Mark Cuban on why AI is the future and Facebook’s Libra isn’t

Billionaire businessman Mark Cuban stops by to discuss his views on artificial intelligence, net neutrality, breaking up Big Tech, investment opportunities he’s excited about, and why he thinks Facebook’s Libra is dangerous. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody. It's Tyler from The Rich Cast. Big interview show this week. Mark Cuban joined me to talk about everything. So in March at South by Southwest, I ended up at a dinner sitting next to Mark, and we talked about net neutrality for 45 minutes. I said, Mark, you got to come on the show. We got to do this on the record for an audience. He agreed. We've been trying to work out the timing ever since. He's a very busy guy. He's finally here, and I tell you, we talked about everything. We did talk about net neutrality. You know, I disagree about it. We talked about AI. Mark is really into AI. We talked about why he thinks Facebook's Libra is not only a bad idea, but dangerous. He actually thinks Libra is dangerous, not cryptocurrency in general. Libra is dangerous. We talked about whether or not big tech should be broken up or regulated.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  You probably won't be surprised on what Mark thinks about that. We even talked a little about NBA free agency. Really wide-ranging conversation. Mark is super smart. He sees both sides of all these issues. It was great to get into it with him. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. It's Mark Cuban on The Rich Cast.

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  Mark Cuban, welcome to the Roach Cast. How are you?

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  So you and I hung out at South by Southwest several months ago, and I think we had-

• 2:12Speaker 03

  It was epic, epic.

• 2:13Nilay Patel?

  Two things happened that I will never forget. One, I saw you give a demo of Google Photos to Kara Swisher, which was incredible. One of my favorite all-time moments. And two, you and I got into like a 40-minute conversation on net neutrality.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Yes, we did, on both accounts.

• 2:30Nilay Patel?

  And I wanted to have you back on the show. It's great timing. It's just about a year since the net neutrality provisions were lifted. There's a bunch of other stuff to talk about. You went on CNBC there and you said Libra was a bad idea. There's about to be Libra hearings in Congress. I want to talk to you about that for sure. And we've been talking a lot about the general spirit of, hey, maybe we should break up tech companies. You think that's a horrible idea. I definitely want to get your thoughts on that. But I got to start at the start, man. You own an NBA team. This is the wildest NBA offseason in history.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  Crazy, isn't it? I loved it, loved it, loved it. We went from a super team with like four All-Star slash superstars to nobody having more than two superstars. And we tend to think the Mavericks have the two best young superstars in the game with Luka and KP, Kristaps Porzingis. So I'm excited. I think the West and the entire NBA is going to be wide open. And it's just going to be who stays the healthiest, who, you know, where do the surprises happen during the season? And then it's fair game for anybody.

• 3:26Nilay Patel?

  How do you feel about this notion that players get to just pick their teams now? That's kind of new.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  It is and it isn't, right? I mean, if you remember back in the day, like 2000, 2001, the Lakers tried to put together a super team with Gary Payton and Karl Malone. And yeah, they were longer in the tooth. They were, you know, later in their careers. But, you know, it's been tried before. You know, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. There's always a little bit of luck involved. But the reality of the NBA is that we are more of a talent-driven league than any other professional sport anywhere in the world. You know, if you think about your favorite football team, if they lined up all 53 players, how many would you recognize? Same with your favorite baseball team or your favorite NHL team. If you think about your favorite NBA team- There's a good chance you can recognize most of the players, if not all 15 players on the roster.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  And so that is a big difference for us. And so when you have players that are visible, when they have big social media presence and following, when they're influencers, when they're integrated into pop culture, they're going to have more leverage. And that's the good news because the fact that they're more visible and they're more impactful means that the league is more visible and more impactful. And having the talent drives the NBA and having them have more power is not a bad thing at all. But it does put the onus on teams to say, okay, what does it take to keep you happy so that you want to keep working here? But that's no different than any job. The days of people having long-term careers in accounting or banking or programming are long gone. They're all free agents.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  You have to get, create a culture where people want to keep on working for your company. So I just think, you know, what happened was inevitable and it's a good thing for the NBA. I mean, last year, whatever team LeBron was on and the Warriors were like the only teams that would sell out every seat, no matter where they go. Now there's going to be a lot of games, a lot of teams that draw sellouts everywhere they go. And so that's good for the NBA.

