smart, smart, smart team.
3
SPEAKER_00
and they believed in it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s a beautiful story, because you re like, all right, all the things that annoy you about this world, like they re inefficient and just seem like a pain in the ass.
3
SPEAKER_01
I probably would have said no, like a lot of people did to Airbnb, because I m like, I don t want people sleeping in my bed.
3
SPEAKER_00
I would have too.
3
SPEAKER_00
I was like, this is not going to work.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ve done like couch surfing and stuff, and it was always, it didn t seem right.
3
SPEAKER_00
It didn t seem like you could do this at a large scale.
3
SPEAKER_01
To monetize it, yeah, but he did.
3
SPEAKER_01
More power to him.
3
SPEAKER_00
In 2000, I think January, you purchased the majority stake in the NBA team Dallas Mavericks for 285 million.
3
SPEAKER_00
So at this point, maybe you can correct me, but it was one of the worst performing teams in franchise history.
3
SPEAKER_01
How did you help turn it around?
3
SPEAKER_01
I had this big, tall guy named Dirk Nowitzki, and I let him be Dirk Nowitzki, and I got out of the way.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I think more than anything else, there was the turnaround on the business side, and then there was the turnaround on the basketball side.
3
SPEAKER_01
And on the basketball side, I just went in there and immediately said, whatever it takes to win, that s what we re going to do.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, back then, they had three or four coaches that were responsible for everything.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, okay, we spend more money training people on PC software than we do developing the most important assets of the business.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I made the decision to go out there and hire like 15 different development coaches, one for each player.
3
SPEAKER_01
And everybody thought I was just insane.
3
SPEAKER_01
But, you know, it sent the message that we were gonna do whatever it took to win.
3
SPEAKER_01
And once the guys believe that winning was the goal as opposed to just making money, attitudes change, effort went up, and the rest is history.
3
SPEAKER_00
So the assets of the business here are the players.
3
SPEAKER_00
The players.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, for sure.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then on the business side,
3
SPEAKER_01
The first question I asked myself is, what business are we in?
3
SPEAKER_01
And I really didn t know the answer immediately.
3
SPEAKER_01
But within the first few months, it was obvious that the entire NBA thought we were in the business of basketball.
3
SPEAKER_01
We were not.
3
SPEAKER_01
We were in the experience business.
3
SPEAKER_01
When you think about sporting events that you ve been to, you don t remember the score.
3
SPEAKER_01
You don t remember the home runs or the dunks.
3
SPEAKER_01
You remember who you re with.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you remember why you went, oh, it was my first day with the girl who s now my wife, or I went with my buddies and he threw up on the person in front of us.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, my dad took me, my aunt, my uncle took me.
3
SPEAKER_01
Those are the experiences you remember.
3
SPEAKER_01
And once I conveyed to our people that this is what we were selling, that what happened in the arena off the court was just as important as what happened on the court, if not more so.
3
SPEAKER_01
because if mom or dad are bringing the 10-year-old, you have to keep them occupied because they have short attention spans.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I would get into fights with the NBA, put aside the refs, but getting into fights in the NBA, I would say NBA, nothing but attorneys, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because they had no marketing skills whatsoever.
3
SPEAKER_01
And to their credit, they realized that was a problem and started bringing in better and better and better marketing people.
3
SPEAKER_00
So part of the selling is you re selling the team, selling the sport, selling,
3
SPEAKER_00
the people, the idea, all of it, like just the... Well, yeah, the experience.
3
SPEAKER_01
So have you ever been to an NBA game?
3
SPEAKER_01
Miami Heat.
3
SPEAKER_01
Do you remember walking into the arena and you feel the energy, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s what makes it special.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the energy is everything, especially playoff games.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, for sure, right.
3
SPEAKER_01
And even a regular season game, right, even against the worst team, you know, that s where we get, you know,
3
SPEAKER_01
Because the tickets tend to be a little bit cheaper on the resale market, that s where parents will bring their kids.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so you hear kids screaming the entire game.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the parents are thrilled to death, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
They got to do something with their kids.
3
SPEAKER_01
The kids are thrilled to death because they got to see basketball, an NBA game, and scream at the top of their lungs.
3
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, if it turns out to be a close game and that ball s in the air, and if it goes in, you know, everybody s hugging and high-fiving people you ve never seen before in your life.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if it misses, you re commiserating with people you ve never seen before.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s such a unique experience that s unique to sports.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we never sold that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s exactly what we started selling.
3
SPEAKER_00
I have to say, like, just going to that game turned me around on basketball, because I m more of a football guy, so basketball wasn t like the main sport.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, oh, wow, okay.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s fun.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s different, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the energy in a stadium is completely different than the energy in an arena.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, in the stadium, particularly if it doesn t have a roof, it s hard to bottle that energy.
3
SPEAKER_01
You feel it and you see, like, I m from Pittsburgh, so there s the terrible towels and people screaming defense and everything at Steelers games, but in an arena, the energy level is just,
3
SPEAKER_01
Indescribable.
3
SPEAKER_00
So how much of it is the selling the tickets in person, but also versus what you see on TV.
3
SPEAKER_00
So when you re owning a team, do you get any of the cut for the what s show on TV?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, we, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
So there s a TV deal that s done with either a local TV broadcaster and we get all of that or a network broadcaster like ABCC, ESPN, TNT, whatever.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then we get one 30th of that.
3
SPEAKER_00
So what role does the TV play in turning a team around?
3
SPEAKER_01
It keeps fans connected.
3
SPEAKER_01
Look, when the team is doing really well, it s easy, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
There s more viewers, everybody s more excited.
3
SPEAKER_01
And when you re not, there s still going to be hardcore fans and general fans and kids that like to watch the game.
3
SPEAKER_00
What about the personality of the people in the stands?
3
SPEAKER_00
Clearly, you re part of the legend of the team.
3
SPEAKER_00
because you re literally there going wild.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, screaming, yeah, the whole game, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s funny, you know, the way I am here is how I am, you know, 24 hours a day, unless there s a Mavs game, you know, and for whatever reason, that s where I let out all that stress and frustration.
3
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, I mean, it s not so, the fans, you know, the sixth man, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
We need fans to bring that energy and, you know, amplifying that as much as we can is important.
3
SPEAKER_00
You ve had a beef recently on Twitter on X with Elon over DEI programs.
3
SPEAKER_00
What to you is the essence of the disagreement there?
3
SPEAKER_01
I wouldn t call it a beef, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s just- It s a bit of fun?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s fun for me, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
I just, you know,
3
SPEAKER_01
It s his platform.
3
SPEAKER_01
He gets to run it any way he pleases.
3
SPEAKER_01
He pays for that right.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I have total respect for whatever choices he makes, even if I don t agree with him.
3
SPEAKER_01
But because it s his platform, people are less likely to disagree with him, particularly somebody who s got a platform themselves.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so when we start talking about DEI and it s just de facto racist and this stuff, stuff that I just think is nonsense.
3
SPEAKER_01
I have no problem sharing my opinion.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if he disagrees, okay, he can disagree.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t care.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s fun to engage, but he doesn t really engage.
3
SPEAKER_01
He just comes back with snark comments, which is his choice.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, in your comments, well, you do a bit of snark, too.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, a little bit.
3
SPEAKER_00
But you re pretty, let s say, rigorous in your response, so there is some exchange of ideas, there s some snark, there s some
4
SPEAKER_01
on all that kind of stuff, and you do voice the opinion that represents a large number of people, and it s great.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s what s, it s really beautiful.
4
SPEAKER_01
But just lingering on the topic, what to you is the good and the bad of DEI programs?
4
SPEAKER_00
Really simple, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
D is diversity, and that means you just expand your pool of potential applicants to people who you might not otherwise have access to.
4
SPEAKER_00
you know, to look where you didn t look before, to look where other people aren t looking for quality employees.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s simple.
4
SPEAKER_00
And the E in equity means when you hire somebody, you put them in a position to succeed.
4
SPEAKER_00
The I inclusion is when you ve hired somebody and they may not be typical, if you will, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
You show them some love and give them the support they need so they can do their job as best they can and feel comfortable and confident going to work.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s that simple.
4
SPEAKER_01
So that s a beautiful ideal.
4
SPEAKER_01
When it s implemented, implemented poorly, perhaps, or in a way that doesn t reach that ideal.
4
SPEAKER_01
do you see maybe when it s quota-based, do you see that it can result in essentially racism towards Asian people and white people, for example?
4
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot to unpack there, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
So first, you can t do quotas.
4
SPEAKER_00
They re illegal unless you re, and I m not the lawyer on this subject, but unless you re trying to repair something that s happened in the past, like some discrimination that s happened in the past.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s not quota-based, and I think that s,
4
SPEAKER_00
really just kind of a straw man that people put out there.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now, does that mean that there aren t DEI programs that are implemented poorly?
4
SPEAKER_00
Of course not.
4
SPEAKER_00
There are everything that s implemented poorly in one company to another, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Sales, marketing, human resources.
4
SPEAKER_00
You can pick any element of business and find companies that implement it poorly.
4
SPEAKER_00
But that s the beauty of capitalism in a free market, or mostly free market, where if you make these choices, and they are the wrong choices, you re gonna lose your best people.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re not gonna be able to hire the best people.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re not gonna execute on your business plans in the way that we discussed, regardless of the size of the company.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it also, I think,
4
SPEAKER_00
depends on where you re having the discussion.
