In conversation with Mark Cuban

(0:00) The Besties intro Mark Cuban: Voting record, working with Ross Perot's campaign in 1992 (5:43) The history of Cuban's love/hate relationship with Trump (19:08) Trump's performance as President: what he got right and wrong (40:46) Party nominations: Kamala vs. Trump (49:18) Biden's performance as President: what he got right and wrong (55:45) Should Kamala share blame for Biden's failures? (1:07:01) International conflict, national debt, crypto regulation (1:21:33) General sense of Kamala Harris, why she's been avoiding adversarial interviews, why Sacks supports Trump (1:31:47) Selling a majority of his Mavericks stake, changing business landscape of the NBA, what he's working on at Cost Plus Drugs (1:44:50) Thoughts on AI, what's next for him (1:51:37) Relationship with Elon, re-evaluating the Twitter deal, OpenAI's new fundraise Follow Mark: https://x.com/mcuban Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcrfpus2&f=m https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcrfpus2&f=m https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/wait-are-windowless-bedrooms-going-to-be-a-thing https://washingtonreporter.news/editorial/scoop-kamala-harris-likely-to-nominate-gary-gensler-as-treasury-secretary-if-elected-senate-sources

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome to the number one podcast in the world. Here we are on the All In Podcast. We have a fifth bestie with us today. Joining David Freiber, Chamath Palihopetia, David Sacks, and myself is the one and the only Mark Cuban. How you doing, buddy?

• 0:15Mark Cuban?

  What's up, guys? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on.

• 0:17Jason Calacanis?

  Of course, of course.

• 0:18Mark Cuban?

  Good to have you here. Thank you. I've been practicing my virtue signaling, so I'm ready.

• 0:23Jason Calacanis?

  You ready to go?

• 0:24David Sacks?

  All right. I think we're gonna have twice the virtue signaling as normal in this episode.

• 0:29Jason Calacanis?

  Double the virtue signaling.

• 0:30Mark Cuban?

  I promise you, I don't virtue signal. I'll say [bleep] to anybody.

• 0:51Jason Calacanis?

  You have gotten very vocal about politics during this cycle.

• 0:55Mark Cuban?

  Uh huh.

• 0:55Jason Calacanis?

  And you seem to be, I don't know if it's official, you know, speaking on behalf of the Kamala ticket. So why, why are you this active? What is the reason that you've decided to get this active during this election?

• 1:10Mark Cuban?

  Because I'm proud to be an American.

• 1:15Mark Cuban?

  That's exactly why. I mean, you know, we all make choices and think what's best for the country and show our patriotism in different ways. And, you know, I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican, I'm an independent through and through.

• 1:25David Sacks?

  Oh, my God, like J. Cal. He's an independent, too.

• 1:27Mark Cuban?

  There we go.

• 1:28David Sacks?

  Why is it that all the Democrats are afraid to call themselves Democrats?

• 1:33Mark Cuban?

  Well, look, I've said this many, many times. If it wasn't Donald Trump running, it was a non-MAGA candidate, particularly if it was Joe Biden still, I'd vote Republican. I've voted Republican before. If it was a non-MAGA candidate versus Kamala Harris, it would be, you know, let's look at the policies, let's look at the character of the people involved, and let's make a decision. It's just Donald Trump is not a Republican. Republicans are Donald Trump. You know, the Republican Party is now the family business for Donald Trump. And to me, I just think Kamala Harris is a better choice for the country.

• 2:04Jason Calacanis?

  On a percentage basis, how often have you voted, just to level set, Democrat versus Republican, would you say, out of 10 elections?

• 2:11Mark Cuban?

  Presidential, probably. I voted for George W. twice, then I voted for Obama twice, and then I voted for Clinton and Biden. But before that, I voted for Ross Perot Jr. My first vote was for a guy named something, John Anderson. So, I mean, I literally worked on Ross Perot Jr.'s campaign way back when.

• 2:33Jason Calacanis?

  Tell us about that. That's fascinating. He got 19% of the vote as an independent candidate.

• 2:39Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, I was living out in LA, and this was 92, and this is when computers were relatively new. I sold my company, and I was taking acting classes and just living by Manhattan Beach and just loving life. And, you know, being from Texas, I knew people there, and they were like, "Look, we need somebody who understands PCs and computers and software. Can you help us?" And I was like, "Definitely." I mean, I wasn't to the point where I was involved in his decisions, but I actually had met him. My first company was a company called MicroSolutions, where we did systems integrations, local and wide area network. I wrote software for, you know, single multi-user app, wide area network apps. And we literally helped Perot Systems get into local and wide area networking. And so, you know, one of

• 3:23Mark Cuban?

  my favorite stories from back then is, you know, I'm terrified. I'm a 26-year-old kid. I'm in Dallas. I'm going into Perot Systems. I get to meet Ross Perot Sr., the man, right? And I'm walking through him, and he's got the original, the model for the, no, he had the original Magna Carta, one of like the 13 Magna Cartas, and he had the original model for the Iwo Jima statue, right, with the flag up and everything? And I'm just terrified. I'm gonna trip and just wipe out American history. And I walk up to him, and I said, "Hi, Mr. Cuban. I'm Ross Perot."

• 3:59Mark Cuban?

  I may not reverse that. Yeah, you know, I was so nervous. And he like made fun of it and, you know, got to be friends and did a lot of business, helped those guys a lot. I made them a lot of money. They made me a lot of money.

• 4:11Jason Calacanis?

  Did you have any more interactions with them when you were on the campaign? Did you get a sense of?

• 4:15Mark Cuban?

  No, did not. No, I was just a little plebe, just trying to do little plebe stuff in LA.

• 4:20David Sacks?

  I didn't know that you took acting classes. That's interesting. Did you want to be an actor or before a businessman or what?

• 4:25Mark Cuban?

  Oh, no, no, no. This was after I sold MicroSolutions. I bought a lifetime pass on American Airlines, moved to LA, got a place right in Manhattan Beach, right on the beach, get two flight attendants as roommates. And I was just loving life. And I was like, how else can I meet women? I'm going to take acting classes. And it was like one of the best things I've, one of the best things I've ever done because, you know, being a business guy, it's always right brain, right brain, right brain. And acting is like, don't think, just be, don't think, just be, just let it go. So it was a totally different experience. And that's why you see me do all these cameos and stuff. Because I like to do it because it's the one place where you just have to completely let go and it's a completely different approach to life. So, you know, little backstory.

• 5:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you got a good character arc on Entourage. I think that was probably the best one.

• 5:11Mark Cuban?

  Seven episodes plus the movie. Yeah.

• 5:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was, that was pretty memorable. So Sax, lead us off here. I don't know if you've been following Mark Cuban on social media at all, or if you guys interact.

• 5:22David Sacks?

  I can't resist asking, so is your, is your acting as a surrogate for Kamala? Is that acting too?

• 5:29Mark Cuban?

  No, absolutely not.

• 5:33Mark Cuban?

  When they go live, when they go live, we go high.

• 5:37Mark Cuban?

  No, no, no. Obviously, I truly believe in it. And look, it's always relative. It's always relative to the other candidate. And so obviously, as you guys know, I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump. I gave him a shot eight years ago, didn't work out.

• 5:49David Sacks?

  Could we, could we get into this? Because I, you obviously have like a love hate relationship with Trump going back 20 something years. So, let's just go through the, the timeline here. I'm just very curious about this.

• 6:01Mark Cuban?

  I don't hate the guy at all. If he was running for president and we all got together and, you know, just shot the like we are now. Now, he's a blast. He's fun to talk to, you know, he's got charisma, he's got personality, he's easy to like. I mean, you know, he's used to schmoozing, he's one of the world's best schmoozers. And so he's easy to get along with. It's not personal. But that doesn't mean like you guys with each other. It doesn't mean you can't, you know, as different things happen over time, you can't go back and forth. And, you know, he did the same thing. So the whole history of it was back, um, right when, um, we went public at broadcast.com. No, right after we announced the sale in 2000.

• 6:41Mark Cuban?

  Um, was it 2000? Yeah, after we announced the sale and January 2000, he threw a Super Bowl party at Mar-a-Lago. And one of my buddies, um, who, um, knew him invited me and I was like, cool, I'll go. Mar-a-Lago, hadn't seen it. Donald Trump, maybe I'll meet him. And so, you know, you guys have seen Mar-a-Lago and a beautiful pool, beautiful book view. There's a veranda up there. And he had like a bunch of, um, Hooters and, um, what's the suntan lotion that always had girls, whatever. Oh, Tropicana? Tropicana? No. Yeah. But you Sun Tropic. Sun, one of those, right? And so they were all dressed in orange and they were walking around and it was just like a big deal.

• 7:24Mark Cuban?

  And it was funny as hell. And so, not that that's a bad thing. It was actually kind of entertaining. And, um, so he comes up to me and I'm with the, um, VP of Visa, my buddy and Jerry Yang, I think it was, maybe it wasn't Jerry, but, um, Co-founder of Yahoo. Yeah, co-founder of Yahoo. And, um, he was like, hey, guys, nice to meet you. And I'm like, hey, I'm Mark, Donald, da, da, da. And he just, you know, not to be mean, just in a flipping way. He was like, hey, someday you'll be able to sit up there with the rich people pointing to the veranda and walked away. And I was like, okay, fine, you know, whatever. And so, um, then, um, not long after that, through my friend, he got back in touch with me.

• 8:05Mark Cuban?

  And, you know, this is the early days of the internet, early 2000s and, um, it's still, I guess, two, still 2000. And, um, I get an invitation to go to, um, his office. In Trump Towers. And I'm like, this is cool, of course. And, you know, he wants to talk to me about business. And I'm like, you know what, Donald, I'll help you all I can. He, you know, he's getting DonaldTrump.com and he wants to sell tchotchkes and merchandise. I guess some things never change. Um, and so, you know, so I'm in there trying to tell him about what you can and can't sell online and what works. And that was all fine and good. Metivanka, it was all really cool. But the one thing that left with me, if you've ever been or seen pictures of his office, every inch of his office is covered with pictures of him.

• 8:50Mark Cuban?

  Every single inch of the office.

• 8:52David Sacks?

  It's like meeting celebrities, right? Stuff like that.

• 8:55Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, whatever covers he was on and just whatever, right? And I just remember walking through there and afterwards, you know, it was, it was a nice meeting and we had some follow-up calls and everything, but it never went anywhere in terms of the online stuff. But I just remember thinking to myself, if I ever become, you know, visible or famous, you know, to that level, don't let me get so caught up in just having pictures of myself. And, you know, I'd had conversations with my buddies about it, just like, you know, you guys would. And so then in 2004, um, I got a chance to do a show called The Benefactor. ABC called me and said,

• 9:31David Sacks?

  Okay, wait, let's show this. We have this, uh, this was got tweeted, so.

• 9:35Mark Cuban?

  So, so this is after we got canceled.

• 9:37Jason Calacanis?

  You did oppo research, Sax? You got oppo research on that?

• 9:40David Sacks?

  This was all online. Every, this is all on, on X.

• 9:43Mark Cuban?

  People tried to [__] with me on, on Twitter. They threw this stuff. So anyway, so when I got the gig, um, he was like, congratulations, good luck and everything. I was like, thank you and whatever. And then when I got canceled, he sent me that letter basically saying you suck. And so.

• 9:58David Sacks?

  Well, he was, he was dancing on the grave of your show. But so you're saying you didn't have beef with him before that letter?

• 10:04Mark Cuban?

  No, it was not a beef. No. Yeah, it was not a beef, but it was just like. That's what it was. And so it was just like, okay, whatever. And um,

• 10:12David Sacks?

  Okay, but then when he ran in 2016, you were supportive. Can we show that? Let's show the

• 10:17Mark Cuban?

  Wait, there's more in between. There's more in between. There's a lot more in between.

• 10:20David Sacks?

  Okay, okay.

• 10:21Mark Cuban?

  So that's 2004, 2007. Eric reaches out to me and goes, hey, there's no hard feelings with my dad or anything. And I'm like, no, I don't care. He goes, we're working with these Russian MMA fighters, this guy named Fedor Emelianko, who was like, one of the best ever at that point in time, and Josh Barrett. And kind of the irony of all this is we were competing with Dana, Dana White, and the UFC in some respects, because a lot of fighters felt like they weren't getting paid enough. There was no healthcare. There was no nothing, right? And so I had a TV network. We had started the first all-high-definition TV network called HDNet back in 2000, back when TVs cost $20,000 and everybody thought we were idiots. But slowly but surely, it was taking off.

• 11:04Mark Cuban?

  And so they came to me and said, we'd like to put, we're partnering with these guys who are putting on this MMA fight with Fedor and Josh Barrett and some other folks. And we'd like to broadcast it on HDNet, because we had a show called This Week in MMA, so we were promoting. We had fights that we were already putting on every Friday night. So it actually was a good fit. So you'll see pictures of me sitting with them. And actually, and I couldn't find it. I was so pissed because I was going to with him some more. What he said in the, you know, during the time we were sitting at that podium, was everything Mark Cuban touches turns to gold. And so I was like, that would have been so great to have out there. And so, and anyway, so we're friends again. And so

• 11:45Mark Cuban?

  it's 2007, and we're friends, and nothing happens between then until whenever he started going crazy on Twitter and all the Obama stuff and everything, and the birth certificate and the birth stuff. So he's on Twitter and He started [__] with me, I say that, so let me just preface this by saying, I golfed once in my life in 1989, and I hated it so bad, I was throwing clubs, because I'm one of those really super competitive guys, I'm like, never again, but I went and worked, I auctioned off myself to be a caddy at a golf tournament that he also was at, but he starts tweeting that I saw Mark Cuban, and he swings like your girl, and this and that, his swing is like your girl, like, nobody saw me swing, because I don't [__]

• 12:29Mark Cuban?

  golf, and so I started [__] back with him, and so we went back and forth on Twitter for years, for years, and then he comes down the escalator in 2015, and I'm like, alright, this guy's got no chance to win, but I think it's great, because I don't like traditional politicians, I'm not, you know, there's nothing about me that thinks that the way we do politics, or the way the government is run, is a good thing, not at all, I mean, I, my heart is libertarian, but I realize you can't, libertarians are not problem solvers or ideologues, you know, like, you look at Rand Paul, everything's only one way, he doesn't try to solve problems, so anyways, I digress, so he comes down the, I'm like, that's cool, right, he doesn't have a chance to win, but, I'm like, he's the best thing ever, you know, you know how,

• 13:14Mark Cuban?

  you know, I forget where I was, but I was like, he's the best thing that ever happened to politics, he's not a politician, he's not gonna be a Stepford candidate, I may not agree with his positions, but, you know, just the fact that he's not a politician is a good thing, and so, from there, he called me, and we talked a lot, probably 10 to 15 times on the phone, he would call me, you know, and he tweeted one time, Mark Cuban was trying to come, I never had his [__] number, there was no way for me to call him, right, he would, you know, and you know the way he emails, he refuses to send an email, because he doesn't want any proof of anything that he's done, right, and so, you know, he would write it up, like, you had one of those pictures, so bring up the one on the CNN where he says, what happened, so right there, CNN nasty, what happened, see, see what he

• 13:56Mark Cuban?

  does there, his email, he writes on a piece of paper, and then someone scans it, and sends it as an image via email. And so what

• 14:03David Sacks?

  Wait, just so the audience can understand. So the email is from you to him saying, tell the boss I said, congrats on his sweep. And then, and then his assistant printed it out and then wrote back to you and

• 14:15Mark Cuban?

  Well, this is one of many emails that we went back and forth on. There were

• 14:18Jason Calacanis?

  But just to be, just as a weird point, he literally prints out his emails, writes on them, has them scanned in and sent as an image to you. Mark, wow, so are you on CNN? Nasty, what happened?

• 14:31David Sacks?

  How did he send this to you? He emailed this to you or what?

• 14:33Mark Cuban?

  He emailed it in image form.

• 14:35David Sacks?

  He doesn't use email. I mean, the guy, you know, it's a different generation.

• 14:37Jason Calacanis?

  He emailed it back.

• 14:38Mark Cuban?

  Right. So he writes on the piece, assistant prints it out, he reads it, he writes on it, she scans it, she scans it, sends the image to me. Now, the big question there, you can't just let that slide. Why do you think he does that?

• 14:50David Sacks?

  Is this a different generation? At least that's my interpretation.

• 14:53Mark Cuban?

  No, absolutely not.

• 14:54Jason Calacanis?

  Nope, I'm with Mark. He don't want paper trails or any of this. Cause he's doing so much shady stuff, man.

• 15:00David Sacks?