• 5:21Nilay Patel?

  I like it. I like the idea that healthy markets. I talked to a lot of self-driving car CEOs. All those companies are new. It's the same thing you're talking about. It's a bunch of engineers are like, you know, I'm tired of Google. We're going to start our own self-driving car company and like make this market better.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Well, exactly. Now, that's a lot more expensive. And it's harder to hire people there than probably than it is to get a free agent in the NBA, but the salaries might be the same too. But yeah, it's the same thing, right? You know, where people have confidence in their talent and they know that they can be impactful, and particularly in a moving market like AI, then change is going to be inevitable. And, you know, I think we're just at the first inning in the AI world. So it's going to be exciting to see what happens there as well.

• 6:02Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, healthy markets is, I think, is going to be a theme of our conversation today. So let's start with Libra because you literally were on CNBC yesterday. You think, Libra, these are quotes, "It's a big mistake and it's dangerous." I actually agree with you, but go ahead and explain why.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  So two different things, right? I'm not against cryptocurrency at all. I'm not against the distributed nature of cryptocurrency. You know, I think the idea that there's no central control is kind of overblown because there's so many forks and there's so many changes and administrative issues that...

• 6:36Speaker 03

  You know, there, there, there's always some external factor forcing control. But the problem I had with Facebook is Facebook is in a unique situation with 2.2 billion worldwide users. And by having those tentacles everywhere globally, they have the opportunity to be more impactful in, in countries where there is less stability. And when you get a, a company like Facebook and the power and the leverage and the, and just the financial resources that they have, putting their tentacles into, not to pick on Africa, but African countries that have less stable currencies and government, to me, that creates issues that can lead to people dying.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  And so if Facebook were to say, you know what, we're going to start off in the United States with Libra, or we're going to start off in United States and Canada and Western Europe, fine, go for it, let's see what happens. But when you look to extend that into 2.2 billion users globally, the law of unintended consequences is inevitable and most likely it's going to be a negative output. And I, as I said in the interview, I think people will die as a result because when you start impacting a death bot's currency manipulation opportunities and their ability to, you know, tax and control where, where they can in their countries, that's when death bots tend to take matters into their own hands and people die.

• 7:58Nilay Patel?

  Do you think this would be a, a different kind of conversation if it wasn't Facebook proposing such a thing? I mean.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  No, I, I mean, you can pick companies that had 2.2 billion users globally and I'd say the same thing.

• 8:09Nilay Patel?

  So why do you think they're pushing forward with it so hard?

• 8:11Speaker 03

  If you question Facebook's ability to monetize data, personal data, and you think that there's a risk that that could go away, what other ways can they leverage 2.2 billion users?

• 8:22Nilay Patel?

  It's taking a cut of transaction fees.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  And creating your own worldwide global currency, what could be better than that? They're thinking big. I mean, I understand why they're doing it. They're in a unique position to, to literally create a global currency. And I can see why they'd want to do it. I mean, whether you're taking just a, a smidgen per transaction, or you get to be the fiat, effectively the fiat currency outside the biggest countries in the world, why wouldn't you try that? And the reason why you wouldn't, particularly in the types of countries I mentioned, is the risk of people dying.

• 8:55Nilay Patel?

  So how do you think this? Kind of intersects with sort of regular crypto, if there is such a thing as regular crypto. The Bitcoins, the Etheriums, like-

• 9:03Speaker 03

  It doesn't.

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  I think it's two different things. I think it's a platform that they're using as an excuse to go become a global currency. I mean, think of it this way, right? What is the biggest play that you could ever possibly conceive of? Creating your own global currency? What does not exist right now? A global currency. Now, the United States dollar is kind of a fiat global currency that's accepted everywhere, but it's not digital. It's not like they used Bitcoin and said, you know what? There's already a base here, we're going to support it, and we're going to extend it by allowing it to be used with transactions on Facebook globally. No. The biggest part of their user base is on lower-powered phones with minimal connectivity and places around the globe that use their phones as the bank. It's global currency domination is the way I see it.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  And, you know, I'm not necessarily against that per se. More power to them for putting themselves in a position to be able to at least try it. But you have to consider what happens in the most remote elements of that currency chain, if you will. And that's where problems occur.

• 10:05Nilay Patel?