4
SPEAKER_00
So when I m in a different group of people off of X, the feedback s completely different, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
But to your question of reverse racism, yes, it happens.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, because people are people.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s no human being that is 100% objective.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s also,
4
SPEAKER_00
There s very, very, very few jobs that can be determined on a purely quantitative basis, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
How do you tell one janitor from the other who s the best, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
How do you tell one salesperson that you re hiring versus another you re hiring?
4
SPEAKER_00
Because they haven t sold your product yet, so you don t know.
4
SPEAKER_00
We talked earlier about firing people because you made mistakes.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes, there s discrimination against any group, white, Asian, black, green, orange, whatever it may be.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I truly believe that there s far more discrimination against people of color than there are people who are white.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think it s become a straw man that reverse discrimination because of DEI is prevalent or near ubiquitous.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, much of American history was defined by intense radical racism and sexism.
4
SPEAKER_01
But in the recent years, there was a correction, and I think the nature of the criticism is that there s an overcorrection where DEI programs at universities and companies are often, when they re not doing their job well, are often hard to criticize.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because when you criticize them within the company or so on, they have a very strong immune system.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you criticize a DEI program,
4
SPEAKER_01
it seems like it s very easy to be called racist, and if you re called racist or sexist, that s a sticky label.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you re getting into the culture of organizations, right, and leadership within organizations, and accepting any type of criticism, put aside DEI.
4
SPEAKER_00
When I criticized the referees at the NBA,
4
SPEAKER_00
I got fined, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
That was their option.
4
SPEAKER_00
I knew what I was getting into, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Not that they re completely analogous, but it s cause and effect.
4
SPEAKER_00
If I m in a major company and I m publicly criticizing or even internally criticizing a sales plan or a product,
4
SPEAKER_00
our product sucks, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Or like there was a Google engineer that got fired for saying, you know, Google had AGI, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And nobody believed they did and they knew that created problems.
4
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t DEI related, but it was, you know, saying something publicly that was to the, in the CEO s eyes, to the detriment of the company, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
So I think those are all analogous.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you re trying to accomplish something within an organization because you think there s a problem and there s people speaking out saying, look,
4
SPEAKER_00
you were getting it wrong.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think I m a victim of all this and the company s right then, you know, leadership has got to make a decision.
4
SPEAKER_00
Do they agree or not agree?
4
SPEAKER_00
Are they right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Are they wrong?
4
SPEAKER_00
Is it to the
4
SPEAKER_00
Is it positive or negative to the company?
4
SPEAKER_00
And you decide.
4
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, this conversation that conservatives are being silenced in organizations now, I just, I haven t seen it.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, I ve talked to, and then the other side of your question, I think I m packing it, is,
4
SPEAKER_00
what s driving all this, put aside universities for one, in corporate America.
4
SPEAKER_00
When I talk to people in corporate America about DEI, they always start talking about ideology, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And like I ve talked to Bill Ackman, who you ve had on, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And when I asked him, well, Bill, you run your own companies, who s telling you what to do?
4
SPEAKER_00
They are.
4
SPEAKER_00
Whose day?
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s the universities, you know, the people who have this ideology of DEI.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m like, did they force you?
4
SPEAKER_00
Did they coerce you?
4
SPEAKER_00
Did you lose control of your company?
4
SPEAKER_00
No, it s not me, it happens to other people.
4
SPEAKER_00
Then I talk to other people, same thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I get, you know, try not to go one-on-one and tip Twitter conversations on this topic.
4
SPEAKER_00
So in the DMs, I ll talk to people who are really conservative,
4
SPEAKER_00
And I ll ask the same question.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I ll be like, well, who s forcing you to do this?
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s the ideology that s everywhere.
4
SPEAKER_00
Didn t you see the Harvard thing, you know, and University of North Carolina?
4
SPEAKER_00
I m like, I ve never had anybody try to push me in this direction to do this.
4
SPEAKER_00
This was my business choice.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m not trying to tell other people you have to do this.
4
SPEAKER_00
You make your own business choices.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so where companies have made their business choices, and if somebody doesn t feel confident or comfortable with it,
4
SPEAKER_00
they may feel they re being discriminated against.
4
SPEAKER_00
There was something I just read in the Wall Street Journal where the Wall Street Journal had a company interview 2 million people, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And the difficulty in firing and how people, when they were fired, 40% of the people who were fired felt like it was wrong that they were doing a great job.
4
SPEAKER_00
yet they then have talked about the HR person going through the hassle of trying to explain to this person through performance reviews that they weren t doing a good job, yet the people still thought they were doing a great job despite being told they re not doing a good job, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
So I see that as being an analogous to all this, you know, this huffing and puffing about reverse discriminations and conservatives not being able to speak up because
4
SPEAKER_00
If 40% of people who have been fired don t believe they should have been fired, there s a disconnect somewhere in how you think you re doing your job.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if you just feel like, I can t speak up because of it, because you re white and that doesn t comport well with DEI programs,
4
SPEAKER_00
a lot of things are going to happen, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Either that s going to come up in your performance review, HR or your boss is going to have to address it in some way.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s going to get to HR at some level, and then decisions are going to have to be made.
4
SPEAKER_00
And you can t just fire somebody because they spoke up, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Somebody s going to have to communicate with you.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I think a lot of, I just don t trust the supposed volume that,
4
SPEAKER_00
people say it s happening at versus everything I ve read and seen.
4
SPEAKER_00
And when I talk to people in positions of authority within organizations and ask them who s forcing them to implement these ideologies, nobody says yes, that there is somebody.
4
SPEAKER_00
But on Twitter, it sounds great.
4
SPEAKER_01
It is true for conservatives, but in general, you can sell books, you can get likes when you talk about this ideology.
4
SPEAKER_01
And there s a degree to which, is this woke ideology in the room with us right now?
4
SPEAKER_01
Meaning like, it s this boogie monster that we re all kind of... Or is it a positive?
4
SPEAKER_01
I guess another way to say that is they don t highlight a lot of the positive progress that s been made in the positive version of the word woke in terms of correcting some of the wrongs done in the past.
4
SPEAKER_01
But that said, if you ask people in Russia, a lot of them will say,
4
SPEAKER_01
there s no propaganda here, there s no censorship and all that kind of stuff.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s sometimes hard to see when you re in it that this kind of stuff is happening.
4
SPEAKER_01
It does seem difficult to criticize DEI programs, not horribly difficult, terrible, they re this monster that infiltrates everything, but it is difficult and it requires great leadership.
4
SPEAKER_00
So where have you criticized it and been condemned, academic or?
4
SPEAKER_00
Academic, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
4
SPEAKER_00
Academic, let s, two different worlds.
4
SPEAKER_01
Companies and academic, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
Two different worlds.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I also think it s not
4
SPEAKER_01
I really wanna point my finger at the failure of leadership, of basically firing mediocre people, like people that are not good at their job.
4
SPEAKER_01
The problem to me is DEI s defense mechanism, like immune system is so strong that the shitty people don t get fired.
4
SPEAKER_01
So the vision, the ideal of DEI is a beautiful ideal.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s just like,
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, maybe it s because I m an entrepreneur when I see an ideal that, you know, you try to implement it and support it and get to that point.
4
SPEAKER_00
But universities and companies are night and day different, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
I can see an argument for the ideology in a university.
4
SPEAKER_00
I can see, you know, you look at the amount of money spent on it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so while the goal is right, the way they implement it in universities, the way they implement most things in universities is wrong.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s a reason why tuition has gone up a multitude of or a multiple of inflation.
4
SPEAKER_00
They re not well-run organizations across the board.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I m not going to argue with that at all.
4
SPEAKER_00
So when you ve seen me argue with DEI, I haven t waded into DEI and universities at all.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s mostly focused on companies. 100%.
4
SPEAKER_00
right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Because that s where I exist.
4
SPEAKER_00
But at the same time, I read Christopher Ruffro s book, where he talks about the genealogy of wokeism and ideology.
4
SPEAKER_00
But then he gets to the point, and I hope I m remembering this right, where he says that the response to it is decentralized activism, if you will.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s not the word he used to try to counter that DEI.
4
SPEAKER_00
And
4
SPEAKER_00
that seems to me to be counter to the whole conservative movement right now, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Other than school boards, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Where it s centralized and, you know, the Republican candidate is all about centralized power in him.
4
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, I, to me, that s just a conflict and a lot of the underpinning of this, of the whole DEI conversation that a lot of it, and a lot of which goes through Christopher Ruffro right now.
4
SPEAKER_01
Let s continue on a theme of fun exchanges on the internet.
4
SPEAKER_01
So Elon tweeted, the fundamental axiomatic flaw of the woke mind virus is that the weaker parties always right, in parentheses, even if they want you to die.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you responded at length, but the beginning is, the fundamental axiomatic flaw of the anti-woke mind is that it allows groups with historical power to play the victim by taking anecdotal examples and packaging them into conjured conspiratorial ideology that threatens to upend the power structures they have been depending on.
4
SPEAKER_01
So.
4
SPEAKER_00
He says it all, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, there s a tension there.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes, but both can be abused, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
Both positions of power can be abused.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s power in DEI, and there s shitty people that can crave power and hold onto power and sacrifice their ideals.
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay, put aside universities, okay?
4
SPEAKER_00
Damn it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, I just- Because I m not gonna argue that universities implement DEI well, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And I m not gonna tell you that,
4
SPEAKER_00
you know, they need to be spending 20 some million dollars a year on DEI positions.
4
SPEAKER_00
To me, that s insane.