  I, I think you're reaching there. Obviously, there's a paper trail. If he writes, hold on, if he writes it on a piece of paper, hold on. If I write right now on a post-it note, scan and email to you, there's a paper trail.

• 15:11Mark Cuban?

  No, no, you can't search for it and it's not his. You know, yes, to your point.

• 15:16David Sacks?

  He signed it.

• 15:17Mark Cuban?

  I'm just telling you, he won't send emails at all. He doesn't want anybody

• 15:20David Sacks?

  His assistant created an electronic record. What's the difference?

• 15:23Mark Cuban?

  You have to ask him on that, but he said it out loud.

• 15:26David Sacks?

  This is my interpretation. I think it's a generational thing.

• 15:28Mark Cuban?

  He said it out loud, David. He has literally said it out loud that he doesn't want a paper trail. But anyways, so let's go back. So, so now we're talking back and forth and we're having legit conversations. I remember asking him, you know, you realize as president, you're going to have to make decisions where people can die. And he really wouldn't respond. Yeah, I get it. I get it. I'm like, Donald, you don't have a ground game. What are you going to do? How are you going to get through this? And he'd be like, yeah, I got the evangelicals doing all that. I'm not worried about it. I'm like, Donald, you know, and we would, I would bring up things about, there was this one thing where, um, The FBI used this device to break into an iPhone. And there was a big thing about, you know, privacy. And I tried to engage him on a conversation on it.

• 16:10Mark Cuban?

  And it's just like, I don't know, you know, just didn't want to talk about that at all. And that would, that would happen multiple times where I would try to engage in conversations about some, some type of policy. And they're just, it never got anywhere and there was never a conversation. And I said to him, I'm saying, there's another email where I said, Donald, at some point, you have to learn these things. You literally have to learn these things in order to be president. And he didn't respond to that. And that's when I went on CNN and I said, basically, look, I liked the guy, but he's not learning. He doesn't make any effort to learn anything. And I think that carries on to this day because you can't look at things he says and say, that's really an in-depth response or that's a nuanced response.

• 16:52Mark Cuban?

  And so that's what I said on CNN and that led to the image that you, you guys posted. So that was the falling out. That was the falling out, yeah. Or maybe. But it wasn't a complete fall. Just to finish this up. If you want me to continue, so it's not a complete falling out because Okay. after that, he gets elected. I sent him a congratulatory message and I say, congrats, you know, you know, if I can ever help, I'm happy to. And so when they were starting to look at replacing the ACA, I was starting to get into healthcare and being excited about healthcare. And so they invited me to the White House and I spoke to Jared. I spoke to this woman named Brooke Rollins, I think her name is. And I spoke to a whole group of people. I went to CMS and I spoke to the head of the agency.

• 17:37Mark Cuban?

  I spoke to the head of CMS, all talking about this thing I created called the 10 Plan, which is a means tested ability to support anyways. And so they brought me back in and then when the pandemic hit, I sent them some ideas on, you know, backstopping.

• 17:53Mark Cuban?

  Bank accounts and credit card accounts, so everybody doesn't just default. And he had Mnuchin call me. And then when they had with the pandemic, he connected with Peter Navarro. And I worked with him and actually found a company here in actually outside of Fort Worth that I put together with them and I helped that company increase their output. And Peter Navarro worked with them closely and we, you know, really made a dent in all the PPE issues. And, you know, he invited me to the White House and then I went to the White House one time, went into the Oval Office and there's pictures of me talking. And again, I tried to explain the healthcare stuff. He just wasn't having any type of in-depth conversation. He wanted to tell me about how much money he saved on, um, on from Boeing, you know, how many billions and this and that.

• 18:35Mark Cuban?

  And then it was a short conversation and then I was leaving and he goes, look, are you still on that show? And he goes, I'm like, yeah, Shark Tank. He goes, yeah, that's Baron's favorite show. And then as I'm leaving further, he goes, wait a minute, I really like that suit. So, you know, and, and, you know, he's called me since, um, not since he left the White House, but, you know, in the, you know, later in his tenure at the White House and invited me to dinner. I mean, and so it's not like we left as foes and it's not like I don't like him. I just don't think he's the best person to be president. I don't think he was a good guy.

• 19:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's just stress that. What, how would you think about the four years that he was president? In hindsight, what, what would you say was done well? What would you say was done poorly? Just those two things.

• 19:19Mark Cuban?

  I think the way he dealt with the zeitgeist isn't the right word, just the vibe of the country was really, really, really bad. I think the hate that he conveyed, I think the fact that what he tweeted negatively, you know, so companies didn't know what was coming next. You know, he tweeted negatively about me, he tweeted negatively about other people. I thought that was a real bad thing. When the BLM protests happened and turned into riots, when they went into Minnesota, he was like, when the looting, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Who the f**k says that as a president?

• 19:57Mark Cuban?

  And so we had more people die during riots during his term than Biden by a long shot. And I think he misrepresented where he stood in terms of being anti-war. If you go back to 2019 and look at the war in Yemen, there were hundreds, at least 100,000 people plus died. And there was a bipartisan resolution to say, we're not selling any more to the Saudis. We're not selling any more weapons to the Saudis. And a bipartisan resolution, including Mark Meadows and Rand Paul and others, said, you know, passed it and it went to his desk. And he said, we're still going to sell these munitions and this, these weapons to Saudi Arabia, even though these people continue to die.

• 20:42Mark Cuban?

  So when we talk about, it's, you know, it's not all that much different than Ukraine. In some respects, only Saudi Arabia got the Glengarry leads and Ukraine got our old stuff. And we replaced it. And so it's when he talks, comes out now and says, look, you know, I'm against all wars. There were no wars. That's bullshit, right? The mainstream media.

• 21:01David Sacks?

  Well, okay, so there's two things there. So just, just on the 2020 riots, I don't know how you blame Trump for the BLM riots of summer of 2020.

• 21:11Mark Cuban?

  I didn't blame him for the riots. What I said was how he dealt with it.

• 21:13David Sacks?

  Yeah, I get you don't like the mean tweets. I get, I totally get you.

• 21:16Mark Cuban?

  No, don't diminish it, David. Don't diminish it as just mean tweets. People pay attention to what happens. And when you have people whose lives are at stake.

• 21:24David Sacks?

  I think, I think it's far worse to actually have riots going on in the streets. That's what needed to be controlled.

• 21:29Mark Cuban?

  How many people?

• 21:29David Sacks?

  He wanted to, hold on, he wanted to send in the National Guard to Minnesota. It was actually Walz who rejected the National Guard.

• 21:35Mark Cuban?

  He had no problem.

• 21:36David Sacks?

  And there were plenty of ties between, oh, and there were plenty of ties between Democratic activists and the BLM organizers of those riots. Time Magazine did a story on that.

• 21:46Mark Cuban?

  I'm not saying he's at fault that the riots happened.

• 21:48David Sacks?

  I just, yeah, but I can't believe that you're using the riots throughout the summer of 2020 as an argument against Trump when it was the left that did that.

• 21:55Jason Calacanis?

  No, I think what he's saying is the leadership that he shows is of low moral character.

• 22:00Mark Cuban?

  Did he do anything right, Mark? Well, I'm not done with the wrong stuff. Okay. But wait, there's more, right?

• 22:04David Sacks?

  Okay, let's go back to the foreign policy for a second.

• 22:08Mark Cuban?

  Uh huh.

• 22:08David Sacks?

  Trump is correct that he did not start any new wars during his presidency. You agree with that, right?

• 22:14Mark Cuban?

  Um, that no new war started or he didn't start any, um?

• 22:19David Sacks?

  He didn't start any. He was like the first president in 20 years not to start a new war.

• 22:23Mark Cuban?

  Well, he inherited some for sure.

• 22:25David Sacks?

  He inherited Syria and Afghanistan and he wanted to get out and the generals didn't let him.

• 22:29Mark Cuban?

  And there wasn't really a war that happened in Turkey. And then when we got shut down, um, he didn't know there wasn't really a war. I'll agree with that. He did start a war.

• 22:39David Sacks?

  That's his argument is that he did not start any new wars.

• 22:41Mark Cuban?

  Has Biden started any?

• 22:43David Sacks?

  Well, I would argue that Biden provoked the proxy war in Ukraine. Yes, I mean, you can disagree whether he provoked or not, but there's no question the US has been deeply involved in a war with Russia in Ukraine.

• 22:53Mark Cuban?

  And I'm saying, what I'm saying is the corollary that the analogy to that is what happened in Yemen. And that we had a chance to get out of Yemen and reduce the deaths in Yemen, much like they're talking about getting us out of the, out of Ukraine now. And we had the opportunity to stop selling weapons, but he looked, the best I could tell, he looked at it as a sales opportunity to sell to MBS all these weapons. And he thought that was a positive. So a lot of people died and we're still in there today. So it's not, he had a chance to get us out and he did not. So I'm not arguing that he's perfect and Biden's perfect and it's tit for tat. It just is what it is. I'm just saying, making this statement of fact, you know, and that's it.

• 23:34David Sacks?

  Yeah, okay. Well, look, we did, we did support, we did support the Saudis in their war with, with Yemen.

• 23:39Mark Cuban?

  So wait, let me give you the one last thing and then we'll. Yeah, keep going. So then I'll go to some positives. So the, the next thing, you can actually trace that Yemen war. I can't say you actually, I'm, I'm a little bit of hyperbole, but I can trace that from that Yemen war to the start of inflation. And here's how I explain that. And so in Yemen, he did a deal with, for his boy in Saudi Arabia and sent them all the weapons in 2019. Fast forward one year and you're in May, uh, no, April.

• 24:11Mark Cuban?

  April, let's say of 2020, and you're looking at the price of gas, the lowest it's ever been, the price of oil just collapsing. At one point, people were paying you to take their oil. And so there was an opportunity. He made a decision because there was a situation that came up. The oil companies came in and said, this price of oil being so low is killing us. Right? We're losing a lot of money. We anticipate losing more because with the pandemic now starting, demand is dropping like a rock. And so he, and that was coming from the oil companies. And so what he did, he said, okay, MBS owes me a favor over in Saudi Arabia.

• 24:53Mark Cuban?

  That's the connection. And Putin's my boy. I'm going to go to them and ask them to reduce production. Now, what happens to the price of gas when the largest producers of, um, largest producers of oil and energy decrease their production? The price starts going up and up and up. And so you can track the increase in the price of gas and how that impacted the price of goods the entire time that the production from the 10% reduction until they, they increase it like 300,000 barrels a day for two years.

• 25:32David Sacks?

  What is your argument here? You're saying that somehow Trump caused the inflation?

• 25:35Mark Cuban?

  Yes. And I'm, I'm explaining to you. I'm getting the mainstream media.

• 25:39David Sacks?

  First of all, by the way, the, the war in Yemen started on March 26, 2015, according to ChatGPT, which is under Obama. So that started under Obama.

• 25:47Mark Cuban?

  That's fine, but he had a chance. He was asked to end it by Congress. He was at, we were sending, he was selling $660 billion. I don't know the number. I can't remember exactly in weapons to Saudi Arabia and he, there was a.

• 26:01David Sacks?

  How did the fact that we had 9% inflation in 2022? So two years after Trump's office?

• 26:07Mark Cuban?

  I'm so glad you asked that, David.

• 26:09David Sacks?

  How in the world is Trump responsible for that and not Biden?

• 26:11Mark Cuban?

  I'm so glad you asked that because the mainstream media never talks about this stuff. And so she had a little dig there. So Trump goes in and says, "We're going to cut the production by 10%." Demand is still relatively low, but you know, in April, May, June, as people start venturing outside their house and to the end of 2020, the end of his term, that there's an increase in demand. But the increase in demand, the increase in production doesn't match the increase in demand. They limited, as part of this deal that Trump put together between Russia and Saudi Arabia, and that led to other people in OPEC+ participating.

• 26:54Mark Cuban?

  They only increased the production of oil by 300,000 barrels a day, which didn't keep up with the amount of demand that was happening. That started increasing the price of gas. That price of gas continued to increase for the two years this program was in place. This program wasn't like, "Let's just cut it for 60 days and go back at it." It wasn't, "Let's just do this for 90 days. Let's just do this during the Trump administration." No, no, no, no, no. This deal went before they got, it took two years before they got back to pre-pandemic levels of production. And so, listen to what Trump says about "drill, baby, drill." Why does he say "drill, baby, drill" will lead to lower costs?

• 27:35Mark Cuban?

  Because oil and energy costs are part of everything. And you know what matches up perfectly? What matches up perfectly is that 9.1% in 2022, and the day that that agreement ended, where MBS and Russia limited production, that agreement ended it like this. If you did your little Venn diagram that like, "And, increased production, decreased production, bam." And so, that is the answer to your question.

• 28:06Jason Calacanis?

  So just to summarize, what you, the argument that you don't like about him is, you got to know him, like many people do, you worked with him on projects, and like Pence, Barr, Mateus, Tillerson, Bill Barr, and Mike Cohen, and the mooch, Omarosa, you realized, this person is out for themselves, they don't care about the people they work with, and you fell out of friendship with him or whatever. There's a long list of people who don't, who worked with him, who think he's an idiot and don't like him now.

• 28:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're on that list.

• 28:36Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think he's an idiot.

• 28:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm not saying that's my position. I'm just summarizing it.

• 28:39Mark Cuban?

  Look, I don't think he's an idiot.

• 28:40Jason Calacanis?

  Not your position.

• 28:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I have to work with him.

• 28:43Mark Cuban?

  He's one of the greatest salespeople ever. He's one of the greatest, you know, motivators in terms of crowd motivation ever.

• 28:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, can I?

• 28:52Mark Cuban?

  But he's Roy Cohn Jr. He's Roy Cohn Jr. That is who he is. If you read books about Roy Cohn, everything Roy Cohn says to do, tracing back to the McCarthy hearings in 54, everything Roy Cohn says to do, that is exactly what Donald Trump does.

• 29:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let me, I just want to, I just want to paint this thing and then I'd like to hear the glass half full version to the extent you have one, but basically I just, I just want to understand. So my understanding was in 2020, what happened was not that Saudi Arabia and Russia were cooperating to cut prices, but they got into a fight because it wasn't really, it wasn't really Saudi, but it was OPEC, which includes us and OPEC plus, which is versus Russia. And we initiated against them, which they counteracted a price war.

• 29:40Mark Cuban?

  They initiated against, so Saudi Arabia initiated against Russia.

• 29:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But what, but what I'm, so what I'm trying to understand is there's a war in Yemen.

• 29:49Mark Cuban?

  Right.

• 29:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We don't stop the armaments of Saudi. And I guess what you're saying is that then triggered an OPEC versus Russia.

• 30:03Mark Cuban?

  MBS owed Trump one.

• 30:06Mark Cuban?

  MBS owed Trump one. So MBS starts a price war with Russia one year later. And the oil companies come to Donald and say, look, we're getting destroyed. Demand is dropping. They've increased because of this price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia. Saudi Arabia decides to take it to Putin and increases their production significantly. So in order to keep their revenues up, Russia's got to do the same thing. Meanwhile, all the, all the demand is dropping because of the pandemic. And so Donald gets asked by the insurance company, the oil companies to go to MBS and to Putin and say, we need to stop this price war. We need to reduce production.

• 30:50Mark Cuban?

  And to his credit, if you think that's a positive, to Trump's credit, he did it. And so by reducing production over a plan of two years, and you can go look at the production numbers, right? And when that stopped by doing that, that increased the price of gas, the price of oil, the price of energy. And that was bad for American consumers who utilize gas, who, you know, paid, paid for gas for their cars, really bad for them. But he decided to work with his oil company buddies and protect them. You can say that's a good decision or bad decision. Maybe it's strategic. We really, he really felt they could go out of business and he wasn't

• 31:28Mark Cuban?

  willing to give them money to help them. But the bottom line was that, that matches up exactly to that 9.1% that David Sacks mentions. It also mentions up, matches up to, okay, does he fully support the oil companies over the price of gas? And will that influence what he will do as president again? So when he says, I'll just get out of Ukraine, depends on who's making the money and where it is. When he says, I'm going to get people to drill, baby, drill. Well, we already learned a lesson.

• 32:03David Sacks?

  Wait, wait, wait, sorry. Okay, so look, this is very hard to, hold on a second. This is very hard to fact check in real time because I've never heard this theory before.

• 32:12Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, no, we can have a theory on the pod. Friedberg hasn't asked a question yet, so let me try to.

• 32:19David Sacks?

  The point, the point is that, you know, this is like totally novel. I don't even think I've heard you make this theory on X before.