  So are you high on Bitcoin, Ethereum, the other cryptocurrencies out there?

• 10:10Speaker 03

  You know, that means a lot of different things, right? Are we talking about blockchain? I'm kind of disappointed in blockchain, it hasn't accomplished near as much as I thought it would. You know, at this point in 2019, there's not the number of applications that I thought would be based on it. But that's not to say that it can't create positive applications. So I am still a fan of blockchain. In terms of cryptocurrencies as a currency, you know, it's been a huge disappointment for everybody. And it's kind of evolved into being a store of value. How much is it worth? How much is someone willing to pay for it? Which makes it like gold, right?

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Gold's more of a religion than it is anything else. You know, people used to talk about gold as if, well, if everything went to hell in a handbasket, fiat currencies can't sustain themselves, then people will turn for gold. Ain't nobody turning to gold and carrying around gold bars, right?

• 10:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Someone's going to be hitting you over the head with a gold bar, maybe as a weapon. But, you know, turning it into gold coins, that's just not going to happen. You know, food or whatever is going to be more valuable. And so cryptocurrencies have kind of evolved to be somewhat like what gold is or has become, which is a religion. You know, if you believe in it as a store of value and there's always somebody who'll pay a little bit more, then it's good to hold. If there's not somebody who'll pay more, then it's not good to hold. The difficulty of storing gold is the physical storage. The difficulty of storing cryptocurrencies is the physical storage. You're keeping it on a USB device, you're keeping it on, you know, somewhere and it gets hackable and it's hard for normal people to use and remember how to deal with it.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  And so it's, you know, it's not something you can just put in a safe and remember because the complexity, what are you going to do? Put your passcode and your keys, you know, on a printout in your safe? That's not safe. You know, and so there's so many complexities to cryptocurrencies that I don't think it's had near the impact a lot of people had hoped it would have. And then there's still, then there's the uncertainty of explaining to people the intrinsic value. I try to explain to people the intrinsic value of blockchain by saying, look, think of it in the days of Enron. If instead of just having Arthur Andersen as their accountant or their auditors, if you will, you had a blockchain-based auditing application so that every general ledger entry

• 12:28Speaker 03

  in their accounting system was reviewed on a distributed basis and by miners and approved, then you wouldn't have fraud from Enron. So there is some intrinsic value in the applications that miners can earn, if you will, but those applications aren't ubiquitous and they're hard to come by. And so I just think there's a lot of challenges for cryptocurrency, particularly for being an actual currency.

• 12:52Nilay Patel?

  Did you see Kevin McCarthy, who's the House Minority Leader, put out a New York Times op-ed saying, "We don't actually need a privacy law in the United States. Blockchain will fix it."

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Blockchain will fix it because it's all distributed and no one can see it then, right?

• 13:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Effectively. That's one way to turn technologists against each other, right? Because he's right. If blockchain is the underpinning of everything, then you truly don't. If everything, which won't happen, but if everything is built on blockchain, why do you need privacy laws?

• 13:19Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, his argument is you got data portability and competition, but it seemed to me like it was spiritual. It was a, it was born of belief that blockchain will fix because not everything will be on the blockchain. That's just reality.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Not right. What he's doing is just trying to be ironic, right? He's just trying to challenge it on its face and that's good, you know, because at least, look, the concept that the minority leader is discussing blockchain in an op ed as it relates to privacy is shocking in and of itself. Nobody would have expected that to happen, right?

• 13:48Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  More power to him for trying to play the angle. I know Kevin a little bit. I hope it was his angle and not something given to him in written form. Yeah, that's not a bad thing.

• 13:56Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's talk about Facebook and net neutrality because Facebook doing a currency is a big deal. Facebook going into these countries and saying, we're going to bring the people without bank accounts into the banking system through our currency is a big deal. It had some bad consequences potentially, as you're pointing out. But their first attempt to do something like this was Free Basics, where they went out and they gave internet access to people around the world and they zero rated Facebook services. If you want to use Facebook, it was free. If you want to use something else, you maybe had to pay. This obviously steered a lot of people into Facebook. That's how they grew some of their user base. This to me is like a classic nightmare net neutrality situation. You don't have a lot of competition.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Those are the only countries with minimal access to the internet. So if anything, you can argue that the flip side of that is not that they were forced to use Facebook that they, but rather they wouldn't have had access to the internet otherwise. And I think that's primarily how it was used as the primary internet access.