4
SPEAKER_00
Do I look at the Harvard and North Carolina decision and say it was a great decision?
4
SPEAKER_00
No, because, you know, I think having a diverse student body helps make for kids who are better prepared for the real world.
4
SPEAKER_00
but I m not running a university, so it s not my choice.
4
SPEAKER_00
Maybe at some point in the future I will, but not now.
4
SPEAKER_00
And in terms of the corporate side of it, who s telling anybody what to do?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, maybe you can give me some help.
4
SPEAKER_01
Sure, I m here to help you, Lex.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s an example in the AI world of,
4
SPEAKER_01
a system called Gemini One Five.
4
SPEAKER_00
Everybody was black or whatever, people of color.
4
SPEAKER_00
George Washington was black, Nazis were black.
4
SPEAKER_00
So why is it when that came out, it was a big uproar, but when somebody, so who was it?
4
SPEAKER_00
One of the people who were trying to fuck with me.
4
SPEAKER_00
I forget which one.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s so many.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
He pointed out to Elon that Grok, Elon s AI, was woke when it answered certain questions.
4
SPEAKER_00
And other people have pointed out other things to Elon about Grok, whatever, however it s pronounced, that was leaning left or woke, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And Elon s response was, oh, it ll change, it s a mistake, we re fixing it.
4
SPEAKER_00
When it happens to Gemini and Google, it s the end of the world.
4
SPEAKER_00
Look how woke they are, and it s a reflection of all their culture.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now Google comes out and says it s a mistake, and then they dox the guy who is the product manager or whatever of that product, and then they go back and look at his old tweets and show that he s very left-leaning and very DEI supportive, and that s the end of the world.
4
SPEAKER_01
it s not the end of the world, but Google s so much dependent on trust, that trust that Google search has as objective as possible channel into the world of information.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so that brand is really important for us.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, see, you re over, you re giving them too much power.
4
SPEAKER_00
And maybe I m not recognizing the power, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
So I ll tell you a personal experience.
4
SPEAKER_00
Up until,
4
SPEAKER_00
a month ago maybe, if you put in keto gummies, shark tank keto gummies into Google, it would show up with scammy ads.
4
SPEAKER_00
Scam ad after scam ad, and I would get emails up until a month ago from elderly people asking me why the gummies weren t working and why the companies were charging all this money on a month-by-month basis when they tried to cancel.
4
SPEAKER_00
And they said it was the number one deal on Shark Tank of all time, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
It was a mistake.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, there s fraud, there s mistakes, but the mistakes... No, but why didn t Google fix it, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
The distance didn t happen once over one week, over two weeks, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And because it was hard to fix.
4
SPEAKER_00
As it turns out, I was working with them to try to find a fix.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we would both look at the same page.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if you were inside of Google, within the google.com domain, it would show one page.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you were outside of Google,
5
SPEAKER_02
it will show another and it took us looking at it at the same time for anybody to realize it.
5
SPEAKER_02
Meaning that there s a lot of technology problems that are hard to fix.
5
SPEAKER_00
They re super complex and we could talk about it forever with social media.
5
SPEAKER_00
The criticism towards Google, towards other companies when they re based in Silicon Valley, there could be an ideological drift into
5
SPEAKER_00
a ideological bubble out of which the technology is created, and they could be blind to the obvious bias that comes inherent to them.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, but they ve got billions of customers who are not gonna, so what you re saying is the free market stops with artificial intelligence, that people don t pay attention and respond, that Google doesn t listen to the responses, that people inside of Google will ignore their own best financial interest,
5
SPEAKER_02
and even their own best personal interest, because they know they re going to get doxxed now by Elon and others.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so I just don t see that.
5
SPEAKER_02
And Elon s not allowed to make those same mistakes, but Google isn t.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh no, Elon is 100% should be criticized for the ridiculousness of all the statements that he makes about various products.
5
SPEAKER_00
He s having a bit of fun like you are also.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I also believe in the free market, but it s not always efficient.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s like a delay.
5
SPEAKER_01
It just takes time, yeah, it s fine.
5
SPEAKER_00
So which is why Elon is important when calling out, I think overstating the criticism of Gemini, but Elon and others are just- Gemini wasn t even a fully available public product yet.
5
SPEAKER_00
it s still a bias that resonates with people.
5
SPEAKER_02
That s the way neural networks work though, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
That s why there ll be millions of models because weights and biases put it together.
5
SPEAKER_02
You know, a neural network.
5
SPEAKER_00
No, so like the black George Washington,
5
SPEAKER_00
is a correction on top of the foundation model to keep it, quote unquote, sort of safe.
5
SPEAKER_00
One of the big criticisms of all the models, frankly, probably even Grok, a little bit less so, is they re trying to be really conservative in the sense of trying to be conservative.
5
SPEAKER_00
careful not to say crazy shit.
5
SPEAKER_00
Because we don t know how the thing.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s brand new and we know what happens, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
And they do it on the front end with prompts and they try to do it on the back end with the neural networks that are underneath them, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
And it doesn t always work and that s why there s going to be millions of models rather than just four foundational models or five that everybody uses.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, I guess the main criticism is you want to have some transparency of all the teams that are involved, and that this kind of, to the degree there s a left-leaning ideology within the companies, it doesn t affect the product.
5
SPEAKER_02
But that s the beauty of the free market.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that s where the market corrects it, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
And not only from the outside, because everybody you know is going to test it, like when YouTube first came out, well, not first came out, after Google bought them, there used to be
5
SPEAKER_02
different commands you could give it, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
There were prompt commands that you could give it.
5
SPEAKER_02
And you could find all the nasty porn that got loaded before they kicked it off, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
And it was just the nastiest shit ever.
5
SPEAKER_02
And even now, to this day, if there s some horrific, tragic event, somebody s loading it up, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
Now, I know that s not direct to your point of internal influence to the output, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
But people on the outside are gonna check for that now.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s almost like the new bug contest to try to find bugs in software.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then on the inside, if it s all left-leaning and all you have is left-leaning employees because most conservatives won t want to work there then, again, that s self-correcting as well.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s the hope.
5
SPEAKER_00
But it can self-correct in different kinds of ways.
5
SPEAKER_00
You can have a different company
5
SPEAKER_00
that competes and becomes more conserved.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, my worry is that it kind of becomes like two different worlds where there s like... It already is.
5
SPEAKER_00
No, come on.
5
SPEAKER_00
Don t give up.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I m not giving up.
5
SPEAKER_02
So where does this go is the question.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_02
Right.
5
SPEAKER_02
What happens next?
5
SPEAKER_02
And I mean, going back, I mean, I ve been in so many PC
5
SPEAKER_02
revolutions, right, or evolutions, where porn was the big issue, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
Now we don t even talk about porn being an issue, even though, you know, every post on Twitter now has, you know, link in bio.
5
SPEAKER_02
for a porn post, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
We don t even think that s a negative anymore.
5
SPEAKER_02
That s just an accepted thing.
5
SPEAKER_02
And now it s become very, where are your politics on Twitter?
5
SPEAKER_02
But again, as you extend that and things grow,
5
SPEAKER_02
as AI models become more efficient and trainable for a lot less money or even locally on a PC or a phone, we re all gonna have our own models.
5
SPEAKER_02
And there s gonna be millions and millions and millions of models and not just foundational models.
5
SPEAKER_02
Now maybe they re built some on open source, maybe it ll be copy-pasta where you can just cut and paste and create your own model and train it yourself.
5
SPEAKER_02
Maybe it ll be mixture of experts where, you know, maybe it ll be a meta front end, like we re working on a project where we take 30 different AI models and there s just a meta search engine where it searches all of them and you can compare all the outputs and see what you think is the best, kind of like a search engine, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
Because you might get, is DEI good, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
You know, is the COVID vaccine good, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
You re gonna get a variety of outputs and you have to make that decision yourself.
5
SPEAKER_02
That s what I think is going to happen with AI as well because I think brands, there s no way the Mayo Clinic and the Harvard Medical School are just going to contribute all their IP to CHAP GPT or Gemini or whatever.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s going to have to be licensed or they re going to do their own.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean that s a very hopeful message, but that said, you know, human history doesn t always autocorrect really quickly, self-correct really quickly.
5
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes you get into this very painful things.
5
SPEAKER_00
You have Stalin, you have Hitler,
5
SPEAKER_00
you can get to places very quickly where the ideological thing just builds on itself and like you know... Twitter is not real world you know there s there s 27 it s not real world that s true yeah yes but you could still have a nation captured by an ideology i think
5
SPEAKER_00
America has been really good at having these two, blue and red, always at tension with each other, dividing the populace, and in the process of doing that, figuring stuff out.
5
SPEAKER_00
Like almost like playing devil s advocate, but like in real life.
5
SPEAKER_02
And that s fair and that s right, you know, as opposed to Pravda telling you everything you wanna know, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
And everybody believing it, because there s control of everything, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
And so going back to what you said earlier, people in Russia don t think, you know, invading Ukraine, it s, you know, a lot of them see it as a positive, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
I m sure you have relatives and friends who think, you know, it s the best thing that ever happened, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
Because they believe in Putin.
5
SPEAKER_00
They re denazifying Ukraine.
5
SPEAKER_00
They re removing the Nazis from Ukraine.
5
SPEAKER_02
Right, because that s exactly what Putin said.
5
SPEAKER_02
And, you know, we don t have
5
SPEAKER_02
one uniform media outlet.
5
SPEAKER_02
That s the difference.