• 32:25Mark Cuban?

  I was waiting.

• 32:26Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so here we go. All right, so Friedberg hasn't been able to get involved. Let's have Friedberg ask a question.

• 32:33David Sacks?

  Basically cite this nonsense and I don't get to interrogate it a little bit.

• 32:36Mark Cuban?

  It's not nonsense, David.

• 32:36Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, but I just wanted to include Friedberg in the discussion. Forty minutes.

• 32:40David Sacks?

  Let me ask a question.

• 32:42Mark Cuban?

  Go chat GPT it, go Google it, go look it up however you want.

• 32:46David Sacks?

  Okay, what about the fact that Biden's first day in office, he cancels the Keystone Pipeline and a bunch of leases. He makes it harder to drill in the United States. So he reduces the ability for domestic producers to produce. You don't think that that would have an impact?

• 33:02Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, but it wasn't on the price. It wasn't on the price of gas because the price of gas is a global phenomenon, right? The price of oil, rather, is a global phenomenon. It's we, we are the largest producer of energy in the world, but we're still only about 13%. I think it is, don't quote me on that, but that's, that's a range. And so the other 87% has more of an impact. And even to that, there was still an unlimited amount of drilling available on public lands and leases available that weren't fully used. Now that said, I think Biden did mistakes, did make mistakes.

• 33:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, yeah, so wait, wait. Okay, guys, hold on. Okay, let's, let's just finish one thing before the other. I would just like an answer of what is the good and the bad of Donald Trump? And then what I was going to ask you is, what was the good and the bad of Biden? I just want those four answers.

• 33:50David Friedberg?

  Guys, just, just, just give me one sec. Can I just ask, make one comment? I've been here for like 40 minutes.

• 33:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I tried to get you in.

• 33:58David Friedberg?

  I want to respond to the inflation point, Mark. I, you know, I just shared two images. First was the US crude oil production chart. And more than half of this oil is exported. So you can see the, the reduction in production, but the, the domestic oil production capacity remained high relative to our consumption. So US consumption, if oil was the biggest driver, it really would have affected the profits of the exporting companies, not necessarily the cost of energy domestically. I will, however, point out that the federal balance sheet, the Federal Reserve's balance sheet swelled during COVID from $4 trillion to $8 trillion. And as we all know, there was significant fiscal stimulus, meaning the federal, the

• 34:43David Friedberg?

  federal government bought a ton of shit.

• 34:46Mark Cuban?

  David, I didn't say it was the only cause. I didn't say it was the exclusive cause.

• 34:49David Friedberg?

  Well, I, I would argue that flooding the world with dollars, which is what the Federal Reserve did, because they bought up all the bonds as the federal government started to issue money in lots of different ways, caused the supply of dollars to go up, which causes the cost of anything that's dollar denominated to grow up. And I think many economists would argue and make the case that the fiscal policy and the monetary policy of the federal government and the Federal Reserve is largely to account, and I'm not going to use The word blame, but to account for the inflation we saw in the cost of everything from energy to production to labor.

• 35:22Mark Cuban?

  Yes.

• 35:22David Friedberg?

  Assets and so on.

• 35:23Mark Cuban?

  Mutually exclusive. They're not mutually exclusive.

• 35:26David Friedberg?

  They're not, but there was also significant, as we can all acknowledge, massive in a dynamical system. Global supply chains are a dynamical system. Stuff is made in one place, moved to another place. When one thing breaks or it slows down, it all breaks and we had a massive shortfall.

• 35:43Mark Cuban?

  Agree a hundred percent.

• 35:44David Friedberg?

  Goods around the world. And that was the biggest driver of the inflationary effects that we saw.

• 35:48Mark Cuban?

  I agree a hundred percent. But even if you go back to those, the first two charts you put up, it matches up with exactly what I said. Production went down, demand went up and the net result was that price of gas went up. And price of gas is in everything. Is it the only cost?

• 36:04David Friedberg?

  No, but production went down in everything, not just energy, but everything and not because of energy, but because of a lot of other reasons.

• 36:11Mark Cuban?

  No, exactly.

• 36:12David Friedberg?

  And then, and then we had a whiplash problem where we had over demand relative to the natural and none of the production systems could keep up with demand.

• 36:19Mark Cuban?

  Agreed. I agree a hundred percent. I agree a hundred percent with you. All I'm saying, you can try to trace it back to maybe it's one percent of the price. Maybe it's three percent of the price, maybe whatever the percentage is, I'm not saying it's exclusive. But you can trace it back to the decision being made to support the energy companies and say, we are going to reduce production. Rather than just letting the market play out and saying, we'll let gas prices stay as low as they are based off of supply and demand. Now, are, do I agree with you that supply chain disruption, transitory? Yes, of course.

• 36:52David Friedberg?

  And fiscal and monetary policy, like stimulating the world economy by pouring a ton of money out. That's never happened in history, right?

• 37:00Mark Cuban?

  For sure. A hundred percent. The question is in proportionality.

• 37:04David Sacks?

  Larry Summers was wrong when in Q1, the first quarter of the Biden Harris administration. Larry Summers warned that if you pass another two trillion of COVID stimulus, like they were planning to do, that could set off inflation, that we were on the brink.

• 37:19David Friedberg?

  He did, he did make that declaration again, against his own party, Mark. And he said, this is the wrong thing. As a Democrat, he said, this is the wrong thing to do. And they went forward with what they planned to do for various reasons. Some would argue political, some would argue that they thought it was the right thing to do. And the effect was precisely as Larry had predicted.

• 37:37David Sacks?

  Kamala Harris cast the tie breaking vote for that inflation explosion act. Otherwise known as the American rescue plan.

• 37:48Mark Cuban?

  Here's the actually. I agree with, I agree with Free Burger.

• 37:51David Sacks?

  Really, the cause of this massive 20% inflation we've had over Biden's four years is a secret deal between Trump and MBS and like Putin's in there somewhere.

• 38:02Mark Cuban?

  You can dismiss it all you want, David. Just look at the data and look at the numbers and they match up. Now, to Friedberg's point, to Friedberg's point, is it the only thing that caused inflation? Of course not. When you spend too much money, when you inflate the economy, when you have supply chain disruption, all those things contribute. But we're also not having the conversation to say, okay, how much of the supply chain disruption contributed to inflation? Was it 3% of that 20%? Was it 5%? Was it 7%? Was it 1%? We don't know. It's impossible. It's all fundable money.

• 38:34David Sacks?

  The supply, hold on, the supply chain was constrained during COVID and it was healing. It was getting better. And then they pumped all this stimulus and everyone got these stimmy checks. Just to level set with the piece, let me just level set with the piece of data here.

• 38:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's leave the opinion. I'm just really curious. I just want the high level report card on the last two presidents. What is the high level report card, Mark?

• 38:53Jason Calacanis?

  To put a cap on this, just for the audience, here is our national debt over the two presidencies, the two terms. And as you can see, with the taking out the bump for COVID, it's pretty much, they're both wild spenders. I think we can all agree, they both are spending too much money and we need to have more fiscal discipline. We all agree on that. Now, to Chamath's point, Steel Man, anything you like about the Trump presidency? And then we'll go to Kamala.

• 39:18Mark Cuban?

  I mean, I think there was good elements of the tax cut. I think he went too far, but I think they needed to come down from 35%. Yeah, whatever the corporate rate, 35% I think was corporate. That was too expensive. It made it difficult for us to compete globally. I thought 20, and I thought bringing down cap gains, again, I forget exactly what they were, maybe 29%, I forget, was also smart, but I think he went too far. But you can argue that there's no right answer on what that is going to be. It's a guess, right? You just put it out there and you hope what you, what you plan and what you propose and what is implemented works. And you don't know until it does. So I didn't, I didn't have a problem with him trying that.

• 40:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, thirty-five to twenty-one. You got it exactly right.

• 40:04Mark Cuban?

  Yeah.

• 40:04David Sacks?

  You've acknowledged that Kamala's unrealized gains tax is a disaster.

• 40:08Mark Cuban?

  Well, I'll acknowledge that it's not real and you're making it up, that you've never heard her say that.

• 40:12David Sacks?

  I made it up?

• 40:13Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, you made up her saying it.

• 40:15David Sacks?

  It was in, it was in the Biden, the last Biden-Harris budget. It was in the Harris platform at the DNC.

• 40:22Mark Cuban?

  It was, that was the Biden platform at the DNC, right? You've never heard her talk about it.

• 40:27David Sacks?

  They did a search and replace on his name and put her name in there.

• 40:29Mark Cuban?

  But you're, you're, you're reaching, David, you're reaching, right? You've never heard her talk about it at all. She's been very specific that cap gains goes to twenty-eight percent, that, um, that corporate tax.

• 40:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What has Biden, what has Biden done well and what has he not done well? And then the follow-up question is, if it were an open democratic primary, would you have voted for Kamala Harris?

• 40:52Mark Cuban?

  I don't know. But then again, if Donald Trump participated in the debates on the Republican primary, in the Republican primary, would you have voted for Donald Trump?

• 41:03Mark Cuban?

  You know, there's all like the vertical.

• 41:04David Sacks?

  You're saying, you're saying it's analogous. The Republicans had an open primary.

• 41:08Mark Cuban?

  No, but they did, they did, but he did participate.

• 41:11David Sacks?

  Nikki Haley competed, that an open primary, Trump was fifty, hold on a second, Trump, Trump was fifty points ahead. Maybe he should have debated, I don't know.

• 41:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Maybe.

• 41:20David Sacks?

  No, I mean, look, I would have been in favor of him debating, but he was fifty points ahead and everybody had a chance to run.

• 41:26Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, but they didn't really have a chance because they wanted to debate.

• 41:29David Sacks?

  The Democrats pretended, hold on, let me finish and you can get your response.

• 41:32Mark Cuban?

  Okay.

• 41:32David Sacks?

  The Democrats pretended that Joe Biden was just fine, that he was sharp as a tack, that he was the best version of Joe Biden. And when the primary came and you had outsiders like Bobby Kennedy, uh, try to compete, not only did he, not only did Biden not debate, they basically used lawfare to keep Bobby Kennedy off the ballot. They did not allow him a fair shot at the nomination, which is why he had to leave the party and run as an independent. Then we find out after the debate that actually Biden is not fine. He's actually, appears to be in significant cognitive decline. So somehow Nancy Pelosi gets him out of there. And then Kamala Harris is anointed. She's never won a primary vote, ever.

• 42:17David Sacks?

  She in 2020, she ran and dropped out before the first primary. And then this time around, she never had to compete in the primary.

• 42:25Jason Calacanis?

  Do you have a question in there, Sax?

• 42:26David Sacks?

  As the candidate. The question is, I don't think, well, the question is, how can you liken this to what the Republicans did? Having an open and competitive primary.

• 42:34Mark Cuban?

  So first of all, the Republicans did not have an open and competitive, keyword competitive primary, because if one of the candidates refuses to participate because they have a lead, look what happened to Joe Biden. For all we know, Vivek, Vivek would have destroyed Trump as much as Trump destroyed Joe Biden. Nikki Haley would have destroyed Trump as much as Joe, um, Donald Trump destroyed Joe Biden. I don't, I think that's-

• 42:59David Sacks?

  I was supporting DeSantis at that time, and it was definitely competitive.

• 43:02Mark Cuban?

  And I think DeSantis would have crushed him too, right? They, those, they all were disadvantaged.

• 43:06David Sacks?

  Their names were on the ballot.

• 43:07Mark Cuban?

  I know.

• 43:07David Sacks?

  You're talking about a very-

• 43:08Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, would you, do you think DeSantis, Nikki Haley, or Vivek would have beaten Trump in a, in a debate?

• 43:15David Sacks?

  No, I think when, if you look at-

• 43:16Jason Calacanis?

  He would have beat them, okay.

• 43:17David Sacks?

  Well, hold, hold on, I'm saying it's unclear. I don't think you can just say that they would have won. I mean, Trump-

• 43:22Mark Cuban?

  So that means it's not a truly competitive-

• 43:24David Sacks?

  Hold on a second, when Trump, when Trump was in a crowded Republican field and debated, he crushed everybody. So I just don't know what would have happened.

• 43:31Mark Cuban?

  That was 2016.

• 43:32David Sacks?

  Yeah, right, right.

• 43:33Mark Cuban?

  That was 2016.

• 43:34David Sacks?

  This is just debate, this is just debate, okay? What about the point that the Democrats kept other contenders off the ballot? They used lawfare, and moreover, they lied about Biden's cognitive condition. And then they anointed Kamala Harris through a process that is opaque, and we still don't know what happened.

• 43:51Mark Cuban?

  Okay, so here's my answer, right? First, going back to the Republican, it wasn't a competitive primary if the contender doesn't participate. And yes, he did well against 15 other candidates in 2016, but I'd be willing to bet that he's also had cognitive decline. Everything he says and does is reflective of that. If Joe Biden had said the same thing, we would be having a lot of, we would-

• 44:14Mark Cuban?

  We don't judge Donald Trump and his cognitive ability the way we did Joe Biden. Okay, so we'll put that behind. Now let's go to Joe Biden.

• 44:20David Sacks?

  Do you think Democrats lied about Biden's condition?

• 44:22Mark Cuban?

  Let's just I'm gonna tell you my personal experiences with Joe Biden, right? I didn't talk to him a lot twice during that period. And I can tell you from the first time I saw him, a year before the last time I saw him, which was, you know, probably in March or April, I forget. There was a decline. But the decline was in his sharpness, right, his quickness of response. If you sat down and you listened to him speak about something, which I did, he wasn't forceful, he wasn't, you know, he looked like a walking corpse. Um, he looked awful, right? Um, but in terms of content, it was there. And so I understand why they positioned him the way they did. It's just to sell it was impossible. So that's part one.

• 45:05Mark Cuban?

  So I don't think the decline is nearly what you're saying it is, but I do agree that

• 45:10David Sacks?

  Why'd they get rid of him?

• 45:11Mark Cuban?

  Well, okay, so that's now we're moving forward, right? His ability to respond in real time, you slow down. We all slow down, right? I'm 66 years old and I've slowed down versus where I was at 45. You so you know, at 81 and at 78, you were going to be slower. Joe Biden and just was not as quick. That was a real problem. He got destroyed in the debate by Trump because of that. Not because he didn't know the, the materials and the content, but he just couldn't respond and think fast enough. So I think that's where the, the misunderstanding is. It's not that he had cognitive decline in the pure sense. It's that his ability to respond quickly was gone. And he looked like he had cognitive decline. So now let's go forward to the Democratic National Convention.

• 45:56Mark Cuban?

  Where, um, and right before that, where they replaced it. I was curious about the, just the, um, mechanics of the whole thing. So being the curious person I am, I went and pulled up the bylaws and the rules of the Democratic Party and the Democratic National Convention, and they reset those every four years prior to them pulling out. And it's very, very clear that the only mission and the only task, and it's pretty much the same in the Republicans, I look that there's two, the only mission is to win. You want to win the presidency, you want to have control of Congress. That's all they care about, and they give themselves every bit of flexibility to do whatever they damn well please to put themselves in that position. They are a private organization.

• 46:41David Sacks?

  Are they the party, are they the party then of democracy as they claim to be? Or are they the party of winning it all comes?

• 46:47Mark Cuban?

  So now you're trying to, you know, play branding games, right? Is Starbucks really?

• 46:51David Sacks?

  No, I'm just saying that their rhetoric is at odds with what they actually did. Hold on a second, there were 14 million primary voters in the Democratic primary.

• 46:58Mark Cuban?

  That's the mainstream media discussion of this, right? They said there's 14 million voters. I say Trump didn't debate at all. There was zero debates with Donald Trump.

• 47:07David Sacks?

  There's an open primary, though. People got to vote for their candidate.

• 47:09Mark Cuban?

  It's not an open primary because it's Donald Trump's family business. He controlled what happened in the.

• 47:15David Sacks?

  What?

• 47:16Mark Cuban?

  Yeah.

• 47:17David Sacks?

  Listen, I mean, I was, again, I was supporting someone different during the primary. And the reason why DeSantis lost is he didn't get enough votes. Okay. The Republican primary voter won Donald Trump. That's why.

• 47:27Mark Cuban?

  And I bet you.

• 47:28David Sacks?

  Trump won the primary fair and square, whether he debated or not, he was up 50 points on everybody else.

• 47:33Mark Cuban?

  And I bet, and I don't know.

• 47:34David Sacks?

  That is not what happened with Biden. What happened with Biden is Biden.

• 47:37Mark Cuban?

  Let me finish, David, let me finish.

• 47:38David Sacks?