• 14:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, that's absolutely true.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  That's like saying a web browser back in the day, you know, shouldn't have been allowed because it gave, it was the only way to get access to the internet.

• 14:59Nilay Patel?

  Let me, let me just make the analogy to where we are right now, which is in the United States, which is AT&T owns a whole lot of mobile phones, uh, mobile phone plans and subscribers. They're going to put their thumb on the scale and say, hey, watching HBO, which we now own, is free to you. And watching something on Comcast is not, right? But disclosure Comcast investor, I gotta say it, everybody knows it, there it is. That is, it seems like the same thing, right? AT&T is gonna say, "Look at our content services."

• 15:27Speaker 03

  No, no, no, because one is internet access, which can be argued as a utility. There's nothing anywhere near being like a utility in watching HBO versus Comcast versus Netflix versus Hulu versus Crackle versus any other streaming over the top service.

• 15:43Nilay Patel?

  So you're saying the zero rating that the big carriers are about to start doing, and they seem very obvious they're about to start doing it, is not nearly the same problem as Facebook free.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  No, not even close, right? If you were just so beholden to Game of Thrones that you need HBO or you can't live, all right, maybe, right? But other than that, you don't even know whether or not there's gonna be a show on HBO that you like.

• 16:07Nilay Patel?

  Doesn't that affect the secondary market? Like, if you say there's access, which is one market and it should be healthy and there should be lots of competitors and there's kind of not enough, but now those competitors are gonna get vertically integrated with the content services.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  So you're against free shipping? You're against free shipping?

• 16:21Nilay Patel?

  This is the beginning of our conversation in South by Southwest. I brought us back to it. So you're saying this is basically just free shipping? That if you buy AT&T, you get free shipping for HBO shows?

• 16:30Speaker 03

  The primary difference is there's no marginal cost for an incremental bit. There's always gonna be the option of offering a free digital product, whether it's content or otherwise, you know, when it comes to some type of delivery mechanism, because the marginal cost is zero. Whenever you, the marginal cost of delivery of something is zero, just like software back in the day when you had bloatware on PCs. You know, everybody got Mavis beacon typing, whether they liked it or not. Not everybody learned how to type, maybe they should have, but how many, how many packages were on a PC when you bought it? How many apps are on your phone when you buy it now? Is texting, is SMS something that's an enticement to use? Or has it become just so ubiquitous and so will all the other digital content that everybody

• 17:13Speaker 03

  else is gonna offer, that one just offsets the other?

• 17:16Nilay Patel?

  So I believe that internet access is like a critical human need right now in America, right? Like, it's very hard to participate in our economy unless you have access to it. If those prices are going up because more and more things are getting bundled onto the service, or a, you know, a huge provider has to pay for more and more content. That they're trying to package into the service. Those prices are going up. I don't know. That's a, that's a good thing.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's where we disagree, right? Because the, again, the marginal cost for content is minimal, right? Now, great content, which you can argue is hard to create, that's a different argument. It doesn't entice people to choose one carrier over the other because it's very subjective.

• 17:57Nilay Patel?

  Do you think, but is that proven out? I, I think we're just at the dawn of finding out.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  It's proven out. Name one YouTube, you know, it's hard. Creating great content is hard. Not everybody watches Game of Thrones, you know? What else after that on HBO? What is there?

• 18:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, sure, but you see that the dollar amount's being thrown around for Friends. I mean, AT&T's paying a lot of money to get Friends on that streaming service because they know it'll pull people away from Netflix.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and there's a whole lot of money not paid for, for thousands, if not millions of hours of other content. It's very subjective. Look, let's look at it a different way. If there was enough value to internet service and I wanted to buy you a car and give away a car, right? The history of, of giving away add-ons to entice people to buy a product is eons, right? It's centuries. It's not, you know, the digital era only. It's just that, you know, what's changed in the digital era is that the marginal cost of delivery is zero. And so people bundle a lot more easily and a lot more efficiently than they used to. You used to have to come to the bank to get that toaster. Now you don't, you know, you just go online and you sign up, or you take your phone and you add

• 19:02Speaker 03

  your SIM card. And I guess the SIM card is enough of a complexity that, that, you know, just adding digital content is not enough of an enticement.