5
SPEAKER_02
Even though people like to talk about mainstream media as being the source of a lot of the friction, there is no such thing as mainstream media anymore.
5
SPEAKER_02
Fox is the biggest cable news channel with the biggest audience,
5
SPEAKER_02
And they call everybody else mainstream media.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s insane the things that we accept from our sources of information.
5
SPEAKER_02
To me, that s the bigger problem.
5
SPEAKER_02
The bigger problem is trying to figure out what is free speech and what is the line of tolerance for free speech.
5
SPEAKER_02
And at what point does hateful free speech crowd out other people?
5
SPEAKER_02
Putin s the master of that.
5
SPEAKER_02
You re going to jail or you re going to be dead if you disagree.
5
SPEAKER_02
God help us if we ever get to that point here.
5
SPEAKER_02
The person who controls the algorithm controls the world, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
And if you are committed to one specific platform as your singular source of information or affiliated platforms, then whoever controls the algorithm or the programming there controls you.
5
SPEAKER_02
In a lot of respects.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I think that s where our biggest problem has been.
5
SPEAKER_02
We get people attached to specific platforms and apps and media outlets and they become part of that team and they identify as such and either you re part of the team or you re not.
5
SPEAKER_02
And that, to me, is the fundamental problem.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s not woke ideology, because I never felt any pressure to make the choices that I ve chosen, including diversity, equity, and inclusion.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I ve never forced anybody or told anybody to do it.
5
SPEAKER_02
I just said, here s my experiences.
5
SPEAKER_02
Whenever I ve talked to people who talk about the woke ideology, no one ever got forced.
5
SPEAKER_02
I mean, if you look at Dylan McDermott,
5
SPEAKER_02
If there was a way to gauge the number of impressions that she had, right, and where they sourced from, I d be willing to bet any amount of money that 90% plus of the impressions and discussions of Dylan McDermott were on right-leaning media.
5
SPEAKER_00
Several things, actually, let s even go there.
5
SPEAKER_00
You ve gotten a bit of a beef with, again, fun, with Jordan Peterson about this.
5
SPEAKER_02
That s the guy whose name I couldn t think of, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
So the topic there was the gender transition and Dylan Mulvaney.
5
SPEAKER_00
Hugh, can you explain the nature of the beef?
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s an interesting claim you re making that most of the people who are concerned about this are conservatives.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, just the point is that if you looked at impressions, like when you run an ad, you re curious about impressions and who sees them, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
But if you look at the impressions related to Dylan McDermott,
5
SPEAKER_02
I would, like I just said, I bet 90% or more were in conservative media.
5
SPEAKER_02
And, you know, I don t know how many followers she had, 250,000 followers or whatever, when the Bud Light ad came out.
5
SPEAKER_02
And if it weren t for Kid Rock shooting, you know, shooting at Dylan McDermott Bud Light cans,
5
SPEAKER_02
she d be long forgotten.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but most of the people that care about censorship are gonna be free speech advocates.
5
SPEAKER_00
So like most people that care about Putin suppressing speech or anybody else suppressing speech are going to be like libertarians.
5
SPEAKER_00
So there s probably an explanation of that.
5
SPEAKER_00
The criticism that Jordan Peterson could provide, I guess he said that Dylan Mulvaney popularized
5
SPEAKER_00
the kind of mutilation, in his view, that can affect, it s a very serious, life-changing process that a person goes through, and when that s applied to a child, it can do a lot of harm to a person.
5
SPEAKER_02
But my point still holds.
5
SPEAKER_02
I don t know how many kids were following.
5
SPEAKER_02
And you can look at the followers list.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s not like it s hidden, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
Back then, if they had 250,000 followers, and now we re on TikTok, where he might get 50-some thousand views or likes, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
I don t know how many views, but likes.
5
SPEAKER_02
I ve never seen any evidence that Dylan McDermott influenced people to transition their gender.
5
SPEAKER_02
As he transitioned to her, it was documented on TikTok over the course of a year.
5
SPEAKER_02
And again, when you go back and look at the views on those TikToks, it wasn t, you know, it wasn t, like, enormous.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but the trends start, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
It could be...
5
SPEAKER_00
What worries people is for young kids, there to be a trend of, especially when you feel like an outsider, you feel not yourself, less than yourself, all this kind of stuff that kids feel like, that if it s, because popular enough as a trend, you would gender transition.
5
SPEAKER_00
without meaning to do that is just part of a trend.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s the worry that I have.
5
SPEAKER_02
That s a big stretch, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
To think that all the things that have to happen before you transition gender, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
And I m not saying kids might identify, you know, find it cool or, you know, in the moment, expedient, if you will, to dress up as the other gender.
5
SPEAKER_02
Great, who cares, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
But to go through the actual physical transition,
5
SPEAKER_02
I don t remember what the numbers were that I read, but I do remember that the latest numbers that came out in terms of transitioning were from JAMA, which is a medical association that said from 2021 to 2022, the numbers went down.
5
SPEAKER_02
But the bigger point is there are no numbers for 2023 when post-Dylan McDermott.
5
SPEAKER_02
So there s no way to know if the assertion is true, even marginally true.
5
SPEAKER_02
Now, you can easily suggest it, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
But you can say that about any social media influencer, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
You know, kids are dying because
5
SPEAKER_02
You know, I mean, it s just like when people accuse Trump of potentially influencing people to, you know, inject bleach into their veins.
5
SPEAKER_02
You can t, you know, that s a big old leap to say that because, you know, Trump says it, that people are going to start injecting.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then they find somebody who actually did, and it s like, oh, it must be true.
5
SPEAKER_02
You know, this is a trend now.
5
SPEAKER_02
I m just not buying it that there aren t enough roadblocks in the way.
5
SPEAKER_02
Now, I m not saying it never happens, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
And for me, to me, you should have to wait until you re 18 to actually have any surgery to transition.
5
SPEAKER_02
And if your parents approve it earlier, then you can have a conversation with your doctor.
5
SPEAKER_02
But you re suggesting that everybody in that process
5
SPEAKER_02
to go to transition a minor is corrupt.
5
SPEAKER_02
That the doctor, the sociologist, the psychologist, all the people involved, the hospital where the surgery is happening, the insurance company that s paying for it, they all have been corrupted by this trend.
5
SPEAKER_02
I just don t see that.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, not corrupted, but you know, people, it s back to the DEI thing.
5
SPEAKER_00
There could be pressure, and we are.
5
SPEAKER_02
Pressure to operate, so think about all the people who have to be complicit to do an operation.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s not complicit like evil complicit, it s more.
5
SPEAKER_02
No, it is evil complicit, right, because somebody,
5
SPEAKER_02
In hospitals right now, they won t perform abortions because of state law.
5
SPEAKER_02
In Alabama, they stopped IVF treatment immediately after that ruling by that judge, the QAnon judge.
5
SPEAKER_02
They re not going to pay attention to the possible consequences of being the hospital that does transgender, that gives doctors operating rights there, and not be aware of the risks associated with it and double check.
5
SPEAKER_02
To me, that s just insane.
5
SPEAKER_02
They re risking their entire business and livelihood and personal relationships for not checking that this 14-year-old boy who wants to be a girl or vice versa is there waiting for surgery.
5
SPEAKER_02
I just don t see that.
5
SPEAKER_00
In America, yes, but if we look at humans in general, and Jordan Peterson, I think, unjustly, incorrectly brought up Auschwitz.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that was ridiculous.
5
SPEAKER_00
But if we look
5
SPEAKER_00
To me, World War II is a very interesting time.
5
SPEAKER_00
It does reveal a lot about human nature and that humans are able to commit atrocities without really speaking up.
5
SPEAKER_00
The point I want to make is that when you re in this situation where everybody around you is committing an atrocity, you can be sort of the good German.
5
SPEAKER_00
Human nature is such that you can do horrible things.
5
SPEAKER_01
But that is in a time of war.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but it s still human nature.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s interesting to remember that.
5
SPEAKER_02
When you feel like there s nationalism, patriotism, everything that comes up.
5
SPEAKER_02
Russia, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
The moms of the kids sent to Ukraine who didn t come back in Russia feel certainly different than the everyday Russian who s just taking whatever information that s available from a unified, controlled media.
5
SPEAKER_02
but we should remember human nature.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s interesting.
5
SPEAKER_02
I m not dismissing human nature at all, but there s a difference.
5
SPEAKER_02
I think that human nature, self-preservation influences those decisions.
5
SPEAKER_02
There s nothing about self-preservation involved in DEI, wokeness, transgenderism to compare it to Auschwitz.
5
SPEAKER_02
That s insane.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, that comparison is almost always, probably always is insane.
5
SPEAKER_00
Comparison between anything and the Holocaust.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think there s a name for that rule, but once you bring up Hitler, the conversation ends.
5
SPEAKER_00
I do appreciate you bringing up Trump and bleach as an example.
5
SPEAKER_00
So continuing on fun exchanges between you and Elon, you said if they were having Biden s last wake, and it was him versus Trump,
6
SPEAKER_01
and he was being given last rites, I would still vote for Biden.
6
SPEAKER_01
To which Elon replied, caricaturing you, if Biden were a flesh-eating zombie with five seconds to live, or upon being reelected, Earth would plunge into a 1,000 years of darkness, I would still vote for him.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s basically quoting you, but in a caricature, and you responded,
6
SPEAKER_01
While I have your attention, wanted to say thank you.
6
SPEAKER_01
Your consultants at Tesla followed up about using cost-plus drugs, which we ll talk about, to save the company money.