  Biden won the Democratic primary, he got 14 million votes, and then they threw out that, threw out that result and put in Kamala Harris because they didn't like his debate performance.

• 47:45Mark Cuban?

  Were you ever in a fraternity?

• 47:47David Sacks?

  What's that?

• 47:48Mark Cuban?

  Were you ever in a fraternity? Were you ever in a fraternity?

• 47:50David Sacks?

  No.

• 47:50Mark Cuban?

  Okay. In a fraternity, they get to vote on all kinds of [BLEEP]. But at the end of the day, if the chapter, the, the national organization says no, right? Doesn't matter who won the election.

• 48:02David Sacks?

  Right, so you're saying the Democratic Party is a clique? I get it. It's just not a party of democracy. Let me regain control here, just to, just to recap, boys.

• 48:10Mark Cuban?

  David, you're just talking branding. You can brand it however you want.

• 48:12David Sacks?

  No, the Democrats said they're the party of democracy. The Democrats said.

• 48:15Mark Cuban?

  I'm not a Democrat. I don't care what they do. I don't care what the Republicans.

• 48:19David Sacks?

  But you're supporting them.

• 48:19Mark Cuban?

  I'm, no, I'm supporting Kamala Harris.

• 48:21David Sacks?

  Okay, so can you acknowledge, hold on, can you just acknowledge that their rhetoric is hypocritical?

• 48:25Mark Cuban?

  I don't care what the rhetoric is, I don't pay attention. I don't pay attention to their rhetoric.

• 48:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're not going to get progress. I really want to hear what Mark thinks. Yes. Okay, move forward, move forward. Two, okay, two things seem to be true at the same time, if I'm recapping your position here. Mark, one, you would have liked to seen Trump debate. Two, I think you would have loved to seen a speedrun primary, perhaps, maybe Kamala, you know, battled it out.

• 48:49Mark Cuban?

  I honestly didn't care. I want, once Donald Trump was the candidate, I wanted the best person to beat Donald Trump. That's what I cared about.

• 48:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let me go back to my question. So I'm just going to give you a succinct summary of Mark Cuban's position. His evaluation of the Trump presidency, the positives were tax cuts.

• 49:07Mark Cuban?

  And Warp Speed and Operation Warp Speed.

• 49:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Warp Speed. The negatives were continuing the war in Yemen when they had a chance to, and then this.

• 49:16Mark Cuban?

  And actually, the negative wasn't so much that, sorry, Tremont, I thought, the negative wasn't so much he continued it. The negative is the hypocrisy in his approach.

• 49:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, right, in the style. Okay, now. And the tone and style of how he governed. Can we do Biden? What are the things that Biden and Harris did well that have helped the country? And what are the things that they could have done better, did not do well?

• 49:36Mark Cuban?

  So I'll start with the negatives first. So just so you know that there's a lot of them. One, the way they handled the border was horrific. There's no way to, you know, to say it any differently. Now, I understand why they took the approach they did. Literally, if, if I were in a Central, a Central American company, country, and my family was at risk of getting shotgun because there's a drug war, I'm doing everything I can, and I reckon, I recognize, you know, that if I just set foot on American soil, I have a chance for asylum, and I get that. And I get why Biden and his administration might say, just for humanitarian reasons, we're going to increase the number of people that we allow to do that. I understand why he would do it.

• 50:18Mark Cuban?

  But at the same time, he opened the door too wide. And he made it so that there were too many people that came through, and that created cascading problems. Now, to his credit, down, back in June, I think it was, he signed, he signed an executive order, which he now has made permanent, or as permanent as you can as present. That changed, that there's no longer the option to just set foot on American soil and be eligible for a hearing for asylum. You can't do that any longer. And to her credit, she worked with the head of the Mexican government, and they have taken steps to reduce the flow of people to the border. And so now the number of encounters at the border is about the same as what it was

• 51:03Mark Cuban?

  right before the pandemic under the Trump administration. So while he was too long to do it, while he handled it incorrectly overall, and the messaging was horrible, I think they got to the right place. But now we have a problem, right, that he created where we have too many non-citizens, illegal aliens, however you want to call them, however you want to brand them, and we have to understand how to deal with them. I think that they have talked about, Kamala has talked about first, and even J D Vance said this, first, we're going to get rid of the criminals, which makes sense. But Donald Trump says, we're just going to deport everybody. Any illegal, we're just going to deport them. Now, Obama was the deporter in chief. He deported more people than

• 51:47Mark Cuban?

  Trump or Biden, over 3 million people, but he had a specific process in place that everybody could understand. And I think with Trump, remember that Orion Gonzalez kid, the six-year-old kid in Miami, Elian Gonzalez, right, where all of a sudden you had these cops with, you know, riot gear on and machine, you know, and AR-15s or whatever they use, pointing them at a six-year-old kid cowering in a closet. If Donald Trump does that, and that's not contrary to how he approaches things, we could have another series of riots and protests that go really, really bad. And so, while I think Biden handled things completely wrong at the beginning, I think with Harris,

• 52:32Mark Cuban?

  Now, and she's saying she'll support the, um, the immigration bill that was bipartisan, et cetera, et cetera. You guys know that. I think she has a more common sense approach to dealing with deportations and getting people through the asylum system. And the asylum, that bill, I think, said that it would reduce the amount of time to adjudicate asylum to 90 days, which means that there's a chance to get control of this before it turns into a riot.

• 52:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, so that was, border was bad. Anything else bad, or should we shift to the good?

• 53:01Mark Cuban?

  I think the spending was bad. I think, um, that we overspent. And I think we went through a period where, and I'm not trying to make excuses for him. I just think, you know, you guys mentioned this before, he did overspend. And I think the, the infrastructure bill was good. I think the broadband bill was good. And everybody says we spent $42 billion on broadband and got nothing. We should have gone to Starlink. But the reality is the money went to the States and they could buy Starlink from Elon all they want. So that's just kind of the mainstream media poo-pooing something they shouldn't poo-poo. But the EV stuff, the EV chargers, that's a cluster, you know, and there's no way around that. And so I think that was bad. Um.

• 53:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So pork barrel spending, basically unaccountable spending.

• 53:43Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, no, I think, you know, what they did in healthcare, um, you know, you can take Lena Kahn and say what she's doing for the mergers, you know, Albertsons and Kroger's, I think is too much. I think, you know, and I even told her this, I sat on a panel, sitting right next to her, and I said, the most important thing from a technological perspective in this country today is that we win AI. That is going to find everything militarily for us and economically for us. And that when you try to break up companies like Google and Facebook, you diminish our ability to compete globally with AI. And she told me, now that she didn't, didn't impact at all, that she understands that and she's heard that before. I think their approach to that is wrong. I think that what she's done with

• 54:23Mark Cuban?

  the FTC against pharmacy benefit managers has been good, right? Pharmacy benefit managers are ripping off more companies and costing and increasing the cost of medications more than anything else that's happening in healthcare. And she's called them on the carpet with a recent report and just sued them. I think that's good. Um, I think in terms of other negatives, like Kamala Harris now, I think, um, the, um, Filibuster, I think that's a mistake to try to get rid of the filibuster because then somebody else gets rid of it for something else and it's just cascading problems. On spending, we talked about, I think he spent too much there.

• 55:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And what have they done well?

• 55:02Mark Cuban?

  I think he changed the tone of the country. I think that was really, really important. No one woke up, you know, David calls it mean tweets, but not waking up concerned about mean tweets is important. Not waking up concerned about there being some random tariff on your company that you didn't expect, not waking up being accused of doing something. I think those were all huge positives. I think supporting workers, I think, you know, just having just a sensibility of, okay, we're not in the middle of everything. There just wasn't this uncertainty like every single day that every business woke up with with Trump. Just removing that was the biggest positive of all.

• 55:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So let's look forward now to a Kamala Harris candidacy for president. Of the things, so we know the Donald Trump track record because he gets the credit for the things he got right and he has to take ownership of the things.

• 55:59Mark Cuban?

  But how it's been defined, I'll use the Yemen example again, I'll use the price example on oil again, the, you know, we have Trumpnesia, right? We presume that what he did in terms of the economy and everything and no wars, you know, no, everything was just rosy under Donald Trump. And I think that's another thing that's neg.

• 56:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll be honest, I've never heard this specific theory. I'll take the time to look and figure it out for myself and I'll let you. But what I'm curious about is that track record is there now, how much of the, and do you think it's important for us to give credit for the good things to Kamala and responsibility for the bad things to Kamala in that so that you have an equivalent A-B comparison? Do you think about it that way or not?

• 56:42Mark Cuban?

  No, I don't. And I'll tell you why. I'm assuming all you guys have had a boss at one point or another. Yes?

• 56:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 56:49Mark Cuban?

  And do you all agree with everything that that boss did all the time?

• 56:54Mark Cuban?

  No.

• 56:55Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 56:56Mark Cuban?

  No, but you had to do what the boss told you to do.

• 56:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 56:59Mark Cuban?

  And that's Kamala's job.

• 57:00Jason Calacanis?

  But I like, I like to take credit for when the boss tells me I'm owning something and then I do it.

• 57:04Mark Cuban?

  Well, but at the same time, you get credit for doing it, but it doesn't matter, you know, if it turns out to be wrong, it's still the boss that's on the hook for it.

• 57:13David Friedberg?

  What about the border, Mark? Because you made a comment about the border and she was declared the border czar.

• 57:18Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, again, that, that's branding. I mean, we play branding games with politics all the time. If you look at what her specific responsibility was, I alluded to it earlier. Her job was to go to Central America and talk to the heads of the countries there and try to reduce the reasons why people were leaving their countries to go to the United States.

• 57:38Jason Calacanis?

  Why do you think they opened the border so much? I'm wondering, Mark, there is a conspiracy theory or theory, you can, you can pick how you want to frame it, that this is to increase the number of Democratic voters. At the same time, we hear that a lot of the folks coming in who are the working class, that the Republican Party is now the populist party, so there was votes would go to the Republicans. So, you know, I've heard this argument from both sides. What does Mark Cuban think?

• 57:59David Friedberg?

  There's another theory, an economic theory, Mark, which is that it increases the base of workers when we're at our lowest unemployment rate in history and inflation is raging. So by bringing in low cost workers that you're, that you're able to get to work at a lower wage rate, you actually have a deflationary effect and a stimulatory effect because then they end up being spenders as well.

• 58:20Mark Cuban?

  And I get the logic there. I don't think there, I think maybe they might have thought of that earlier and that's why they let too many people in, but I think they realize now that they screwed up.

• 58:30David Friedberg?

  And that shouldn't be, that shouldn't be an executive authority, right? I mean, that should be like a legislative congressional authority that makes that decision and that determination on whether to change immigration policy. Do you think that the executive branch should be able to unilaterally determine who comes into the country without following laws?

• 58:45Mark Cuban?

  No, I prefer that Congress does it. Unfortunately, that's just not what worked. Look at the SEC with Gary Gensler. The guy's a moron and, but, you know. Here we go.

• 58:56David Sacks?

  Actually, yeah, so that's an area we can we can agree on. But before we get to that. So so your claim on border. We finally found ground truth. Here we go. No, we can agree on that. And Lena Khan, I think we all agree about Lena. But but before before we do that, I just want to finish up on border here. So your claim is that Kamala Harris really wanted to seal the border, but she was prevented.

• 59:18Mark Cuban?

  No, that's not what I said at all.

• 59:19David Sacks?

  He didn't say that.

• 59:20Mark Cuban?

  David, you're really good at trying to position things. So you have, you know, you have talking points to go out with.

• 59:26David Sacks?

  No, I'm just, you said that this was a case of a VP who was thwarted by her boss from doing what she wanted to do.

• 59:33Mark Cuban?

  That is not what I said. That is not what.

• 59:35David Sacks?

  So you admit that she was on board.

• 59:36Mark Cuban?

  You're the king of virtue signaling, David.

• 59:37David Sacks?

  No, no, no, it's not virtue signaling. Okay, so the truth is she was on board with Joe Biden's agenda.

• 59:42Mark Cuban?

  I don't know. She's doing what she was [bleep] told to do.

• 59:46David Sacks?

  Which one is it?

• 59:46Mark Cuban?

  There's no, you're creating false choices, David. You're creating false choices. So David, if you do the job your boss told you to do, does that, do you make a declaration before you do it if I agree or disagree?

• 59:59David Sacks?

  Then how do you know she disagreed with Joe Biden about these policies?

• 1:00:02Mark Cuban?

  Because I see what she's doing now.

• 1:00:04David Sacks?

  Well, because she changed the policy, right? She has a different policy. It's an election year conversion. She realizes what a disaster it's been.

• 1:00:09Mark Cuban?

  So so when Trump does it, it's brilliant.

• 1:00:12David Sacks?

  No, let me give you the proof. Okay, her own words. Okay. So she flipped her position. She called Trump's border wall un-American and medieval and mocked it. And this is before she became Biden's vice president.

• 1:00:24Mark Cuban?

  And right around the same time.

• 1:00:25David Sacks?

  Hold on, when when she was in the Senate and Trump was trying to build the wall, remember, Democrats tried to thwart that. They subjected him to years of litigation to prevent him from building that wall. And she, multiple times, was on record saying the wall was un-American, medieval, mocked, and so forth. She also compared ICE to the KKK. She said that images of Border Patrol agents evoke slavery. Okay, this is her rhetoric. I don't think Joe Biden made her say that. She suggested that we abolish ICE and start from scratch. Okay. And now she wants to talk about how tough she is on the border.

• 1:00:58Mark Cuban?

  Maybe she talked, maybe she talked to J.D. Vance back then and was taking his positions. People change their mind for whatever reason. People learn. You're positioning as

• 1:01:09David Sacks?

  Okay, so for, so hold on. So, so throughout her whole time in the Senate, she was arguing against a border wall, okay, in the strongest possible language. She then becomes border czar, or you could call it point person for the Biden administration. And for three years, they gaslit us that the border was not a problem, that it was not an open festering wound, like the videos were constantly coming out. I remember on the show, we talked about it, and I was told when I raised the issue of the border, that was a conspiracy theory, that Fox News was just cherry picking videos. Remember that, Jason? In any event?

• 1:01:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, well, people were actually, it was interesting to bring that up, because people were sharing, people were sharing videos and playing them on Fox that were from like 10 years ago. So there was a lot of misinformation.

• 1:01:48David Sacks?

  The Democrats, the whole Democratic Party-

• 1:01:50Mark Cuban?

  You know, the thing about caravans, David, all those caravans never made it to the border. How many caravans did we hear about that were coming?

• 1:01:55David Sacks?

  Something like 10, over 10 million migrants have entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration. The first thing they did, hold on a second, when Biden, when Biden, no, we know about, no, no, we do know. Those, those 10 million are just the border encounters. Those are the recorded crossings that they led into the country. The number we don't know is whether, how many more were not recorded. That could be 20 or 30 million. Okay, now, what happened? Why, why did this happen? I'll tell you why. When Joe Biden took office, he repealed all of Trump's executive orders.

• 1:02:26Mark Cuban?

  No, he did not. What is it, section 42?

• 1:02:28David Sacks?

  90 of them.

• 1:02:30Jason Calacanis?

  Title, title 42.

• 1:02:31Mark Cuban?

  Title 42 stuck around until the end of 23.

• 1:02:34David Sacks?

  And in addition, they got rid of Trump's Remain in Mexico policy, and they changed the meaning of asylum, so that anyone who went to the border and said that they were suffering economic hardship, which is basically the whole world, okay, could now qualify for asylum. And they were giving, they were given like a ticket to appear in court one day, like three years, five years, and they were ushered into the country. And then, there were like nonprofits working with the Biden administration to put them on buses and planes.

• 1:02:56Mark Cuban?

  David, I agree that they screwed up on the, I agree, they screwed up on the border. I, I, you're not, I'm not arguing with you on that.

• 1:03:02David Sacks?

  This is more than a screw up.

• 1:03:03Mark Cuban?

  No, fine, they screwed up. But now, we are back where Trump was. So yeah, but she she changed, just like Donald, just like J D Vance, J D Vance called him Hitler. J D Vance in 2020 and and after diminished Donald Trump.

• 1:03:16David Sacks?

  That was that was in private communications in 2016 and J D Vance explained, including last night, why he changed his mind about that.

• 1:03:22Mark Cuban?

  Right, and that's fine. So he talked to people. So since so did she, representing the state of the people.

• 1:03:27David Sacks?

  This was her position like six months ago, and now all of a sudden she's the nominee. So she's going by the bus.

• 1:03:32Mark Cuban?