• 19:11Nilay Patel?

  The golden age of giving away toasters, there were a lot more banks in America then. Do you think there's enough competition for access right now?

• 19:18Speaker 03

  Is there enough competition for, I think 5G is going to change that considerably. With 5G, you're not going to be regionalized like you have been recently. You know, now all of them are looking to do national networks with 5G, aren't they?

• 19:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but they, I mean, they have national networks now.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  I mean, there's not as much overlap, but there'll be even more now. And historically, we always talked about net neutrality being a problem because The carriers were localized, right? And we talked, you know, and that's no longer the case. And with 5G, you're going to see people replacing the, cutting the broadband cord. So that broadband Comcast and AT&T and anybody who's got fixed wire, Charter has got fixed wired broadband is in trouble. And so, don't you think it's a good thing to try to entice people to go to wireless over fixed broadband when the cost will be less? And the delivery will be better?

• 20:04Nilay Patel?

  I do, I think those promises are pretty nascent. And the spectrum allocation right now is not great for that stuff.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, but that's the same as any emerging technology.

• 20:13Nilay Patel?

  That's true, but do you think, you know, right now we're provisioning millimeter wave for 5G. A lot of people say, hey, we need mid-band spectrum to make this really work. Do you think we're getting that right to make this competition actually work out the way you're saying?

• 20:23Speaker 03

  We'll find out. We'll find out, right? That's why Verizon got, did what they did, right? And tried to get out of the fixed broadband business.

• 20:30Nilay Patel?

  So I ask everybody this question, I'll ask you. I will tell you, no one has ever had a good answer to this question, but take your best shot. Is 5G a race? And if so, why?

• 20:38Speaker 03

  Well, no, and it should be, right? If the standards are standards, then there's no such thing as a race. It's, it's an investment curve, right? Who's putting it in the, who's investing the quickest? So no, it's not a race. It, it's a timetable based off of capital allocation. How's that for an answer?

• 20:52Nilay Patel?

  It's great. It's, it's what I think too, but I, I talked to YO's CEOs, I talked to Jeep Pies out there being like, we gotta win this race.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Because if you're a CEO and it's a race, then you're allowed to win. And then if you win, or if you're at least competing well, you get paid more, right?

• 21:07Nilay Patel?

  I also think you, you get to push the government towards maybe not looking at what you're doing as closely as possible. Which I think is of high interest.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  So that, that begs the question, what should the government be looking at that you think they're not looking at?

• 21:19Nilay Patel?

  Right now, obviously, there's a lot of question about what equipment providers are going to be allowed to make 5G equipment. So that's, it's clearly out there.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, with Huawei, yeah, that's a different question though.

• 21:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, but it's, it's all part of the, the race dynamic. And then you see a lot of, particularly with millimeter wave, you see a lot of, hey, we, we're going to change the way we allow. Permitting to go and where the towers can go and like here's how we're going to run auctions for spectrum. Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Right. That's more revenue generation for for local governments or state governments than anything else.

• 21:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, I mean, I literally, the headlines are always who's winning the race. I'm like, what happens if we come in second?

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Well, that's a function of media as much as anything too, right?

• 21:57Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's good. I mean, I will say that we have projected the race dynamic, but I don't control the entire media, unfortunately, not yet.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, you get my point, though, right on terms of the media because, you know, a headline saying 5G is not a race, it's boring. It's just a capital allocation issue.

• 22:11Nilay Patel?

  So how are you feeling on Sprint T-Mobile? I mean, I just want to stick on on sort of internet access broadly, right? Like more competition is better. You're saying, look, this bundling, throttling, paid prioritization is all, it's all free shipping. I don't agree with you, but I understand the argument. I think it's a smart one. But you're looking at more consolidation in the industry, right? Sprint wants to buy T-Mobile.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  Again, I'm not as concerned there because there's a finite amount of spectrum, right? When the the spectrum is allocated, then it's just who does the best job. And as long as that spectrum is national, I mean, it's global, but within the within the realm of what we're talking about, then, you know, it's just a question of who uses it, how good a job they do of implementing their version of 5G. And then, look, this is not just a 10 year question. It's a 20, 30, 40 year question and what comes next. And so there'll be new technological advancements and new ways of using spectrum and we'll see what comes after that. So I'm not as terrified of the merger simply because you

• 23:13Speaker 03

  have to have the capital in order to allocate it wisely, in order to make mistakes, in order to iterate. If you don't have the capital, that will cause a fall off in competition, which is not what you want.