6
SPEAKER_01
Truly appreciate it.
6
SPEAKER_01
And in parentheses, my limit is 300 years of darkness.
6
SPEAKER_01
Very well done, Mark.
6
SPEAKER_01
What s your intuition, if we just stick on Biden and Trump for a sec, what s your intuition why Biden would make a better president than Trump?
6
SPEAKER_00
Look at the basics, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
If you look at the people he s hired,
6
SPEAKER_00
there hasn t been any turnover in his cabinet at all.
6
SPEAKER_00
If you look at the people he s hired over the course of his career, or while he was vice president in particular, there s nobody who turned on him and came out and written books and made public statements about how he s bad for the country.
6
SPEAKER_00
Now compare that to Trump.
6
SPEAKER_00
The people closest to him
6
SPEAKER_00
almost all of them turn unless there s a financial relationship involved.
6
SPEAKER_00
And to me, that says everything.
6
SPEAKER_01
The dynamics of the team is important to you.
6
SPEAKER_00
If you re going to be the most powerful person in the world, you better know how to manage and lead.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that s not to say Biden hasn t made a lot of mistakes.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, immigration, the border is a horrific mistake.
6
SPEAKER_00
And hopefully he recognizes that.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I don t like the fact that he doesn t admit his mistakes and just say, okay, I got to fix it.
6
SPEAKER_00
Or I made a mistake in Afghanistan, whatever it may be, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
The position of commander in chief and president, you re going to make mistakes.
6
SPEAKER_00
Then I look at the other guy, never miss a mistake.
6
SPEAKER_00
And the list is long.
6
SPEAKER_01
What do you think about the immigration situation?
6
SPEAKER_01
A lot of conservatives are using that sort of the
6
SPEAKER_01
The theory is that the reason it s happening is because they would be able to illegally vote.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s insane for Biden.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you can t be an illegal immigrant and vote.
6
SPEAKER_00
And now in a lot of states, because of the conservatives, they ve passed laws saying you have to show identification.
6
SPEAKER_00
When I voted in Texas, you had to show state identification.
6
SPEAKER_00
They can t vote.
6
SPEAKER_00
You can t register as an illegal alien that I m aware of to vote.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but of course that story really worries me.
6
SPEAKER_01
enables or serves as a catalyst for questioning the legitimacy of an election.
6
SPEAKER_00
I remember going to the debate with Trump in 2016 and he was debating Clinton and one of the things he said was, we don t even know if this election will be legitimate if I lose.
6
SPEAKER_00
This was in 2016 before he was even elected and that was where he was going.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s just what he does.
6
SPEAKER_00
He s never admitted a mistake.
6
SPEAKER_00
The guy s failed a zillion times.
6
SPEAKER_00
Most people say, okay, I learned from him.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, I read a book about Roy Cohen and, you know, Roy Cohen was the ultimate deny, deny, deny.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that was one of Trump s mentors.
6
SPEAKER_00
And you can see almost everything Roy Cohen ever did in the same way that Donald Trump approaches things.
6
SPEAKER_01
But given how drastic the immigration situation is, that story becomes more believable.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, of course it does, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
But the facts are still the facts, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
And in red states, they re going to be checking every ID.
6
SPEAKER_00
They re going to be making sure that s not the case.
6
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, you can also make the argument, well, in the blue state, it doesn t matter.
6
SPEAKER_00
In the swing states, they re still going to be checking because they know Trump is going to sue the shit out of him when he loses, you know?
6
SPEAKER_00
And so, again, that s where
6
SPEAKER_00
you know, people will take those self-preservation steps to keep their job and do the right thing.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s still enough people who believe in this country and how amazing it is to do the right thing.
6
SPEAKER_00
And a lot of the premise of what some conservatives are saying and doing, the underpinning of it is that
6
SPEAKER_00
their fellow citizens will not do anything, not some things, anything that serves the best interest of this country.
6
SPEAKER_00
And to me, that s just wrong.
6
SPEAKER_00
That is just misleading and wrong.
6
SPEAKER_01
I just worry about, I don t care about Trump or Biden.
6
SPEAKER_01
I care about democracy.
6
SPEAKER_01
I just worry.
6
SPEAKER_01
I worry about the viral nature of the idea of this illegal immigrants.
6
SPEAKER_00
But it s just, it s very functional, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Either they get across,
6
SPEAKER_00
There s a thousand different ways, an unlimited number of ways to enter the United States of America undetected, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
And the South border where it s the easiest and the worst.
6
SPEAKER_00
And Biden needs to take steps to reduce that.
6
SPEAKER_00
Remember, when Biden was vice president and Obama was president, they called Obama the deporter in chief.
6
SPEAKER_00
He had no problem deporting people.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I think if I had to guess, and this is just a guess, that when they looked at the initial statistics for immigration when Biden took over, they thought there was room for more immigrants, not because they would vote, but you can make a fiscal argument that in a world where the birth rate is flat to declining, we need immigrants, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
And immigrants typically don t,
6
SPEAKER_00
don t have a higher crime rate or anything than, you know, indigenous American citizens.
6
SPEAKER_00
Indigenous isn t the right word, but American citizens.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so they made a calculated mistake.
6
SPEAKER_00
They made a decision that was wrong and now they have to fix it or it s gonna hurt them severely.
6
SPEAKER_00
But I don t buy, you know, like what Elon s pushing that the whole reason is they are voters and will become voters.
6
SPEAKER_01
And we should say the obvious.
6
SPEAKER_01
You re a descendant of immigrants.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, for sure.
6
SPEAKER_01
And the immigrants is what makes this country great in many parts, the diversity of this nation.
6
SPEAKER_01
And we should probably keep the people that are already been in this country for a while and are killing it, like PhD students and all this.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s not what Donald Trump wants, though.
6
SPEAKER_00
He wants to ship them all out, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
There s just a whole lot of hyperbole when it comes to talking about all of these things we re talking about.
6
SPEAKER_00
When it s right versus left, my team versus your team, my tribe versus your tribe, the only way to stand out is hyperbole.
6
SPEAKER_00
The hard part, and why I like this conversation, is how do you distinguish hyperbole versus reality?
6
SPEAKER_00
And I get where you re going, Lex, where it s like, what
6
SPEAKER_00
the smallest spark sometimes can cause people to change, and then that spark becomes bigger, and then it becomes more widespread, and then all of a sudden, your country has changed.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not what you thought it was.
6
SPEAKER_00
I get that completely, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
And yes, you always have to be on top of that to make sure.
6
SPEAKER_00
But a lot of that comes from lack of leadership, right, and lack of trust.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because there s nobody who s saying, all right, Republicans,
6
SPEAKER_00
That s all hyperbole, and you re wrong for that.
6
SPEAKER_00
Democrats, you fucked up on immigration, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
You fucked up in Afghanistan, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Here s where you made these mistakes.
6
SPEAKER_00
Own it.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s nobody who says, right, we re not going to just bring in Republicans if the Republicans win.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then, you know, and there s nobody who says, we re not going to just bring in Democrats.
6
SPEAKER_00
We re going to bring in a mix, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
We re going to try to get balance on the Supreme Court.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s no leadership that s doing it.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s the fundamental problem.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not about the ideology of woke.
6
SPEAKER_00
No leadership.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, leadership.
6
SPEAKER_01
And yeah, whatever systems we ve created, it s really frustrating that if you don t like Trump, it really is Trump derangement syndrome.
6
SPEAKER_01
He s definitely Hitler.
6
SPEAKER_01
If you don t like Biden, he s senile lizard person.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right, everybody gets labeled, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Because that works on social media.
6
SPEAKER_00
Look, if Elon changed the algorithm,
6
SPEAKER_00
Just by taking himself out of it?
6
SPEAKER_00
Seriously, I m not saying don t post, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Post all you want.
6
SPEAKER_00
But he, you know, if you look at his followers,
6
SPEAKER_00
they re almost all right-leaning.
6
SPEAKER_00
If you look at the people he engages with positively, they re almost all right-leaning.
6
SPEAKER_00
And if you look at the people he engages with negatively, like me, right, I consider myself an independent, but I lean left on the DEI topic, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
That influences the algorithm.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so you see what you see because of what he says.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, I mean, for sure, but there could be a lot of influential people
6
SPEAKER_01
on Twitter that influenced the algorithm and all that kind of stuff.
6
SPEAKER_01
I do feel it s not even about ideology where you lean, it s about like the algorithm not prioritizing drama.
6
SPEAKER_01
Like the attention,
6
SPEAKER_01
grabbing thing, or the lower lizard version of that, where people just want the drama, they want to tear it out.
6
SPEAKER_00
When I last read through all the stuff on their algorithm, maybe it s changed, whoever has the biggest account and gets engagement on that account influences what people see the most.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, that s interesting.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if that s, to the degree that s true, they ve- Pretty sure it s still the case.
6
SPEAKER_01
Pretty rigorous description of what s, of the way the algorithm works.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s actually kind of fascinating.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s a clustering of people based on interest.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right, but I think they call it the nearest neighbor, right, approach, and I think that s what they do.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so, whoever has the biggest account has the most neighbors, who in turn have their neighbors, who in turn have their neighbors, and that s how they discern what comes next.
6
SPEAKER_01
But there s a clustering still, so if you don t give a shit about Elon, you re not following him.
6
SPEAKER_01
You re not gonna have an influence.
6
SPEAKER_00
He s not gonna have an influence.
6
SPEAKER_00
When you get a break, just create a burner account on Twitter and see who they recommend to you.