  No, no, no, no, no. You're you're trying, you're virtue signaling like a mother, right? You're trying to put, you're trying to brand anything. You tried to brand anything that you disagree with, that you think is a negative and just put it on her, which is politics 101, right? But you're not looking at what she's actually doing. What she's actually doing is.

• 1:03:50David Sacks?

  Person for the administration. Okay, look, when.

• 1:03:52Mark Cuban?

  What does it matter if she was, if she was in charge, does, and she said, you know what? What you want her to do is like J D Vance said about abortion, right? I talked to somebody and, you know, they proved it. Great. That was a smart move by him. Would it be smart for her to say, I was wrong. Now I I've learned more and I've picked up more information.

• 1:04:11Jason Calacanis?

  This is actually a good question for you, Sax. If J D Vance can lobby and want a national abortion ban and then change his mind as the number two for Trump, can Kamala change her mind when she is is no longer running for, you know, the number two seat as Biden?

• 1:04:29David Sacks?

  Well, I think I think J D explained why he changed his mind about that. He said that there was a referendum in Ohio and his side lost.

• 1:04:36Jason Calacanis?

  So he can change his mind, can Kamala? And you have the grace for Kamala to change her mind or not?

• 1:04:41David Sacks?

  Hold on a second. He's taking a learning from that. Kamala Harris has never explained why she changed her mind.

• 1:04:45Mark Cuban?

  No, it's not that she changed her mind.

• 1:04:46David Sacks?

  Second, when will the media even ask her this question? She doesn't submit for interviews and certainly the the debate moderators like on ABC never asked her a question. Mark, if she's going to change her mind, if she's going to have this election year conversion, why doesn't the media ask her, what is the basis of this? When did you change your mind? Was it five minutes ago? Why then did you support Biden throughout your entire last three and a half years? Why don't they ask her these questions? If you were part of the Biden administration, why do you volunteer to be the borders czar? If you disagree with Joe Biden about these policies, when exactly did you change your mind? Those are the questions that she should be answering. Why won't she answer?

• 1:05:23Mark Cuban?

  Those are the questions that you want.

• 1:05:24David Sacks?

  Why won't she submit to an adversary?

• 1:05:25Mark Cuban?

  No, those are the questions that you want so that you think you can put her on the defensive and get. And have

• 1:05:31David Sacks?

  I think it's what the country wants to know.

• 1:05:33Mark Cuban?

  No, look, you want to know, but let me just tell you what's important. Put yourself, put yourself in the shoes, let's just call this a business, right? And the business of this business is getting votes and winning this election. And you came in and the, the product that you originally had, New Coke failed, right? Biden's New Coke in this example. And you come in and you say, um, you know, I'm bringing it back. This is the new New Coke and we're, we're going to test to see if that's working. Well, when you brought in Kamala Harris, she had no favorable ratings whatsoever. She was behind in all polling, right where Joe Biden was. And now she's either even or ahead or a little bit behind in every single poll. And why do I bring it up?

• 1:06:17Mark Cuban?

  Because it means what she's doing is working.

• 1:06:20David Sacks?

  I think actually we agree. I think we actually have found a point to agree on, which is I think Kamala Harris is just saying whatever it takes to get elected.

• 1:06:27Mark Cuban?

  You can say the same thing about J D Vance.

• 1:06:29David Sacks?

  Hold on, she stated her true belief years ago and throughout the Biden administration, which is she never believed the border was a problem. She thought the border wall, Trump's wall was un-American and medieval. And she thought that ICE needed to be abolished. I think that was her true belief. Now, if it's not her true belief, I would like her to explain when she changed her belief and why, the same way that J D Vance did. And I think the American people are entitled to know that. And I think if the media was doing its job, they'd be asking her those questions. She, she's never been asked that. Stephanie Ruhl, in her latest interview, did not ask that. And the debate moderators did not ask that.

• 1:07:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's just go outside of America for one second because Mark, you're Jewish, you're of Jewish heritage. I would really like your opinion on what's happening outside of America. There is some crazy pictures over the last few weeks coming out from the Middle East. There's still all this complications, complicating stuff with China.

• 1:07:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Where do you stand on all of these things? Where do you stand on the Mearsheimer Sachs, Jeffrey Sachs kind of school of logic that there's a military industrial accomplice that tends to just push us towards these war zones and these forever wars? Where do you just stand on those issues? And how do you think about that?

• 1:07:41Mark Cuban?

  I mean, honestly, I don't have enough information to give you a qualified response. I'm pro-Israel to the core because I'm Jewish. I'm anti-Hamas to the core. I think, you know, they're terrorists. They are terrorists. I want to see Israel to succeed. I want to see Israel succeed. I want to see the United States support them and help them in that. But, you know, when Israel was going into Gaza, I thought it was too blunt an instrument. But when they went after Hezbollah, I thought they did it the exact right way. And so, you know, I'm always only going to respond to what I see.

• 1:08:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You have a nuanced opinion of this, yeah.

• 1:08:18David Friedberg?

  And Ukraine?

• 1:08:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:19Mark Cuban?

  Ukraine, I don't want to see American blood spilled. And as long as there's a NATO and I agree there should be a NATO, I'd rather see us spend money than put soldiers in harm's way. And so.

• 1:08:30David Friedberg?

  Does the Harris campaign agree on that point? Or do they have a point of view?

• 1:08:33Mark Cuban?

  I haven't had that conversation. I haven't had that conversation with them. I don't know.

• 1:08:36David Friedberg?

  So Mark, let me ask you just a point on arithmetic, which I think is the most important arithmetic we should all be talking about. Today is the first, yesterday was the first day of the federal.

• 1:08:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Fiscal year.

• 1:08:48David Friedberg?

  Fiscal year, right? And here's a little image for us to all look at together as a group. An image that everyone should wake up every morning in the United States and look at. The first thing they do, instead of looking at Twitter, they should look at the image that I'm sharing on the screen right now, which is federal debt in the United States.

• 1:09:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I thought it should be a screen of you taking a bath.

• 1:09:08David Friedberg?

  This is just. On the first day, on the first day of the new fiscal year, federal debt jumped by $204 billion in one day. Federal debt now stands at $35.7 trillion.

• 1:09:19David Friedberg?

  And the biggest challenge we have in the year ahead is that 10 trillion of the outstanding debt comes up for refinance. It's going to refinance at around 4%. So we're going to be adding another $300 billion in new interest expense next fiscal year, plus the Biden administration has proposed a $7.2 trillion budget for next year, which will inevitably lead to another $2 trillion of deficit spending, which means that by the end of 2025, we could be staring at $40 trillion of federal debt. And if you do the math on that at 4% interest, it's 1.6 trillion a year of interest expense a year, just on interest expense on the outstanding

• 1:10:00David Friedberg?

  debt, which effectively begins to eclipse the entire federal budget very quickly and gives us no ability to maneuver to meet the needs of all the policy demands that are being described and shaped in all of these elections and all of these debates and all the bullshit that's going on is really not fundable. What does the Harris campaign say about the situation with respect to deficit spending and debt? And I don't know how high you can raise taxes and not cut spending to even make a dent in the challenge ahead without driving a massive recession. What is, what do you think like the Harris versus the Trump campaigns kind of intentions are as we look at this abyss that we're now kind of jumping into?

• 1:10:42Mark Cuban?

  Again, I can't speak for them. I can only tell you the conversations I've had and what they've said to me. Whether or not they take these directions is completely up to them and I don't know. But I've said the exact same thing. They know that the deficit's a problem. It won't be a Biden budget. There's no Biden administration to happen. They've already, you know, just the tax rates are completely different than the Biden budget proposes where there's no, you know, unrealized capital gains, et cetera. They went to 28, 28%. So

• 1:11:14Mark Cuban?

  It's not going to be what was proposed by Biden.

• 1:11:16David Friedberg?

  There's a limit on tax, basically, right? Like that, that, that people will vote for.

• 1:11:19Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, there's only, there's a point of diminishing returns and raising taxes and they realize it. Right? So when we talked about unrealized capital gains and I gave them a thousand reasons why not, they're like, we already know this. Um, yada, yada. Now, to David's point, why don't they just come out and say it? Because the 1% of high information voters don't know the difference of unrealized capital gains or not and don't care. The 99% want to hear about the things that they're talking about. So that's why people like me can go out there and talk about it. But to your point, and the bigger point, David, um, that they've realized that there's only a couple of ways to reduce the deficit. One, you get inflation under control and that reduces interest rates. And that's going to work in our favor, and I think that's happening. Now, if it's $1.6 trillion, then, you know, if interest rates go below 4%, that saves a lot of money and probably the most you can save.

• 1:12:05Mark Cuban?

  They realized efficiency is an important element. In her last speech in Pittsburgh, she talked about how long it took, it only took one year to build the Empire State Building. That is crazy. There's too much friction in the government to be able to do building the right way. They're going to reduce friction. I've had conversations with them about AI as a service and being able to, um, optimize integrating, um, um, artificial intelligence into all these processes so that they don't have to keep on hiring people. I don't think their mindset, again, I'm speaking for myself and my perspective of my conversations with them. I don't think their mindset is to just go out there and just cut a ton of people. But I do think the mindset is, how can we implement technology to become more efficient?

• 1:12:47Mark Cuban?

  So that we can provide more value to the citizens of this country at less cost. And I think that's important to them. I think, um, you're going to see a lot of reduction. I'm trying to think of the best way to say it. She knows that technology is the ultimate driver of success. And if she supports new technologies, and you heard that again in Pittsburgh. She wants, she mentioned blockchain, but more importantly, she mentioned AI. And how AI is key to us being a dominant military, um, Having our military be dominant and to have our economy grow because the other way to get results isn't just to slash and burn like Vivek wants to do, but to grow the economy

• 1:13:29Mark Cuban?

  and that there truly are ways to grow the economy without just more spending.

• 1:13:33David Friedberg?

  But do you support Elon Musk going in? Like if you're saying shed regulatory burdens, shed inefficiency, improve productivity, don't we need an Elon Musk style model that, you know, Trump has talked about with Elon, send someone in and let's go fix the inefficiency across all of the administrative efforts run by the federal government?

• 1:13:51Mark Cuban?

  First of all, when you just cut, when you do a Vivek type, just cut the Department of Education, right? Whatever it is, we don't know what Elon would actually do.

• 1:14:01David Friedberg?

  Well, I think that triggers a recession because then you got a lot of people unemployed, right?

• 1:14:04Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, well, exactly right. And there's contracts. And so that means the United States of America is violating all these contracts with small businesses and medium-sized businesses. And maybe Elon put Doge in the treasury, who knows? And that's how we make it all up. But, but you can't just crap and slash and burn, to your point, Dave. I mean, it just won't work. And so what you can do, though, is introduce technology. We have yet to have a president that fully understands technology. I'm not here to tell you that Kamala Harris is a geek. She's not. But she understands the impact and she has a lot of people who truly are geeks around her. And she truly believes that implementing technology is a way to improve efficiency. But the whole idea is you can't take the

• 1:14:48Mark Cuban?

  libertarian approach. That's ideological. You have to take a problem solving approach. How do you look at any specific problem we're trying to solve? How can you apply technology to that? I think you will get that from the Harris administration as opposed to Donald just talking about the AI and how much energy it consumes.

• 1:15:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Mark, you, you said of all the roles, if there's a Harris administration, you said you want to run the SEC. Why?

• 1:15:14Mark Cuban?

  I was just trolling Gary Gensler. Yeah, I was just trolling Gary Gensler because it's fun to do.

• 1:15:19Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, okay. So do you think, and particularly wise, Gensler, has he done a particularly bad job?

• 1:15:25David Friedberg?

  Are you just trolling? Are you just trolling? Are you just trolling David Sacks?

• 1:15:27Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, it's about controlling me now, right?

• 1:15:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I can't keep up with the trolling.

• 1:15:31David Friedberg?

  I didn't need to control the trolling.

• 1:15:33David Sacks?

  I agree with Mark.

• 1:15:34Jason Calacanis?

  Nasty trolling, nasty trolling.

• 1:15:36David Sacks?

  No, so Mark, you are actually supporting.

• 1:15:38David Friedberg?

  Mark is actually supporting Trump. He's just trolling Sachs and coming on the show. He's been going on for weeks.

• 1:15:42David Sacks?

  No, no, no, I know he's not supporting Trump, but I tell you, one Republican that, as I understand that you are supporting is John Deaton, who is running against Elizabeth Warren in the Massachusetts Senate race.

• 1:15:52Mark Cuban?

  Yep.

• 1:15:53David Sacks?

  So I'm curious about this because I think this is an area we could agree on. You're not a fan of Elizabeth Warren at all.

• 1:15:59David Friedberg?

  I didn't know that. That's pretty, that's pretty interesting.

• 1:16:01Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not a fan of Elizabeth Warren's. I've talked to her about crypto. I mean, I understand her position. Her basic position is, you know, bad nation states use crypto to fund their operations, the bad stuff. And she just wants to throw the baby out with the bathwater as opposed to using, you know, like I proposed a blacklist from OFAC that can be implemented in all kinds of [BLEEP]. I need to get into the details, right? But it was just, it wasn't going to happen. And so when John, not just being pro crypto, but, you know, his background, his character, I thought really was a positive. And so even before he got through his hat and his ring, I was talking to him, supporting him, giving him feedback and helping him. So again, I'm not a Democrat.

• 1:16:42Mark Cuban?

  I have no problem, and I think John Deaton will be better for the country, better for the citizens of Massachusetts than Elizabeth Warren would be.

• 1:16:48Jason Calacanis?

  What would be common sense crypto regulation? Obviously, you don't want people bilking people out of their money. Yeah. So what would be a way to balance accredited investors versus the populist, non-sophisticated investors, if that's even a thing?

• 1:17:03Mark Cuban?

  So I've got a company called.

• 1:17:04Jason Calacanis?

  And people running amok, you know?

• 1:17:06Mark Cuban?

  Right. So I've got a company called lazy.com. And like, if you go to lazy.com/mcuban, you'll see all my NFTs. And all it is, is a way to display your NFTs. It hardly makes any money, but I wanted to see if we could release a token. So first thing I did was I had one of our people call the SEC and say, hey, what steps do we have to take to release a token? They went through this whole rigmarole about getting securities lawyers and this and that. There's no way a company with $100,000 in revenue is going to be able to afford to do that. So then I said, okay, I'm going to go right to the SEC.gov and see about Reg A and see if I could just fill out the forms myself. And, you know, just see what... So you start filling in name, address, then you get to the type of business, and the

• 1:17:46Mark Cuban?

  only category is "other." And once you follow that "other" connection, there's just no way to put the... There's no way to make it work. You can't make it work. And I actually said that directly to Gary Gensler. And so, to answer your question, you have to make it easy to follow the rules. And you can't... And in terms of everything being a security, Gensler says, "Everything applies to Howey," right? There's a Howey rule and everything, you know. But the reality is, there's also a rule that came after, a ruling that came after, called Reeves, Reeves versus Ernst & Young, that had to do with interest. And if you think about it, if you guys ever shorted stocks or done stock loan, where you can make some money off a stock loan?

• 1:18:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  A borrow, yeah.

• 1:18:30Mark Cuban?

  Yeah. So, you know, you can make a share... You can make one of your shares of stocks available to the borrower and get paid a vig, right? You might get 10% or 12%. And so, doing that is the exact same thing as loaning out Bitcoin for somebody else to borrow. And there's no... They don't call that a security. So I asked Gary Gensler, "If it's not a security to loan out a share of stock, and why is it, you know, a security to loan out a Bitcoin to somebody else?" He didn't have an answer. And the point there is, he has an approach that is regulation through litigation. He's going to sue you first, ask questions later, and hope that the result of that litigation becomes a rule that everybody

• 1:19:15Mark Cuban?

  else has to follow. I literally said, what's that?

• 1:19:19Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I was gonna say, wouldn't a more common sense approach here be to say if we had an accreditation test, a sophisticated investor test, we've talked about it here on the program?

• 1:19:27Mark Cuban?

  Which you do, yeah.

• 1:19:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:28Mark Cuban?

  Which there is.

• 1:19:29Jason Calacanis?

  Well, there's not one for the populace to take like a driver's license where they could say, hey, I've taken this test, I understand diversity, diversification, et cetera.

• 1:19:38Mark Cuban?

  Yeah. If you were able to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission for your company for the release of your token, then depending on how many people you were trying to sell it to, you would only be able to do that with qualified investors.

• 1:19:51Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:19:52Mark Cuban?