• 23:24Nilay Patel?

  And here, the capital that you're referring to is the spectrum that Sprint holds.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  It's the purchase of the spectrum and it's also the the technology to make it work. And it's also the money to to market it. It's also the money to support the users. It's also the money, you know, to continue to upgrade it as technology advances.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  So I think my favorite summary of this deal is Sprint has good spectrum and T-Mobile has good executives. So we need to combine those. To me, it sounds like maybe Sprint should just get some better executives.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, but how easy is that?

• 23:52Nilay Patel?

  You're in the business. I'm asking you, how easy is that?

• 23:54Speaker 03

  No, but I'm just saying, look, if it was all easy, they would be competing and this wouldn't be an issue, right? Because they'd all be running a great business, but that's just not the way it works. Change is inevitable, right? You know, the conversation we're having about net neutrality today is far different than it was seven years ago and different than it was 10 years ago, 12, 13 years ago when I started talking about it. And so it's changed dramatically. The players are different, which is the antithesis of the expectation for net neutrality fans. You know, because if net neutrality was truly as big and bad an issue as everybody expected, the players would be exactly the same and the dominant players would be even more dominant. And that's just not what has happened.

• 24:36Nilay Patel?

  I disagree with you there. I think that the conversation has always been about Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, like

• 24:42Speaker 03

  Charter.

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  They're still in the mix. They're still doing weird stuff.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  They're in the mix, but their power is declining rapidly.

• 24:48Nilay Patel?

  In favor of whom?

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Being in the mix is not the same as dominating.

• 24:51Nilay Patel?

  The power shifting from Comcast to AT&T does not seem like a great for the average consumer, that's just, okay, another giant corporation is overcharging me.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  No, but AT&T is desperate right now. You know, Comcast, I mean, when you look at any of these companies, look at the way the stock market is treating them. No investors are saying, boy, these guys are in great position to dominate. And that dominance is going to return so much in profits to our shareholders that let's just invest more and run their stock price up. It's exact the opposite. You look at what they're doing and like, okay, so why is AT&T buying Time Warner? You know, why is Comcast trying to figure out what it's going to do with wireless and not sure? Why is Dish in a position where they own Spectrum and that's a good thing, but not everybody's sure how they're going to get value out of it? You know, why is Charter being questioned about their future? You know, all these things are coming into play.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  You know, a lot of what we looked at as being the dominant element of their business video is crashing in value. I mean, Netflix has just destroyed them. And so the value add that you're talking about bringing in terms of bundling. The value of that programming is just deteriorating by the minute.

• 26:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, I mean, this is why you're in the live sports business. It's the one thing that'll hold.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  Exactly, and, and, and why you're in the news business, right? Those are the currency of the realm right now in terms of getting people to traditional media. But the power element is, is changed dramatically. We didn't even talk about, you know, when, when we were talking in South by Southwest, we were discussing forbearance. And to me, that's still the biggest risk of the whole net neutrality thing. If the current administration decides to unforbear what was for, for, forbared, then we're all in deep shit.

• 26:33Nilay Patel?

  Well, so let me just explain to the audience really quick what forbearance means. When they moved to Title II, which was the net neutrality rules, they said, we got a bunch of rules here for landline phones. We're going to forbear them. We're going to not apply them and we're just going to use the ones that let us do net neutrality. And this was a very long and complicated legal drama that led to that moment.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 26:51Nilay Patel?

  And you're saying, well, the risk is that they will change their mind.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, tho- those keys are what was forbared, right? Things like pricing, applications, so you can't change prices without it being approved by the government. There's a whole long list. I think there's like 800 of them, right? And if they were to undo those forbearances, if that's the right word, the administration would have an incredible hammer over not just telecom companies, but the entire internet. And to me, that is the biggest risk of all.

• 27:20Nilay Patel?