6
SPEAKER_00
Elon.
6
SPEAKER_00
And not just Elon, I mean the people that Elon likes.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I m saying that s not Elon saying, add this person, add this person, and suggest this person, this person, and this person.
6
SPEAKER_00
I m saying that s what the algorithm is.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there should be transparency around that for sure.
6
SPEAKER_00
There is.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s the key.
6
SPEAKER_00
There is, and that s the whole point, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
He knows there s transparency, and he knows the impact.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s why when I say take yourself out of the algorithm,
6
SPEAKER_00
Right.
6
SPEAKER_00
Don t include his account.
6
SPEAKER_00
That changes, I think, the output of the algorithm.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, when he wasn t owning Twitter, he was one of the biggest accounts, if not the biggest account already.
6
SPEAKER_00
He wasn t.
6
SPEAKER_00
But still, like even like the Kim, well, the Kim Kardashian accounts, whatever.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right.
6
SPEAKER_00
I don t, it wasn t open source to Elon s credit, it is now, so I couldn t see it to know, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
So I didn t get the sense one way or the other of one element being dominant over the other.
6
SPEAKER_00
But obviously conservatives felt that left-leaning was more dominant back then.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I would love to see numbers on all of this.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you ll be both.
6
SPEAKER_01
DEI, everything like this.
6
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes anecdotal data really frustrates me.
6
SPEAKER_01
It frustrates me primarily because of how sexy it is.
6
SPEAKER_01
People just love- It s a great way to describe it.
6
SPEAKER_01
Love a story, and I m like, goddammit, this is not science.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s not even common sense.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, no, I think anecdotal stories often have a wisdom in them.
6
SPEAKER_01
No doubt, right.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s something to be gained from seeing them.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s a signal there, but how representative is that signal of the broader thing?
6
SPEAKER_00
Right, there s a whole lot more noise than signal, more often than not.
6
SPEAKER_01
All right, so as I mentioned, cost plus drugs.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s so many questions I can ask here, but what s the big question?
6
SPEAKER_01
What s broken about our healthcare system?
6
SPEAKER_00
There s no transparency.
6
SPEAKER_00
And lack of transparency leads to lack of trust.
6
SPEAKER_00
And when you can t trust the healthcare system other than maybe your doctor, that s a broken system.
6
SPEAKER_01
So what aspect of this system, this Cost Plus Drugs is trying to solve?
6
SPEAKER_00
So the thing we re trying to solve for is trust.
6
SPEAKER_00
And the way we feel we get there is through complete transparency.
6
SPEAKER_00
So when you go to costplusdrugs.com and you put in the name of the medication, if it s one of the 2,500 and growing that we carry, we will first show you our cost, what we actually pay for it.
6
SPEAKER_00
then we ll show you our 15% markup, then we ll show the pharmacy fill fee and shipping, and that s your total price.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that alone, that transparency alone is completely revolutionizing how drugs are priced in America today.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it s led to, you know, research being done comparing our pricing to CMS,
6
SPEAKER_00
and ours being cheaper than even the government is negotiating, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so just that transparency alone has had an impact and saved millions of people hundreds of millions of dollars or more.
6
SPEAKER_01
And maybe it results in more transparency in other parts of the system, too, seeing the business of it.
6
SPEAKER_01
But what do the so-called middlemen companies
6
SPEAKER_01
So the PBMs.
6
SPEAKER_01
The Pharmacy Benefit Managers.
6
SPEAKER_01
Thank you.
6
SPEAKER_01
CVS Caremark, Cigna s Express Scripps, and UnitedHealth s OptumRx.
6
SPEAKER_01
They control the majority of the market.
6
SPEAKER_01
What do they do wrong?
6
SPEAKER_00
They put profits over everything, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
And they know in an industry that s completely opaque,
6
SPEAKER_00
they can pretty much do what they want and nobody gets to see what they re doing in detail.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so, you know, the first thing when you sign a contract with one of those big PBMs, it says, you can t disclose any of this.
6
SPEAKER_00
And the fact that you can t be disclosed means they could tell Lex s company that they re getting a great price and they re only being charged X. And they can tell Mark s company, oh, you re getting a great price and we re charging Mark X plus, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
But Mark doesn t know any better because there s no way to know.
6
SPEAKER_01
The markup is not transparent.
6
SPEAKER_00
The cost isn t transparent.
6
SPEAKER_00
The markup isn t transparent.
6
SPEAKER_00
And there s different things.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like I was just talking to a company in a presentation a couple of days ago.
6
SPEAKER_00
and they took the step to leave the big three PBMs to go to a rebate-free PBM that was smaller.
6
SPEAKER_00
And what they said led to the decision, they had a contract with the PBM for these things called rebates, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Where depending on the volume of medications you buy, they ll kick back to you a percentage of them.
6
SPEAKER_00
And as it turns out, when they compared what was contracted for to what they actually got, they were getting underpaid every single year.
6
SPEAKER_00
They just don t care, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
They ll take products.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s a drug called Humira, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
And it is the number one revenue drug in the country.
6
SPEAKER_00
And there s also a biosimilar, multiple biosimilars, but one we carry called Usimri.
6
SPEAKER_00
And Humira, the pre-rebate price is about $8,000 per month.
6
SPEAKER_00
And after rebates, depending on the size of the company, it ll be anywhere from three to $6,000 a month.
6
SPEAKER_00
You can go to get your doctor to prescribe that biosimilar, Usimri, and you pay $594.
6
SPEAKER_00
But those big three PBMs won t allow their clients to get Usimri because they don t get a rebate on Usimri.
6
SPEAKER_00
So they d rather keep a drug on their formulary even though
6
SPEAKER_00
their patients would save, their customers would save a lot of money.
6
SPEAKER_00
They d rather keep a drug and exclude another because they ll make a lot more money.
6
SPEAKER_01
So the CVS Caremark spokesperson, I think responded to you, Phil Blando,
6
SPEAKER_01
with the usual language that so deeply exhausts me, but I was wondering if there s any truth to it.
6
SPEAKER_01
Employers, unions, health plans, and government programs work with CVS Caremark precisely because we deliver for them.
6
SPEAKER_01
Lower drug costs, better health outcomes, and broad pharmacy access through our true cost, cost vantage, and choice formulary initiatives.
6
SPEAKER_01
We are the leading agent of change, innovation, and transparency in the market.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s a whole lot of nothing.
6
SPEAKER_00
So they are not transparent.
6
No.
6
SPEAKER_00
No, call them up.
6
SPEAKER_00
You go to Cost Plus Drugs, we ll give you our price list of all 2,500 plus drugs.
6
SPEAKER_00
The actual cost.
6
SPEAKER_00
The actual cost and what we sell it for, because it s just a plus 15%.
6
SPEAKER_00
Call up any of the big three companies and ask them for the same thing.
6
SPEAKER_00
They re going to laugh at you.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s so bad, in fact, if you do business with them right now and you just ask for your claims data, meaning how many people use Humira that we re paying, what are we paying for it?
6
SPEAKER_00
they won t even give it to you unless you really, really scream and yell at them, and then they ll charge you and take six months to get it.
6
SPEAKER_00
So like when we moved away from them, we wanted to get what our claims data was to understand what we were gonna be facing.
6
SPEAKER_00
They wouldn t give it to us until like six months later, I forget the exact month, and then they charge us for it as well, our own data.
6
SPEAKER_01
On the CEO front, you said that CEOs don t understand healthcare coverage.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s costing them big.
6
SPEAKER_01
What s the connection between cost-wise
7
SPEAKER_01
drugs and companies.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I can speak for my own companies and this applies to all companies, you know, bigger companies that self-insure, because we self-insured.
7
SPEAKER_00
When I finally, when we started Cost Plus, I finally said, okay, it s time for me to understand how I m paying for my healthcare, for my employees and their families.
7
SPEAKER_00
And the first thing I looked at was a lot of these companies use employee benefits consultants.
7
SPEAKER_00
And turns out I was getting, I was paying $30 per employee per month.
7
SPEAKER_00
which was millions of dollars a year, and they were just sending us to the companies that paid them the biggest commissions.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m like, how fucking dumb am I, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
So I m like, okay, we re cutting that.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then I looked at our medication, our prescription deal that goes through the PBMs that we were using and that the consultant connected us with.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I took a list of, this was early on in Cost Plus Drugs, a list of the generic drugs that we sold that cost more than $30 that the Mavericks also had purchased, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
We were able to get that claims data.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it turns out we spent $169,000 with that PBM, one of the big three PBMs, and what it cost us buying from Cost Plus Drugs, $19,000.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that s just a simple example.
7
SPEAKER_00
Then I looked at the insurance side of things, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
We self-insure, so there weren t premiums per se, but we were getting charged $17.15 per employee per month just to use the network that they put together for us, you know, providers, hospitals, whatever.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, all right, are there companies that won t charge us to put together these networks?
7
SPEAKER_00
Turns out there s a lot of them.
7
SPEAKER_00
And those that those insurance companies and those PBMs are also responsible for determining what claims what what
7
SPEAKER_00
what to authorize and what to deny, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
So for a drug, it may be, all right, this is an expensive drug, but before they ll allow, before they ll say they ll pay for the drug that your doctor wants to prescribe for you, you have to try these three other drugs in what s called step-up therapy, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
To see if these other cheaper drugs work, or they re not even necessarily cheaper, they may be being pushed because they re getting a higher rebate.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so I m like, that s insane.