  But what happens is Gary Gensler is making it so difficult to register and what he's, what he should be doing is saying, here's the bright line regulations. If FTX wants to loan out all their Ethereum, you have to do what they did in Japan. You have to have 95% collateral and 95% of anything needs to be put in cold storage. If he had followed the same rules for crypto that Japan did, FTX would still be in business. Sam Bankman-Fried might still be in jail, but FTX, Three Hours Capital, they'd still be in business because he did the wrong thing. Now, I've literally talked to Kamala Harris at lunch about this specific topic of litigation, regulation through litigation, and as a lawyer, she got it immediately and she knows it's

• 1:20:36Mark Cuban?

  a problem and they know, and she's even mentioned in one of her speeches that that's something that they're going to deal with.

• 1:20:41David Sacks?

  Can I, can I get your reaction to this story from the Washington Reporter? There was a, a story, I don't know if it's true or not.

• 1:20:47Jason Calacanis?

  Website, Washington Post?

• 1:20:48David Sacks?

  But, no, Washington Reporter, so according to some Senate sources, Kamala Harris was considering Gensler for Treasury Secretary.

• 1:20:56Mark Cuban?

  I would call that bullshit.

• 1:20:58David Sacks?

  Okay.

• 1:20:58Jason Calacanis?

  What's the Washington Reporter?

• 1:20:59David Sacks?

  Have you asked her about that or?

• 1:21:00Mark Cuban?

  I, I haven't asked her about any position at all, but what I was told, and look, talking to people who are like always in the same room with her, the response to me about Gary Gensler was, have you heard anybody say anything positive?

• 1:21:17Mark Cuban?

  That's intentional.

• 1:21:19David Sacks?

  Well, I mean, the reason he's in that role is because he is Elizabeth Warren's

• 1:21:24Mark Cuban?

  Right.

• 1:21:24David Sacks?

  ally.

• 1:21:25Mark Cuban?

  Right.

• 1:21:26David Sacks?

  Has been enormously powerful during the Biden administration.

• 1:21:30Mark Cuban?

  Have you heard her say a word?

• 1:21:31Jason Calacanis?

  Mark, Mark, boil it all up. Like, what's your general sense of her? Like, how should we all think about her?

• 1:21:36Mark Cuban?

  So here's the way I look at Kamala, right? She is open minded. She's smart. She does the work. She digs in and learns. She's ethical. She's honest. She cares. Um, she wants to bring the country to the middle. She knows that when she was far left, that might have been great for the state of California, but it doesn't solve the problems of the United States of the America of America today. And that's why you've seen her go to the middle. And that is truly, I know, David, you might not believe this. It is truly honest and through and through her. When she gave, gives speeches now, she says, I'll take ideas from independents. I'll take them from Republicans.

• 1:22:16Mark Cuban?

  I don't care. We have a lot of problems to solve in this country. I, I would be shocked if, if she wins, she talks to Elon Musk. If Elon would talk to her, she doesn't care where the ideas come from.

• 1:22:26Jason Calacanis?

  Interviews with unfriendly or challenging folks. This seems to be like, you know, a really valid criticism. I mean, let Trump here, we've had J D Vance here.

• 1:22:36Mark Cuban?

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't disagree. Look, it is not.

• 1:22:39Jason Calacanis?

  Why does she, why does she hide, do you think?

• 1:22:41Mark Cuban?

  I don't, I don't think she's hiding. There's two elements there, right? One, I think she understands the assignment, which is to win the election. And the best way to reach the most number of people and get them to change their mind is not the 1% of people who are high information voters. It's all the people who are showing up at rallies and screaming and yelling. Those are the peoples who, people whose mind she has changed so far, and that's how she's caught up and who she wants to change. And that's where she's putting her focus. And two, and this is brutally honest, um. She has too long a wind up in answering every single question. And that makes interviews difficult. She wants to inspire everybody with everything that she answers and tries to get people all excited about what she's going to do. And so she takes too long to get to that.

• 1:23:26Mark Cuban?

  If you cut out the wind ups, her answers aren't so bad. Her answers are absolutely legit. But that wind up makes it seem like the whole word salad thing.

• 1:23:35David Sacks?

  You don't think it's relevant that she was born to a middle class family is the answer to?

• 1:23:39Mark Cuban?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:39David Sacks?

  How she's gonna solve inflation?

• 1:23:40Mark Cuban?

  She's gotta drop that, yeah. But on the flip side, I mean, if you listen, I literally, because I knew I'd be talking to you guys. I listened to Donald Trump's speech in Milwaukee. Did any of you guys listen to that?

• 1:23:51David Sacks?

  Yeah. I was there.

• 1:23:53Mark Cuban?

  Okay. You were there, Sax?

• 1:23:55David Sacks?

  I was there.

• 1:23:55Mark Cuban?

  The last one? No, no, not in Milwaukee, not at the convention. No, no, not the RNC, not the RNC. I'm talking two days ago.

• 1:24:00David Sacks?

  Oh, no.

• 1:24:00Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, I'm talking two days ago.

• 1:24:02David Sacks?

  No.

• 1:24:02Mark Cuban?

  Two days ago.

• 1:24:02David Sacks?

  I thought you were talking about the RNC.

• 1:24:03Mark Cuban?

  So Kamala might have a long wind up. Donald Trump has an eternal wind up where all he does is get to his slogans and talking points and then talks gibberish the rest of the time. Let me fill you in on some of the gibberish.

• 1:24:17David Sacks?

  You're talking about a rally? He will speak extemporaneously for over an hour.

• 1:24:20Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, but what he says should matter.

• 1:24:22David Sacks?

  I'll take that any day over someone on a teleprompter for 19 minutes.

• 1:24:25Mark Cuban?

  But David, so what you're saying, it doesn't matter what he says?

• 1:24:27David Sacks?

  No, I think it does matter, but I think that I've watched enough. I've watched enough Trump rallies, including his speech at the convention where I was there listening, to understand what he's, what issues he stands for.

• 1:24:39Mark Cuban?

  Okay, well, tell me what issues he stands for when he diminishes Jimmy Carter, who just has his 100th birthday. Tell me what issues he stands for.

• 1:24:46David Sacks?

  I've heard him say good things and bad things about Jimmy Carter.

• 1:24:48Mark Cuban?

  Okay, so let's put that aside.

• 1:24:49David Sacks?

  Everyone makes fun of Jimmy Carter.

• 1:24:51Mark Cuban?

  Okay, so let's put that aside. Let's just say it is what it is, even though it's aside. We'll go that, put that under the character. He started talking about apartments with no windows. That builders under Kamala Harris are gonna start, are being forced to build apartments with no windows.

• 1:25:06David Sacks?

  I haven't heard that bit yet. Yeah. Oh, I listened to this today. And then he also said that. I also know that people take a lot of what Trump says out of context to make it seem a lot worse. If you actually listen to, if you listen to, if you listen to what he says, and you don't try to, you know, shade it in the worst possible way, a lot of what he says makes sense. I believe that if you, if you want to know why I support Trump, number one, the border. Okay. Unlike Kamala Harris's election year conversion, he has been very consistent ever since he came down the escalator. Yes, he has. That we needed to have a wall and that really that was just the first part of our border security. We need to have a border. Democrats, not just Kamala, pretty much all the Democrats fought him on that for the last eight years. To the point where. Understand, understand. So the border is one thing.

• 1:25:51David Sacks?

  So you got that. Okay. So I think that he and only he has credibility in this election on that issue. Number two, on the, on the foreign wars, we talked about this. I mean, I don't think his record on foreign policy was perfect. But it is true that he did not start any new foreign wars. He was Joe Biden. And, and, and the, no. What war did Joe Biden start?

• 1:26:15David Sacks?

  The Ukraine war. We could have ended that. He invaded Ukraine? I've argued on the show many times. He might have. In my view, he provoked it. He provoked it. Okay. So you're assigning whatever to Joe Biden. At a minimum. As opposed to Putin. So he got, he forced Putin to invade Ukraine. Come on, stop acting dumb. You understand that we tried to convert Ukraine into a giant NATO base. That was, the Russians said over and over again that that was a red line to them. It was the brightest of all red lines. Blame it on Biden. And Bill Burns, our current CIA director, said it best. It's the brightest of all red, of all red lines for the Russian elite, not just Putin. Okay. That has been a consistent Russian policy for over 20 years. And moreover, hold on a second, even if you don't believe, even if you disagree with me, and you say that Biden didn't provoke it.

• 1:27:01David Sacks?

  We had the chance to end the war in its first month with a deal in Istanbul. Okay. And, you know, the mainstream media denied it for a year. It was only an alternative media. And then finally, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, wrote stories about it. It is the truth. Victoria Nuland just admitted it. We could have. agree to a deal in the first month, the Biden administration shot that down. That is why we have the war going in Ukraine.

• 1:27:21Mark Cuban?

  Okay, so let's just say that right there, but remember, Zelensky has also got to agree with it.

• 1:27:25David Sacks?

  And by the way, if you care about Israel, hold on, Mark, if you care about Israel, you should be really concerned about the fact that the United States has significantly depleted its stockpiles of weapons and artillery ammunition in Ukraine on a war that is futile.

• 1:27:40Mark Cuban?

  We sent, we sent them our old shit, David. We didn't give them anything new. We sent them our old shit. Israel gets the Glengarry leads.

• 1:27:46David Sacks?

  155, 155 millimeter artillery shells are 155 millimeter artillery shells. It's not about new or old.

• 1:27:52Mark Cuban?

  They get the Glengarry lead. Israel gets the Glengarry leads, right? And then look, and on top of that, Zelensky still has the final.

• 1:27:59David Sacks?

  Air defense, there's only so many patriots to go around.

• 1:28:02Mark Cuban?

  All right.

• 1:28:03David Sacks?

  We don't make enough of them.

• 1:28:04Mark Cuban?

  Do you agree that Zelensky could have said yes to that deal?

• 1:28:09David Sacks?

  The, the one in Istanbul?

• 1:28:11Mark Cuban?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:12David Sacks?

  He could only say yes to it if the US supported it. And instead, we encouraged him to fight. We threw cold water on that deal. We blocked it.

• 1:28:19Mark Cuban?

  He still had the final say.

• 1:28:20David Sacks?

  We should have told Zelensky, you know what? Just make that deal. We don't need another war right now. Okay, this NATO thing's not happening anyway. Okay, because we're not letting Zelensky into NATO.

• 1:28:30Mark Cuban?

  Well, no, the guy from Norway, the guy who just took over NATO says otherwise.

• 1:28:35David Sacks?

  We're not gonna let in, Zelensky was just here in the US last week with his so-called victory plan. You know what his victory plan was? Let us into NATO immediately so that you can fight our war for us.

• 1:28:45Mark Cuban?

  Or, no, I get that.

• 1:28:46David Sacks?

  With the Biden administration, to its credit, rejected that. Okay, I give Biden credit for that.

• 1:28:50Mark Cuban?

  The good news is Biden is not running in this election.

• 1:28:53David Sacks?

  Whenever it's inconvenient, you want to pretend that Harris has nothing to do with this administration.

• 1:28:59Mark Cuban?

  I'm just giving you reality, David. I'm giving you reality. When I've had people who worked for me and started, went out and started their own companies, like Chamath and, and Facebook, right? They're not, people have different opinions. The people who work for me do what I say. Period. End of story. Maybe they do a better job.

• 1:29:15David Sacks?

  She was just following orders, basically, than your own birth defense.

• 1:29:18Mark Cuban?

  Do you think JD Vance is going to do anything contrary to Donald Trump if he wins?

• 1:29:23David Sacks?

  There's an abundant record. I know what JD Vance stands for. There was an abundant record.

• 1:29:26Mark Cuban?

  That's not the question. That's not the question.

• 1:29:28David Sacks?

  As a senator before she even got the VP job.

• 1:29:31Mark Cuban?

  She was rated the most liberal member of the Senate by GovTrack.

• 1:29:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why don't you answer Mark's question?

• 1:29:36David Sacks?

  It is. The question is, what does she really stand for?

• 1:29:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, he asked you about JD Vance. You're ignoring his question.

• 1:29:41David Sacks?

  Sorry, what's your question? I'm happy to answer it.

• 1:29:43Mark Cuban?

  Would JD Vance ever go against Donald Trump?

• 1:29:47David Sacks?

  No, obviously, I understand that a VP cannot go against what their president wants.

• 1:29:51Mark Cuban?

  In a nutshell, that's it, period, end of story.

• 1:29:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Now we can cut half the episode out.

• 1:29:54Mark Cuban?

  Now move it on.

• 1:29:56David Sacks?

  Hold on a second. That fact does not prove that Kamala Harris has a different policy than Joe Biden. Whenever it's inconvenient for you to admit that Biden's policy sucks.

• 1:30:06Mark Cuban?

  No, you're doing the exact thing you're saying that I'm doing. You're trying to position her so that everything from the Biden administration is, she has ownership of it. And what I'm saying is just look at what she's doing. Look at what she's saying. You're, see, here's the, here's the Trump derangement, here's the antithesis of the Trump derangement syndrome, syndrome, right? You tell, whenever Donald Trump says something stupid, everybody explains it for him. When Kamala Harris says something smart, everybody tries to explain why it's stupid and not true.

• 1:30:35David Sacks?

  When did she say something smart? I mean, seriously, what was the last thing she said that was smart?

• 1:30:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just curious. Jason, you want to fact check the windowless, by the way, the windowless, the windowless thing, Mark, just so you know, because Nick shared it with us. It's an Architectural Digest article. Apparently Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, proposed windowless bedrooms as a way to change the building codes to incentivize more apartments being built to fix the housing crisis.

• 1:31:01Jason Calacanis?

  Converting, the problem with converting the plates in commercial.

• 1:31:06David Sacks?

  This is the gaslighting. They try to make Trump seem crazy.

• 1:31:08Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, he also, I mean, Trump lies constantly, let's be honest.

• 1:31:10David Sacks?

  You find out that there's a real basis to his comments.

• 1:31:13Jason Calacanis?

  In some cases, he just lies. Anyway.

• 1:31:15Mark Cuban?

  Trump can't ever explain it himself. Why is it that the guy that you like can never come out and say, hey, you know, this is crazy. This is the most ridiculous thing Eric Adams suggested. Everybody else has got to do the research and explain what Trump really means because he is losing it. He is cognitively incapable.

• 1:31:32David Sacks?

  As some example, you raise it as an example of Trump.

• 1:31:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay. Do you think he's a cognitive client sex?

• 1:31:38David Sacks?

  No, I think he's very sharp. We met him personally.

• 1:31:40Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so let's wrap, let's wrap the politics section with just a final question because.

• 1:31:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, wait, I have a question. Yeah, let's leave politics. Mark, very, very pointed question. Why did you sell the Mavs at this moment?

• 1:31:53Mark Cuban?

  So I sold three quarters of them, not the whole thing. I still own 27.7% for a couple of reasons. One, when I first bought in in 2000, I was the tech guy in the NBA. I was the media guy. You know, broadcast.com just sold it. HDNet just created the very first ever high-definition television network. I had every edge in every angle. Now, fast forward 24 years later, in order to sustain growth, to be able to compete with the new collective bargaining agreement, you have to have other sources of revenue. And so you see other teams, and all sports for that matter, you know, talking about casinos, talking about creating, doing real estate development.

• 1:32:35Mark Cuban?

  That's just not me. I wasn't going to put up $2 billion to, you know, to get an education on building.

• 1:32:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Same.

• 1:32:42Mark Cuban?

  So that was one. That's part one. Part two is my kids are now 15, 18, and 21. And over the next 10 years, that's a lot of pressure on them to have to take over the team or deal with the trust, you know, God forbid something happens to me, deal with the trust fund issues. And so by selling three quarters of it, I took all that pressure off of them. Because you, you guys see the hate. I mean, Jason could tell you all day long about Jimmy Dolan, you know?

• 1:33:09Jason Calacanis?

  He's MIA right now and the Knicks are doing great. Do you think valuations peak, Mark?

• 1:33:14Mark Cuban?

  I don't think they've peaked yet because it, for the reasons I just mentioned. If we're able to build a Venetian-type casino in Dallas with an American Airlines center in the middle of it, the valuation is $20 billion. But I own 27% of that.

• 1:33:32Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and you bought it for under 300 and

• 1:33:35Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, 285.

• 1:33:36Jason Calacanis?

  3.5. Just not everybody's keeping the records. I think Chamath, you bought a 300 and sold at 3 billion as well. So congratulations, boys.

• 1:33:42David Sacks?

  Actually, let me ask you a question about that. When you did it, did you just do it for fun and it worked out to be a great business? Or did you think it was going to be a great business?

• 1:33:48Mark Cuban?