7
SPEAKER_00
I want my employees to get the medication that the doctors say is best.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so I didn t realize those were the intricacies of how my health or where my healthcare dollars went.
7
SPEAKER_00
There s not a single CEO who does.
7
SPEAKER_00
Because that s not a core competency that they need.
7
SPEAKER_00
And the CFOs, that s not their core competency.
7
SPEAKER_00
And the HR people, they contribute and they understand it some because they re dealing with the claims, but they spend most of their,
7
SPEAKER_00
prescription drug-related time or healthcare-related times, trying to get preauthorizations approved.
7
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, your kid breaks their arm or you get sick and you go to the doctor and before the doctor will do a surgery or do whatever, they have to go to the insurance company and get preauthorized.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then they always say no, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
And then you have to go back and somebody has to argue for you.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that just eats up employee time because, you know, I m sick or my kid s sick and you re wasting my time, eats up HR time.
7
SPEAKER_00
The CEOs don t know any of this, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
So what I m saying is, one, the smartest thing to do is to get a healthcare CEO at every company with over, let s say, 500 employees that focuses on all these things.
7
SPEAKER_00
You d save a shitload of money.
7
SPEAKER_00
And two, healthcare is your second largest line item expense after payroll.
7
SPEAKER_00
And in some companies, it s hundreds, billions of dollars, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
And you don t understand it, and you re letting these guys rip you off.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it s because these big CEOs don t understand it and are getting ripped off that the industry is the way it is, because that allows the opacity to continue.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s fascinating.
7
SPEAKER_01
So that most companies outsource offload, sort of the expertise on the healthcare side, when they really should be internally, there should be an expert that figures out.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes, because it s the wellness of your employees and their families.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it costs a lot of money.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but if your employees aren t healthy or if they re worried about their kids, and what is more worrisome and detrimental to the performance of a company?
7
SPEAKER_00
right, a DEI program or having to go to HR and scream and yell and explain and your doctor wasting their time doing the same thing to get authorization for a surgery or a medication.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s insane.
7
SPEAKER_01
What made you decide to step into this cartel-like situation where so much is opaque?
7
SPEAKER_00
So I got a cold email from a Dr. Alex Oshmayansky, who s my co-founder.
7
SPEAKER_00
He s a radiologist by trade and a physicist and a smart motherfucker.
7
SPEAKER_00
And he had a pharmacy that he wanted to create a compounding pharmacy that would manufacture generic drugs that were in short supply because it happens all the time that things aren t available.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m like, you re thinking too small.
7
SPEAKER_00
We should do something on a much bigger scale.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then it was right around the time they were sending the pharmacy bro, Martin Shkreli to jail.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so I was reading up on that and he increased the price of this drug Daraprim, I think it was like 7,500% or increased a low cost drug to $7,500, one of those.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, well, if he can just jack up the price to this drug and charge more and get away with it, this has to be an incredibly inefficient market.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so the question is, why is he able to do it?
7
SPEAKER_00
And it was immediately apparent that it was a lack of transparency.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so can we start a company that is fully transparent with our costs, our markup and our selling price and see if it works?
7
SPEAKER_00
And so we went for it and it took off immediately.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you read a press release from a company saying they were creating a cost advantage program, basically pretending to replicate us.
7
SPEAKER_00
We haven t been in business two years.
7
SPEAKER_00
How insane is that?
7
SPEAKER_01
Did you get a lot of pressure?
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I m sure they re very good at playing games.
7
SPEAKER_01
So cartel type situations, they protect.
7
SPEAKER_01
It feels like healthcare, it s very difficult to get in there.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it is.
7
SPEAKER_00
And the whole industry is an arbitrage, but we don t work inside the system, we work outside the system.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so we don t work with those biggest companies.
7
SPEAKER_00
The biggest companies with the most dominant control,
7
SPEAKER_00
it s very insulated and very controlled, like you said.
7
SPEAKER_00
We work outside them, we won t work with them.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so because of that, we don t have access to every medication because they ve told a lot of the big brand manufacturers that if they work with us, they ll take them off their formularies or change the rebate structure so that they won t be prescribed as much.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it is dark, but we ll get past that, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
Because there s a downstream impact of all this in the rebates and the greediness of those big three PBMs.
7
SPEAKER_00
When you go to a local pharmacy here in Austin, right, and let s just say you have a friend here, right, that is on Medicare or Medicare Advantage, and they go to a local pharmacy and they get a drug that costs $600.
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, an insurance company
7
SPEAKER_00
that s $600, the pharmacy first buys that drug for probably that price minus 5%, so $570.
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SPEAKER_00
Then there s probably a copay by the patient, and that s probably $20.
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SPEAKER_00
So now the net investment that the local pharmacy has for that brand medication is $550.
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SPEAKER_00
Where it gets really fucked up is those big three PBMs, they re not reimbursing them $550 or more.
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SPEAKER_00
they re reimbursing them $500 or less.
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SPEAKER_00
And literally, those community pharmacies are eating that loss.
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SPEAKER_00
And as a result, they re going out of business left and right.
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SPEAKER_00
And the most insane part of it is, yes, with corporate employer insurance, that happens, but it happens more with Medicare Part D and Medicare Advantage.
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SPEAKER_00
It happens all the time with those, almost with every script.
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SPEAKER_00
So the government is complicit
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SPEAKER_00
and these community pharmacies going out of business.
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SPEAKER_00
So how does that connect to Cost Plus Drugs and what we re doing and the big brands?
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SPEAKER_00
The big brands know that if all these community pharmacies are going, tens of thousands of them are going to go out of business because of the way this pricing is, they re going to lose a connection
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SPEAKER_00
between their brand medications and grandma and grandpa and aunt Sally, and all that business is gonna get transferred to the big companies.
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SPEAKER_00
And they re gonna have even less leverage.
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SPEAKER_00
So they re working with us to come up with programs that are very supportive of independent pharmacies.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s gonna allow us to break the cartel.
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SPEAKER_00
Because it s in their best interest not to allow them to be so vertically integrated that they destroy the entire community and independent pharmacy industry.
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SPEAKER_01
Is there other aspects of the healthcare industry that could use this kind of transparency, revolutionizing?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so what we re going to do with our own healthcare, right, we re not going to be in the business of selling healthcare or anything like that, but the things we do for my companies,
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SPEAKER_00
We re only gonna do deals with providers, healthcare providers, that allow us to be completely transparent.
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SPEAKER_00
So that whatever contracts we do, we re gonna post them all.
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Whatever pricing we get, we re gonna post them all.
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So that every company who s our size or even bigger will have a template that they can work on.
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SPEAKER_00
which will take it away from the big three insurance companies and the big three PBMs.
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SPEAKER_00
Because now without that transparency, they have to use consultants who are getting paid by those big three, you know, those big companies and aren t giving them the best response.
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SPEAKER_00
And so now that transparency will overcome that.
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SPEAKER_01
And you re using your...
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SPEAKER_01
how should I say it, celebrity, your name, to kind of push this forward.
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SPEAKER_01
It s weird that people aren t getting into the space.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, you public people, you know, like big, there s not like a big, you know, you look at tech, there s like these, like, like CEOs are open and public and public and they re pushing the company and they re selling everything.
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SPEAKER_01
It s like all transparent.
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SPEAKER_01
But you don t see that in healthcare.
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SPEAKER_00
No, because it s a big business.
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SPEAKER_00
And most people, like if I was 25 trying to start a company, I d work in the system because if I can build it up big enough, they would just buy me.
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SPEAKER_00
and I d make money and buy a sports team, but I don t need that money now.
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SPEAKER_01
Let me ask you about AI.
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SPEAKER_01
You got a little bit of an argument about open source.
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SPEAKER_01
I think you stepped in between Vinod Khosla and Mark Andreessen.
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SPEAKER_01
You think AI should be open sourced?
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, for sure.
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SPEAKER_01
So like all that discussion we ve been having about like Google and so on, one of the solutions.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, okay, two different things, meaning that,
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SPEAKER_00
Meta s doing open source, right?
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SPEAKER_00
That s a good choice for them.
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SPEAKER_00
I think that s a smart choice, right?
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SPEAKER_00
But it s just a business decision for everybody else.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t think it should be forced.
7
SPEAKER_01
Forced, yes, yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
And even Google s open sourcing some of the models.
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SPEAKER_00
Because they re all, that s a very incestuous industry where, you know, the people all work together at some level, they read the same papers, they go to the same conferences.
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SPEAKER_00
You know, it s like the early days of streaming and the internet where people use the same technology everywhere.
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SPEAKER_00
And now they just try different things and you get one smart or two, a couple of smart people in one company like Anthropic, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
And they do things a little bit better and model efficiency gets better.
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SPEAKER_00
So, you know, it s just a business choice, but I don t think it should be forced, but I think it s a smart business decision.
7
SPEAKER_01
Open sourcing is a smart business decision.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
It s a tricky one.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, Google is a pioneer in that with TensorFlow in the AI space.
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SPEAKER_01
That s a tricky decision.
7
SPEAKER_00
It really, really is, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
But go back to historically, you know, there was digital computing, which was a dominant player.
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SPEAKER_00
And they thought, and IBM to a certain extent, thought that they wouldn t be subject to a problem with the PC industry.
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SPEAKER_00
And then all of a sudden,
7
SPEAKER_00
And with their mainframes and everything, they had captive software.
7
SPEAKER_00
They wouldn t use off-the-shelf software, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
So for a digital equipment mainframe or an IBM mainframe, you needed software that was written for it.