  No, I did it for fun. So, you know, it's a great question, Dave. From 2000 to 2010, the actual valuations went down. And in 2010, we were not even able to sell the New Orleans Hornets. The league had to buy it.

• 1:34:05Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:34:05Mark Cuban?

  And it was right around then that the Sixers got purchased for 200, for the same price I paid. And, you know, the cap, the NBA salary cap is a reflection of the total revenues of the NBA. There were multiple years when the salary cap went down, meaning our overall revenues went down, which was great for me competitively because I would buy first round picks for $3 million. I would buy players from other teams that couldn't afford to run their teams. And that's why we went on this, you know, 15 year streak of never having a losing season and winning 50 games in a row for 10 years in a row. So, you know, it worked against me, it worked for me competitively, but that just shows you that things can change. And so I did do, what's that?

• 1:34:50David Sacks?

  What?

• 1:34:50Mark Cuban?

  TV deal. So when cable and satellite and over the air became very competitive and they started to grow and subscriptions grew to 130 million people or subscriptions, that's a lot of money. And they had to compete for content so that there would be less churn. And I literally remember in 2001, when we first signed our first cable deal, NBC had the deal and they were going back to David Stern saying, we need fewer games. And I sat there in one of our Board of Governors meetings and I'm like, look, TBS just signed a deal to pay a billion dollars per episode for repeats of Seinfeld.

• 1:35:30Mark Cuban?

  If you do that on a valuation per hour, ours is fresher, our ratings are actually better. Don't think of it as less product will lead to more demand. It's the exact opposite. We're so inexpensive, we can charge more and that led to the next TV deal and that led to the explosion.

• 1:35:50Jason Calacanis?

  Mark, you have a lot of fingers and a lot of pots in other businesses. You have a really important thing you're doing in drugs that you may want to talk about.

• 1:35:57Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, thanks for bringing that up, Chamath.

• 1:35:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you look at the next 10 years of your life, so you're 66, between now, 14 years, between now and 80, 81, what's your goal? Like, what are you working on? What are the things that you care about? Where are you putting your capital? What are you trying to do?

• 1:36:12Mark Cuban?

  The number one's family, obviously, but beyond that is costplusdrugs.com. Um, we're [bleep] up the health industry like you wouldn't believe. If you've seen-

• 1:36:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just explain it for the folks that don't understand.

• 1:36:23Mark Cuban?

  So, let's just say, guys our age, or you guys are close enough to my age, we use a drug called Tidilfil, right? For those of you who know what it is. And you, it's generic Cialis.

• 1:36:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Cialis. Yeah, Cialis is great.

• 1:36:37Mark Cuban?

  I'm trying to bring the smirk from you guys, not even a smirk.

• 1:36:39Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, wait, wait, hold on, we gotta double click on this.

• 1:36:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So you've heard from Sacks.

• 1:36:44Mark Cuban?

  Right.

• 1:36:44Jason Calacanis?

  Are you a Cialis or a Viagra guy, Sacks? What's going on here?

• 1:36:48Mark Cuban?

  At any event-

• 1:36:49Jason Calacanis?

  Or both?

• 1:36:50Mark Cuban?

  So-

• 1:36:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Cialis just seems better value for money.

• 1:36:53David Sacks?

  What are those? Never heard of them.

• 1:36:55Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks is like, what is that?

• 1:36:56David Sacks?

  Never heard of them.

• 1:36:57Mark Cuban?

  He's turned red, actually. So, if you go to costplusdrugs.com and you put in Tidilfil, when it comes up, we show you our actual cost. And then we mark it up by 15%. And if you buy it via mail order, then we add $5 for a pharmacy fee to review everything, and $5 for shipping and handling. The net result of that is, you guys have a general idea of what the price is now from now the ads. You can buy a 90-pack of Tidilfil for about $9.90, plus shipping and handling. So for less than the price of a bag of M&Ms, you could put up a little cup or jar next to your bed of either M&Ms-

• 1:37:37Jason Calacanis?

  What is the name of this website?

• 1:37:39Mark Cuban?

  Costplusdrugs.com.

• 1:37:42Jason Calacanis?

  Chumot be right back. $9 for 90 days.

• 1:37:45Mark Cuban?

  Right? We're like, let's go!

• 1:37:46Jason Calacanis?

  Or Chumot. That seems free. It's an incredible deal.

• 1:37:50Mark Cuban?

  So, but you apply that to the 2,500 drugs that we have. And now, all of a sudden, you see what's wrong with these things called pharmacy benefit managers. And the problem of an industry that's opaque, and I'll give you another example. There are drugs that are called specialty generics. And the only thing special about them, they're actually just pills, is that they were traditionally more expensive. So there's a drug called ematinib, which is a chemotherapy drug. If you just walk into a CVS, as an example, and a big, big pharmacy, and just, you were a cash payer or a high deductible payer, and you just needed it- They'll charge you anywhere from $200 to $2,000. You have no idea what you're going to pay.

• 1:38:31Mark Cuban?

  If you get it from cost plus drugs, depending on the number and the strength, it might be $21 to $30. There's another drug, Droxodopa. One of my buddies came to me and said, I'm losing my insurance. They want to charge me, the pharmacy wants to charge me $10,000 a quarter for this medication called Droxodopa. All right, Landon, let me check. Initially, it was $64 a month. Now it's in the $20 per month because as our cost goes down, we pass it on. And that's just changed the industry because think about what happens when you get a prescription.

• 1:39:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What's the pushback, but Mark, I mean, what is the pushback you get because that's, that's

• 1:39:05Mark Cuban?

  None.

• 1:39:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's counter to the trend, right? So is it just infinite growth or how does the industry respond when you create that price differential?

• 1:39:13Mark Cuban?

  So it's the innovator's dilemma. They can't just give up all of this margin. They, so most of the business of pharmacy benefit management, not most, so a big chunk of the businesses comes from corporate, from corporations, right? And self-insured companies and they go to them and they put together the thing called the formulary, which is all the drugs, right? That's available to them and they say, we're going to price this so that we get rebates and we'll pass on the rebates we get from the manufacturers to you. Now they say they're going to pass on 100% of that rebate. They don't. They create all these subsidiaries and everything that skim 10% or whatever off the top. But they know that they can continue working with these companies because the core competency of a CEO is not to know their healthcare costs.

• 1:39:56Mark Cuban?

  And literally for any CEOs that are out there, audit your PBM contract. Audit it right now. I promise you that that PBM is going to tell you, you don't need to audit. And then you can say, we want to add cost plus drugs to our pharmacy supply contract. And they're going to say, no, you're not allowed to do it because they know our prices are so much lower that it's disrupting their industry.

• 1:40:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Are you doing this as like a for-profit business? Are you losing money on this and doing it just to help society? What's your plan here?

• 1:40:26Mark Cuban?

  Right now, I'm losing money and most of that was because we built a factory, a whole robotics-driven factory that manufactures sterile injectables that are in short supply. So now, like with the hurricane, you know, we're using our robotics to switch over to sterile water of all things and some other things so that we can manufacture it and get it to them at, you know, a reasonable price as opposed to price gouging, which Kamala has talked often about. So, you know, because there will be price gouging in pharmacy and we're here to be an alternative. So to answer your question, I've spent a whole lot of money on these robotics and putting this together, but our path is hockey stick, double, triple hockey stick.

• 1:41:07Mark Cuban?

  And so we're taking business from them and I think the traditional legacy companies in the insurance-

• 1:41:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But did something, did something happen to you or somebody around you that motivated you to go after the PBMs or was this clinical business analysis of like, this just doesn't make sense and it can be done better?

• 1:41:23Mark Cuban?

  So both. What happened was I got an email from my partner, co-founder, Dr. Alex Oshmeyansky, and he wanted to create a compounding pharmacy in Denver that made drugs that were in short supply because there's always, for whatever reason, some generic drug that is on a shortage list. And I'm like, you're thinking too small. And this was right around the time that the pharma bro was going to jail. And I asked him, you know, how is it that this dude buys up a one-year supply of Deraprim, the drug he bought, and just jacks it up? And how does that happen? And he goes, it just happened. And I'm like, well, let me do some homework and dig in. And the reason was obvious. The industry was completely opaque. The first line in every single pharmacy contract and healthcare contract for that matter is you're not allowed to talk about it.

• 1:42:08Mark Cuban?

  You are restricted from talking about this to anybody, anybody at all. So we had a completely opaque market. So we put together the website called costplustrugs.com, but really the smartest thing that we did, and it was unintentional in terms of impact, we created a full price list. So you can get our 2,500 drugs, the actual price list, and we release it every week because we're on a roll now where we've had since last, a year ago, more than a year ago, every weekday, we've lowered a price on a drug. And so we just put that out and what's happened as a result is now companies can just get the price list and do comparisons to approximately what they're paying because their PBM won't tell them exactly what they're paying.

• 1:42:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  One suggestion for you there, Mark. You can make this a nonprofit. When you sell the Mavs, you could donate money to this. Then, like, six, seven years later, you could flip it into a for-profit and take it public. There's like a strategy here. This could work out really well for you.

• 1:43:04Mark Cuban?

  Exactly the point. And, you know, Sam Altman is an investor. No, I'm just kidding. And so, um, so we put out this price list, and all of a sudden Harvard Medical and Vanderbilt and the, all these research institutes took our pricing and compared it to what Medicare was paying for the same drugs. And it was like, well,

• 1:43:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, this is, this is what I was gonna ask you, because CMS is now in power to negotiate.

• 1:43:30Mark Cuban?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And this is sort of maybe ties together with the governmental efficiency and just do the obvious right thing. But shouldn't they just work with you as an example? And, and why don't they?

• 1:43:43Mark Cuban?

  They are. And it's just started.

• 1:43:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They are.

• 1:43:45Mark Cuban?

  Right. So here's, again, I can't speak for her to say what she's going to do, but here was the conversation I've had with her team. When it comes to reducing out-of-pocket costs to deal with inflation, what I have told them is, one key area that impacts most families at some level, nobody dies healthy, is the cost of healthcare and pharmaceuticals. And by working, by requiring transparency in all contracts, signed by anybody, anywhere in terms of pricing, you are going to see the same impact on across-the-board pricing of a decrease of 30, 40%. And so, all that is going to reduce out-of-pocket spending for everybody, reduce government spending for everybody, and have a net positive impact.

• 1:44:29Mark Cuban?

  They see that, they know that.

• 1:44:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And have you had the, had that conversation with the Republicans as well, so that they, I mean, it seems it makes sense for everybody?

• 1:44:37Mark Cuban?

  I had the conver- a similar conversation, like, as I mentioned to you, in the White House, when I went there, and it just didn't resonate.

• 1:44:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Boys, any, any final questions for Mark here, as we wrap up?

• 1:44:46Mark Cuban?

  Not gonna ask me about Elon, and why I troll Elon, and any of that good stuff.

• 1:44:48David Friedberg?

  Well, I wanna, I wanna know about, are you investing in AI technology? Where are you investing in the stack? How do you think about that? Are you an active venture investor, Mark? I mean, I know we've obviously done- Some stuff together, but I'm curious like how how you look at stuff.

• 1:45:02Mark Cuban?

  So now I've kind of slowed down. I invested in Grok, right, with Schmatz, right? Schmatz is, yeah, let's go, right? And he can tell you all the reasons.

• 1:45:08David Friedberg?

  I think I think we all I think we all have a piece of that now.

• 1:45:10Mark Cuban?

  Okay, well, good. So you guys know the whole story, right? And so I think that that's great. Picks and shovels, I think, are important. I think the problem, and this happens with all new technologies, is we're seeing the gold rush right now, where everybody calls everything AI, particularly with agents. And I think you can put all these vertical agents together to do all these different things. But agents are just going to be a feature, not a product. Because inherently, in AI, as it advances and gets smarter, then it's going to be able to create its own agents for its users and go forward from there. So I've been really hesitant now, because, you know, you're not going to invest in the foundational models. I mean, through a fund, I have part of OpenAI, but and some others, but

• 1:45:53Mark Cuban?

  it's that's just so expensive. You don't know who the winners are going to be. But yet, everything that everything that happens is going to be a derivative.

• 1:46:00Jason Calacanis?

  Well, what's your what's your business intuition tell you about that, actually? So you have this crazy capital race between closed and open. How do you think that plays out?

• 1:46:10Mark Cuban?

  I think there are going to be tens of millions of models. Everybody's going to have a model. Your kids are going to have models. You know, their little invisible friend is going to be a model that's in a, you know, a teddy bear that they grow up with. So there's going to be an unlimited number of models. But we don't know who the winners are going to be to host those models. I have no idea. And if you go back over the history of technology, it's that's always the case. Everybody, there's always a race to be the winner for the foundation, whether it was broadband, whether it was networking, whether it was whatever it's streaming, and everybody battles it out. And so it's okay. And for me now, I'm just like, let me just wait.

• 1:46:51Jason Calacanis?

  You think there's a you think there's going to be or a chance at job displacement? What do you think of like this universal basic income cataclysm?

• 1:47:00Mark Cuban?

  I think it's the exact opposite.

• 1:47:01Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, explain.

• 1:47:02Mark Cuban?

  So I think that.

• 1:47:05Mark Cuban?

  In order to train a model, you need access to information. And the internet ain't what it used to be in terms of being a source of information.

• 1:47:13Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:47:14Mark Cuban?

  And so IP is becoming more valuable. You're not, I think everybody by this time expected all the foundational models to have all this healthcare information. But if I'm Mayo Clinic, I'm not giving Microsoft or Google or OpenAI my IP because that's what brands me. And so there's going to be a lot of money available there. And I think that there, that has got to be a way to, there's got to be a way to figure that out, right? First, how does IP work and how is it distributed? And then how are we using it just in general? We really don't know how we're going to implement it or use it or what the interface is going to be. And all that will be figured out by some kid somewhere.

• 1:47:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So maybe just to wrap, Mark, so these, these next 10 or 15 years, is it about doubling down on these current things? Making cost plus thing huge, like harvesting essentially? Or are you going to do new things or is just the bar getting higher?

• 1:48:09Mark Cuban?

  You know, when I'm gone, I wanted to say, motherfucker, he did it. It was expensive when we were sick and ain't expensive no more. And to me, that's, that's the ultimate mission. Now, it's fun to learn AI and, you know, build models and do all that stuff, right? But when it's all said and done, to me, that's

• 1:48:28Jason Calacanis?

  That's where you want to, Mark.

• 1:48:29Mark Cuban?

  That's what I want.

• 1:48:30Jason Calacanis?

  Let me ask you a final, final question then. That's great. We've, you've, you've done a reality show, just retired from that, cashed out of three quarters of the Mavericks check, did that. Helping people with this cost plus drugs and, and saving people money. It's a pretty noble mission, kind of adds up to you're going to run for president and

• 1:48:52Mark Cuban?

  No, there's no way.

• 1:48:53Jason Calacanis?

  Why not? It would be a great thing to do. You've checked off all the boxes. Why wouldn't you?

• 1:48:57Mark Cuban?

  Too old now, right?

• 1:48:58Jason Calacanis?

  He's not, what are you talking about? He's 20 years younger than Trump and Biden.

• 1:49:02Mark Cuban?

  Wikipedia is wrong. I changed, I'm a sock puppet in my spare time. I changed.

• 1:49:05Jason Calacanis?

  No, four years from now, eight years from now, would you, would you even consider it? Or if you were going to consider it?

• 1:49:10Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, right to our era, right?

• 1:49:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. How would you process making that decision?

• 1:49:14Mark Cuban?

  My kids hated the idea. My wife hated the idea. They want, you know, it's hard enough for them to have a normal life as it is. Um, and that just takes it to a whole nother level.

• 1:49:23David Sacks?

  Plus, you'd have to run as a Republican because Democrats hate billionaires like you.

• 1:49:27Mark Cuban?

  No, actually.

• 1:49:28David Sacks?

  You saw it happen at Bloomberg, right? You saw it happen at Bloomberg.

• 1:49:30Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, but that's.

• 1:49:30David Sacks?

  A hundred million dollars made it to the first question of the first debate. Boom. Elizabeth Warren knocked him out.

• 1:49:36Mark Cuban?

  But let me just tell you this, and we don't have to talk more about politics. Parties don't exist anymore. They don't. There, there's fundraising vehicles and they have procedures in place. But this is Donald Trump. He took over the Republican Party. They do what he says. And Kamala Harris has learned from Donald Trump. Give him credit. She has learned what worked for him. They're not stupid. She has learned that she has got to be that personality that takes over and they have got to do what she says. You haven't heard a word from Bernie or Elizabeth Warren. And that's not unintentional. She is doing it her way. Now, whether or not you agree what she's doing or her approach to win, everybody can argue and that's what makes a market. But there are no political parties anymore.