7
SPEAKER_00
There was nothing off the shelf.
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SPEAKER_00
And when the PC industry came along, it was the exact opposite.
7
SPEAKER_00
There was MS-DOS and then Windows, things that were off the shelf that every PC could use.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that changed how people thought about software.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I think the same thing will happen here where it s going to be,
7
SPEAKER_00
as models become more efficient and easier and less expensive to train, I think there ll be more reasons to open source.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s the hope.
7
SPEAKER_01
It creates more competition and a lot of different diversity of approaches in how they re implemented, deployed, what kind of products they create, all of that.
7
SPEAKER_01
Vinod compared the danger of that
7
SPEAKER_01
to the Manhattan Project.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I m not buying that at all.
7
SPEAKER_01
You don t see the parallels between nuclear weapons and AI?
7
SPEAKER_00
No, no.
7
SPEAKER_00
I think I m not an AI fatalist at all, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
I m an AI optimist.
7
SPEAKER_00
But it s not to say that there isn t a lot of scary shit that can happen with it.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
you know, like I said earlier, I m a big believer that there s going to be millions and tens of millions of models.
7
SPEAKER_00
And people will take their expertise and either get hired for it and contribute or create their own models and license.
7
SPEAKER_00
So that, you know, you see now with this thing called mixture of experts, right, where you connect things and people can
7
SPEAKER_00
take their expertise and will be able to take that expertise and retain it in a way that they want to retain it.
7
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, I don t think there s going to be one medical database.
7
SPEAKER_00
I told this to people at a couple of big companies that were doing healthcare initiatives.
7
SPEAKER_00
Branding is so important in the healthcare space, you know, for hospitals, you know, the Mayo Clinics, the MD Andersons, they re huge brands.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I don t think they re just going to give up their expertise to some, you know, main singular model, you know, and say, okay, you know, whatever expertise we have is available to you in Gemini or chat GPT or, you know, so-and-so s version of Meta s open source.
7
SPEAKER_00
I just don t, I, there s just, that would be business suicide.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so I think you re gonna see each of them have their own models and update them as they go and license them.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and yeah, make money from the expertise.
7
SPEAKER_00
You have to.
7
SPEAKER_00
Don t give away the expertise.
7
SPEAKER_01
You have to.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_01
And the expertise evolves and grows and all that kind of stuff and you wanna own that growth.
7
SPEAKER_01
What advice would you give to young people?
7
SPEAKER_01
You have an exceptionally successful career.
7
SPEAKER_01
You came from little, made a lot.
7
SPEAKER_01
What advice would you give them?
7
SPEAKER_00
Love your life, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
Find the things that you can enjoy.
7
SPEAKER_00
Be curious.
7
SPEAKER_00
You don t have to have all the answers when you re 12, 15.
7
SPEAKER_00
I get emails from 13, 15-year-old kids, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
What do I do?
7
SPEAKER_00
What do I do, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
I feel like I m being held back.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m like a 15, you feel like you re being held back?
7
SPEAKER_00
But just be curious, because you don t have to have the answers.
7
SPEAKER_00
You don t have to know what you re going to be when you grow up.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m a hardcore believer that everybody has something that they re really, really, really good at that could be world-class great, every single human being on this planet.
7
SPEAKER_00
And the hard part is just finding what that is and in some places having resources to enable it.
7
SPEAKER_00
But be curious so you can find out what it is.
7
SPEAKER_00
I took one technology class in college, Fortran programming, and I cheated on it, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it wasn t until I got a job at Mellon Bank and I started learning how to program in this thing called Ramus, this scripting computing language, that I realized, oh, this is interesting to me and I like it.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that s what got me a job selling software and going on from there.
7
SPEAKER_00
you just don t know what that s going to be until you go out and experience different things.
7
SPEAKER_00
So for anybody young out there listening, enjoy your life, find things to smile about, be curious, read, watch, expose yourself to as many different ideas as you can because something s gonna click at some point.
7
SPEAKER_00
You may be 15, you may be 25, you may be 55, but it can happen.
7
SPEAKER_01
One thing to mention is sometimes it s difficult for your parents, people around you,
7
SPEAKER_01
might not be conducive or might not be of help in finding the thing you re good at.
7
SPEAKER_01
In fact, in my own life, the society was such that I don t know if they ve helped much at the thing I was good at.
7
SPEAKER_01
I m still not sure what that is.
7
SPEAKER_01
But I think- I think the interview done pretty well for you.
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s not even, there was a thing
7
SPEAKER_01
where I saw the beauty in people.
7
SPEAKER_01
Like I, it very intensely.
7
SPEAKER_01
So you can call it empathy, all that kind of stuff.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I would call it wokeness.
7
SPEAKER_01
Super woke, I guess you could say, just super woke.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s me.
7
SPEAKER_01
And you know, but in the education system I came up in, it was a very hard mathematics, you know, science and so on, and I didn t notice that, whatever that was.
7
SPEAKER_01
and me, but you have to keep the flame going, you have to try to find your way and see what that s useful.
7
SPEAKER_01
And others around you might not always notice it, so it might take time.
8
SPEAKER_00
it can be lonely, you can really have to find the strength to believe in yourself.
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh, for sure.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I ll tell you one quick story.
8
SPEAKER_01
1992, I went to Moscow State University to teach kids how to start businesses.
8
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
8
SPEAKER_01
Because I had sold microsolutions, and I wanted to travel, and I took Russian in high school, my Russian is not good.
8
SPEAKER_00
Good enough to remember that.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, right, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
But it was interesting to me, and I bring it up, because they didn t know what the word prophet meant.
8
SPEAKER_01
But at the same time, I would go around and meet people.
8
SPEAKER_01
it was this entrepreneurial, like right after the Soviet Union fell, entrepreneurship went through the roof.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, a lot of it was mafia-driven, but people found that spark, because I think that is natural.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so you just never know when and how and when the circumstances will come together for you to be able to take advantage.
8
SPEAKER_00
That spark is really important to comment on, is in Russia and Ukraine,
8
SPEAKER_00
I think the system kind of suppresses that spark somehow.
8
SPEAKER_00
As you said, you saw the natural entrepreneurship, but there s not the entrepreneurial spirit once you grow up in both of the nations I mentioned.
8
SPEAKER_00
There is, especially in Ukraine.
8
SPEAKER_00
But there s something about the system that kind of, you know, be reasonable, be secure, be safe.
8
SPEAKER_01
There would have been no reason for me to go over to do what I was doing if it was otherwise.
8
SPEAKER_00
But that s the thing that really can help a country flourish.
8
SPEAKER_01
You know, it s gonna be interesting with Ukraine if they re able to survive this, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
Because as horrific as it is, you know, as you saw across Europe after World War II, the rebuilding creates opportunities.
8
SPEAKER_00
Rebuilding creates opportunities, but, you know, first the war has to end.
8
SPEAKER_01
And how that ends- I don t know either.
8
SPEAKER_00
Is a really complex path.
8
SPEAKER_00
What gives you hope about the future of humanity?
8
SPEAKER_01
I m just looking in my kids  eyes, just, you know, talking to them and seeing their spirit, their friend spirit.
8
SPEAKER_01
And obviously we re blessed as can be, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
And it s not the same for every kid, but I do, you know, I get emails that I respond, don t respond to all of them, but from 13, 14, 15 year old kids around the world, you know, because Shark Tank s shown everywhere, asking me business questions.
8
SPEAKER_01
And it s just like, they took the time.
8
SPEAKER_01
They were that curious and that interested.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I see it when I talk to schools, you know, when I go to different groups.
8
SPEAKER_01
that spark in kids  eyes that there s something bigger and better and exciting out there.
8
SPEAKER_01
And that s not to say there s not fear, you know, climate and any other number of things, but that s the beauty of kids.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I think Gen Z really embodies that.
8
SPEAKER_01
And to me, that s just really exciting.
8
SPEAKER_00
They dream, they dream big.
8
SPEAKER_00
They see the opportunity for making the world better.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s cool, it s cool to see young people in their eyes, that dream.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I could be the one to do it too, which is a super powerful thing.
8
SPEAKER_01
elementary school kids, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
One of the things I do, I said, okay, let s look around.
8
SPEAKER_01
You see that light there?
8
SPEAKER_01
One day that light didn t exist.
8
SPEAKER_01
Then somebody had the idea, then somebody created a product of it, and now your school bought that.
8
SPEAKER_01
You see that chair?
8
SPEAKER_01
Chairs didn t always look like that.
8
SPEAKER_01
Somebody had that idea.
8
SPEAKER_01
Why not you?
8
SPEAKER_01
So when you walk out and wanna make them do, ask yourself, why not me?
8
SPEAKER_01
Why can t I be the one to change the world?
8
SPEAKER_00
Thank you for that beautiful, hopeful message, and thank you for talking today, Mark.
8
SPEAKER_00
You re fun to follow.
8
SPEAKER_00
I m a big fan of yours, but you re also an important person in this world.
8
SPEAKER_00
I really appreciate everything you do.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, I appreciate it.
8
SPEAKER_00
Thanks for saying that, Lex, and keep on doing what you re doing.
8
SPEAKER_00
This was great.
8
SPEAKER_00
I really enjoyed this.
8
SPEAKER_00
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Mark Cuban.
8
SPEAKER_00
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
8
SPEAKER_00
And now, let me leave you with some words from Oscar Wilde.
8
SPEAKER_00
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.
8
SPEAKER_00
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.