• 1:50:16Mark Cuban?

  And the idea of the, the ideology of a party on the Democratic side is no more in place than on the Republican side.

• 1:50:23Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So, uh, with that, my Knicks got a shot this year. What do you think?

• 1:50:28Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, I thought the trade was great. I thought that was. The trade was great. Yeah. The trade was great. Cat, I think.

• 1:50:33Jason Calacanis?

  That's great. I mean, he's a little weak on the defense, but he's, you know.

• 1:50:37Mark Cuban?

  But with KP, right? That's what they're doing. How do they match up with Boston? And so KP and Cat match up and that's why.

• 1:50:44Jason Calacanis?

  So we got a shot. You're saying there's a chance.

• 1:50:45Mark Cuban?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:45Jason Calacanis?

  My Knicks might get there.

• 1:50:47Mark Cuban?

  I'm saying you and Jim Carrey have a lot in common.

• 1:50:49Jason Calacanis?

  There's a chance. All right, everybody. This has been another amazing episode.

• 1:50:53Mark Cuban?

  Thank you. This was fun. Thanks, guys. I really enjoyed it.

• 1:50:55Jason Calacanis?

  Come back anytime, Mark, and we'll see you all next time. Bye bye.

• 1:50:59Mark Cuban?

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:50:59Jason Calacanis?

  That was awesome. They'll give you instructions and I'll upload and I'll see you at a game soon.

• 1:51:03Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, you guys were awesome.

• 1:51:04Jason Calacanis?

  Cheers.

• 1:51:05Mark Cuban?

  And I don't mind arguing data. I love to argue this stuff, right?

• 1:51:08David Sacks?

  I know, I know. Look, I give you credit. You're fun to talk with and argue with, and you obviously don't take it personally. And I appreciate that. And, uh, yeah, I give you credit for having fun with it. I know too many depressed billionaires, so. I give you, I give you a lot of credit.

• 1:51:23Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, I don't get that. But you know what? If you were, if you were when you were poor, you're up when you're rich, right? And it just doesn't change anything. I was hoping you, we talked about Elon.

• 1:51:32David Sacks?

  That's inside, actually. Well, we could still go there. Where's Jake?

• 1:51:35Jason Calacanis?

  We can still go there. You can ask the question if you want. All right. Two of my besties, last 25 years, you and Elon. Is this, you guys just goofing on each other? You got an issue with Elon that's sincere? Or is it just playful fun trolling?

• 1:51:51Mark Cuban?

  So two things. One, as an entrepreneur, Elon's like the shit of the shit of the shit, right? There's, I'm a huge fan. What he's been able to accomplish is insane. It's incredible. I would never diminish anything he's done as an entrepreneur. As a Twitter user, he's a troll. And I mean, he just trolls to troll to troll. And every good troll deserves a foil, right? Somebody to troll back. And it's just so easy and so much fun. Now, you know, I get some of the underlying principles, I think, at least in my mind, like when he talks about.

• 1:52:25Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think about the First Amendment principle that he's doing here of like radically changing Twitter from like, it's pretty controlled to, hey, anything goes?

• 1:52:35Mark Cuban?

  I think that's a fear. I think that's a fear of losing users. So I think that within the conservative community, they are more joiners and heavier

• 1:52:49Mark Cuban?

  social media users.

• 1:52:50Jason Calacanis?

  Participants, yeah.

• 1:52:51Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, participants. So they, they subscribe to more things. They listen to more podcasts. They're more active. And I think he recognized that. And that was a fundamental underpinning of why he kind of connected to them on the free speech thing. Because he still has his limits, obviously. It's his platform and what he doesn't want doesn't get shown. So I think that's why, and I can't blame him. I wish you would call me. I'd help him on, on his, his revenue and all that. And then I think on the immigration side, here's my theory. You guys can tell me if you agree or disagree. I don't think he's anti-immigration like he says, you know, anti-illegal immigration,

• 1:53:33Mark Cuban?

  where anybody who's in the country should be deported. I think as an immigrant himself, and I'm second generation, you guys are, you know, immigrants at some level, we all are. But I think as an immigrant himself, he thinks that the number of illegal immigrants in this country and the hate that's pushed towards them carries over to legal immigrants, including himself. And I think he believes that by diminishing the illegal or the non-citizens in this country and asking for their removal, it improves the standing of the legal immigrants, including himself. And so that's kind of my theory on both of those things.

• 1:54:14Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting, yeah. It's certainly a different place.

• 1:54:18David Sacks?

  Honestly, I don't think you need much of a theory to explain Elon's views because he's just so transparent about what he believes. I truly believe that his core conviction and the reason he bought Twitter X is because he wanted to unlock it as a free speech platform.

• 1:54:33Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, I don't think so.

• 1:54:34David Sacks?

  Okay, well, I don't know how much more money he can lose in pursuit of that goal.

• 1:54:38Mark Cuban?

  But, see, here's why I disagree. You don't take other people's money to do that.

• 1:54:42David Sacks?

  Well, I don't think he knew. He didn't know that he would get boycotted by all these advertisers.

• 1:54:49Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, but he knew that, I think he went in, open eyes, carried the sink in the door, to run it with some improvements operationally, which he did a great job of, and to actually...

• 1:55:01David Sacks?

  And taking out a huge amount of the cost structure, which he did. But Jason and I were there on the first day. The first day he took over, there was an organized boycott of advertisers. They called him anti-Semitic, which is ridiculous, before he even had a chance to change one thing about that site.

• 1:55:15Mark Cuban?

  So I've heard from a lot of those folks. And it's not so much...

• 1:55:22Mark Cuban?

  When you talk about free speech, free speech applies to advertisers as well. They get to associate with whoever they want to, no matter what. So there are repercussions.

• 1:55:32David Sacks?

  Unless there's a collusive effort going on to sort of organize.

• 1:55:37Mark Cuban?

  No, and I get that organization just resolved immediately, so there weren't. But, look, I could, for my own self, right?

• 1:55:43David Sacks?

  I don't understand why you won't give him credit for believing in free speech. That's clearly the principle he believes in.

• 1:55:48Mark Cuban?

  I have no problem with free speech. Look, I've always said, people like, get rid of the anti-Semitic people. You get anti-Semitic tropes. I get, you know, zillions of anti-Semitic tropes, you know, in my replies. Just they're non-stop. I mean, I'm not white, you know, my grandparents changed their name to, from Jabinski to Cuban, not even intentionally, and so it's always your real name is Jabinski, why? It's just the hate there is insane. And my attitude has always been, I want to know who the morons are. I have no problem with them still being allowed on the platform. But the trade-off is for advertisers, they don't want to be associated with that. There is no upside for being on Twitter right now, or X on right now. And you add to that the porn.

• 1:56:29Mark Cuban?

  Kids 13 years old can go on that site and you can find any insane thing you want on X right now. And that also is a problem for advertisers. That's part of free speech, but you gotta pay the bill when you're willing to accept that. I don't think he realized just how deep users will go in order to use their free speech. And I think that really surprised him. And so that's why I don't think that he bought it specifically for free speech, because I think he's always, one of the things I really admire.

• 1:57:00David Sacks?

  I don't know. I mean, he said, he said before he bought it, that he was going to open it up as a free speech platform.

• 1:57:05Mark Cuban?

  And that's fine, but.

• 1:57:05David Sacks?

  This is why, hold on, this is why the left immediately started boycotting him, before he even changed one policy. Jakeout, help me out, you were there.

• 1:57:13Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, I know for a fact that this was a free speech mission for him. I do think, you know, multiple things can be true. Mark, you are correct that if you have spicy content. Advertisers don't want anything to do with it and they have choices. And it's also one of the smaller platforms that have choices that have more scale. So that makes it even easier. And it's also true that they're boycotting him and specifically targeting. But all these things are happening at the same time.

• 1:57:38David Sacks?

  That's fair.

• 1:57:39Jason Calacanis?

  And I, and I think, you know, when you look at what he's done there, well, look at it historically as this place that was very controlled and clean and owned by the press and the elites became this chaotic thing, but also ultimately the one place where at scale you cannot be canceled. And, you know, if you look at cancellation as a concept, the number one place to get canceled was Twitter. You said something even slightly off, man, they came down on you, they destroyed you. And that, now that we've gotten rid of cancel culture and people can say what they believe and people can make a mistake.

• 1:58:16David Sacks?

  I don't know why it's necessary to find.

• 1:58:17Jason Calacanis?

  I do think, I'll just finish the thought. I do think that that will be looked at as a beautiful thing that he gave to society as a gift and it will be looked at as a really challenged business because it was an ad business that lost its advertising base and Apple and Disney have choices.

• 1:58:32David Sacks?

  I don't see the need here to look past or to look for an ulterior motive in what Elon's doing. Elon believes in free speech. It's very clear. He's run the platform that way and it's costing money. So what else could the motivation be except his principles?

• 1:58:47Jason Calacanis?

  Obviously, but he was also addicted to it. I can tell you that as the person who got him.

• 1:58:51David Sacks?

  I know, but that's not, that's not why he's running.

• 1:58:53Jason Calacanis?

  He loves it.

• 1:58:53David Sacks?

  I know. He's running as a free speech platform.

• 1:58:56Mark Cuban?

  Let me give you my counter to that. You know him better than I do.

• 1:58:58David Sacks?

  Why are we even having this debate? Who cares? I mean.

• 1:59:01Mark Cuban?

  I know, I'm just curious.

• 1:59:01David Sacks?

  The point is he's running. He's running as a free speech platform.

• 1:59:04Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, and that's fine. Obviously, it's his choice. That, that's free speech by definition.

• 1:59:08David Sacks?

  Actually, to me, this debate is, is kind of pointless, but let's, let's talk about actually the, the issue. There's a news story this week where OpenAI just raised, was it six billion?

• 1:59:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 1:59:19David Sacks?

  At a hundred and fifty billion dollar valuation.

• 1:59:23David Sacks?

  They originally started that enterprise with 50 million or so from Elon. It was a nonprofit. Then they became a for-profit. Now there's a report saying that they're telling investors in this round that they can't invest in any other AI companies. So they're acting like, I mean, they've gone from nonprofit philanthropy to piranha. For-profit company.

• 1:59:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's pretty sharp elbow.

• 1:59:46David Sacks?

  Sam, yeah, it is sharp elbows. Sam said he wasn't going to take compensation. Now he's getting compensation.

• 1:59:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yep, 10 billion.

• 1:59:52David Sacks?

  I mean, what do you think about this?

• 1:59:54Mark Cuban?

  I mean, look, it's their company. They get to do what they want. Period.

• 1:59:58David Sacks?

  They're not on their false pretenses. I mean,

• 2:00:00Mark Cuban?

  But then don't, but, but don't invest. I mean,

• 2:00:03David Sacks?

  He didn't invest. He gave them a donation.

• 2:00:05Mark Cuban?

  Let me, which leads to something I want to say very positive about Elon. Put aside his genius and coming up and running these companies. The one thing I, I respect the most about Elon Musk, and he does more than anybody I've ever seen, and that is he goes all in. He doesn't just, you know, he takes every cent he has, and he believes in it, and he goes all mother f***ing in. He never hedges his bet at all. Till Twitter, right? That's why I say, you know, he brought in investors. You know, he brought investors to Tesla and everything, but initially he went all in himself. You know, I think with Twitter, I think he was kind of surprised. But going back to OpenAI, I don't, I wouldn't do business with people like that.

• 2:00:49Mark Cuban?

  And there are people who just look for what they think is the next big thing. And I certainly could have given him money, didn't give him money. I said one of our funds that I'm in, did give him money originally, didn't give him money another time. To me, that's just wrong, and that catches up to you. When people f*** over investors and whatever, it always comes back. Karma's a bitch in business, too. Now, you know, Gemini with Google, I've done a lot of stuff with them. Notebook is insanely good. Gemini 1.5 is insanely good. Meta as open source and what they're doing is getting better and better. There is no, you know, there's nothing that says that OpenAI is going to win. Nothing at all. And so I don't feel bad about what they're doing.

• 2:01:34Mark Cuban?

  And to me, it tells me they're more scared than anything by trying to restrict what people are doing.

• 2:01:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yep, that's your perspective is it says it's more a reflection of Sam than anything else is, is what you're saying.

• 2:01:47Mark Cuban?

  Yep.

• 2:01:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I mean, that would be reflected in the fact that so many people who are the co-founders have left.

• 2:01:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that that's a really big red flag. If this thing is going to change the world and every all the co-founders leave.

• 2:01:59Mark Cuban?

  I heard forty of the forty-four co-founders left.

• 2:02:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, with the original employees. I mean, I don't know if that's true, but that's bonkers. And then if you, well, I mean, if you also think about this business, Chamath, and where it's headed. Sorry, there were three. There were forty-four co-founders.

• 2:02:12Mark Cuban?

  No, I was around the Donald Trump cabinet members thing.

• 2:02:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but I mean, it's if you if you we we did a joke about it last week. But if you just look at the the competition set that they're up against, they're losing five billion a year. They're making three and a half. They put this thing at one hundred fifty billion. It's forty times fifty times revenue to fill in that valuation on a price of sales basis. You know, it's kind of crazy.

• 2:02:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Here's the one thing that I'll say, and I think Mark said this in a different way, but I'll just. I don't think you can underestimate how companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon will react when they feel cornered. And I think in in the last twenty or twenty-five years, what you've seen is those companies, when their backs are against the wall, they use money, they're sharp elbowed, but the consistent thing is they've won. And so the real question is, do people look at the chart of the users? Because typically what happens is it's users what tilts these companies. When something some upstart, you remember when Snapchat was about to explode?

• 2:03:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There was a decision, we're going to decapitate this company. Facebook effectively did that. They relegated it to the corner.

• 2:03:25Mark Cuban?

  Yep.

• 2:03:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Zynga. There's many examples. So the real question is, when they see that this app is going to be at three or five hundred million Mao, and they appear on some list where they're bigger than, I don't know, pick your favorite app inside of Meta or Google.

• 2:03:40Mark Cuban?

  Ever, yeah, ever.

• 2:03:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Will they freak out? And if they do freak out, what do they do?

• 2:03:44Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I could tell you they're freaking right now.

• 2:03:45Mark Cuban?

  Oh, yeah, it's an it's an existential risk to them.

• 2:03:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 2:03:49Mark Cuban?

  And the crazy, I mean, look what Microsoft did. They bought Three Mile Island. The nuclear reactor, they bought it. Everybody is looking for the angle and the crazy part is

• 2:04:01Jason Calacanis?

  It's really crazy.

• 2:04:01Mark Cuban?

  Yes, there used to be Moore's law that everything followed, right? The price performance curve always went like this, you know, and power goes up now. Because you don't know, you don't know what you don't know and what you need to do next. That's part of the challenge that Elon has with Tesla in terms of full service driving. You don't know what you need to do next to get there to solve every problem.

• 2:04:21Jason Calacanis?

  Do you have a Tesla, Mark?

• 2:04:23Mark Cuban?

  I do, and I do also, I also have a Kia EV. I have a Tesla EV and I have a Kia EV.

• 2:04:28Jason Calacanis?

  Do you use the FSD and if so, how is it?

• 2:04:30Mark Cuban?

  I have, but I stopped using it just because it terrified me. Because it doesn't know what adversarial things it doesn't know. Because you know, you know, anything that's adversarial that something, it has to train on something it's seen. And it's not smart enough to figure out what it hasn't seen and whether or not it's a risk. And I've said this before, my, my four-year-old mini Australian shepherd, I can put it in a risky situation to cross the street and trust it'll get across the street, no matter what it is. It doesn't have to be pre-trained. You can't do that with full-service driving yet. And so until that gets to where it needs to be, where adversarial issues aren't an issue, I'm not going to fully trust it.

• 2:05:14Jason Calacanis?

  I have the 12.

• 2:05:15David Sacks?

  All right, guys, I gotta, I gotta go. Mark, you've been really fun to talk to, so good talking to you.

• 2:05:20Jason Calacanis?

  This has been Overtime with the All In Podcast with Mark Cuban. We'll see you all next time.

• 2:05:24Mark Cuban?

  You guys, thanks so much.

• 2:05:26Jason Calacanis?

  Love you, boys.

• 2:05:49Speaker 05

  Besties are gone.

• 2:05:52Speaker 05

  That's my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 2:05:59Speaker 05

  We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just... It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.

• 2:06:08Speaker 05

  What your... What your... What your... What?

• 2:06:13Speaker 05

  We need to get merch. Besties are gone.