  But so, I mean, you look at right now, Senator Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, the president, they're saying the social media companies are censoring conservatives, which I do not think is true, but they're saying it. They like saying it. Isn't this a power they should want? This is where I don't get it. They want to regulate the, the platform companies that sit over the access layer. But then they've got Pi at the FCC saying, we have to completely deregulate the access layer. It's the same thing, conceptually.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  So the, the question becomes who truly understands what the forbearance, what's been forbared. As you, Pi obviously does, but he's, he wants an open internet, not a net neutrality based internet. And so he's not going to say anything. Who else would?

• 27:58Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, Pi is out there being like, the real problem is Google. Like, don't worry about these access providers. We should, we should, Google's the one that controls what you see.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  I mean, I think we've come to understand, at least from my perspective, is that if you're going to retain a position in this administration, there's a certain amount of kissing up that has to occur.

• 28:17Nilay Patel?

  It seems very obvious after this weekend with Trump's tweets about who should go home that some people are just gonna stay quiet. So you think that's just a game?

• 28:26Speaker 03

  Everybody, not just some people, everybody.

• 28:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You're saying that's all just part of the game. That we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna lean into this random conservative bias meme so we can get the outcomes we want?

• 28:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, which, I mean, and I actually gave a talk to the young Republicans in Dallas two weeks ago. And that was one of the questions that came up. And, you know, there was this big, not big, minimal controversy about whether the NBA should call people who actually own the equity in a team an owner or a governor. And on one hand, they were kind of trying to, the same group was ridiculing the NBA for not using the term owner. But on the flip side, they don't want Twitter and Facebook to be owners of their own businesses, right? So I had a little fun with the irony there. But the reality is, there is certainly hypocrisy in the position that we're all for ownership of companies and we're all for free markets. But unless it's, unless we don't like it, and we don't like how Twitter and Facebook

• 29:18Speaker 03

  are handling distribution of news and information.

• 29:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone's arguing that Twitter and Facebook are doing a good job, or that Google is doing a good job with YouTube. I think the argument is, well, these are private companies.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that's exactly right. If it's not a good job, then effectively, like you said, with an open market, you take the good with the bad, right?

• 29:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think, well, the question is, is there too much consolidation in that market? If there isn't a great competitor to Facebook, well, your choice is to regu... I mean, the first thing we started talking about is Facebook starting a world-scale currency, right? And Mark Zuckerberg is like, I want to have a free speech court. Like, he's talking about, he runs a country. Is that just too big?

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Two different things, right? So what I'm saying is, you know, remember when I talked about Libra, I mentioned that if it was just the United States or Western European countries, I'd be fine with it.

• 30:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  And so, no, it's not too big, because if you look at usage numbers and users numbers in the United States, it's declining. And so, it's not like Facebook is this juggernaut that keeps on absorbing more and more of our country, and we need to stop it. It's the exact opposite. It's declining in the United States, yet we want to stop it. You know, the point I tried to get across in that CNBC interview is... Part of what we're trying to do in regulating Facebook, a big, I think Josh Hawley has been a proponent of this, and Senator Warner as well, is, you know, we want to limit Facebook monetizing and using the information that they have about us, right?

• 30:47Speaker 03

  And part of that is not being able to sell or distribute that information, as we saw with Cambridge Analytica. To me, we want Facebook publishing or distributing 100% of their data, as opposed to retaining 100% of their data privately. Because they are big enough, if you're talking about being too big, they are big enough that that information would be incredibly valuable if no one else were able to access it, even if via purchase. Do you see what I'm saying?

• 31:15Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  That by siloing it to Facebook, they would have such a competitive advantage over everybody and anybody. Even if you broke them up into multiple companies. Instagram is big enough, as an example, that they would have such a huge advantage in business by being able to silo that data, that they would become more powerful by breaking them up, not less.

• 31:37Nilay Patel?

  But wouldn't that power be in opposition? So let's say you broke off Instagram from Facebook and WhatsApp from Facebook. Wouldn't, and you're saying, well, those companies would be huge and powerful anyway. But at least they would be huge and powerful in competition with each other.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  No.

• 31:51Nilay Patel?

  Which you couldn't create right now out of nothing.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  It wouldn't matter.

• 31:53Nilay Patel?

  You don't think so?

• 31:54Speaker 03

  No, it's not like Facebook and Google prevent each other from doing anything.

• 31:58Nilay Patel?

  That is true. There's a great Bloomberg piece today, it literally just came out, so there's no way you read it, but today about how Google's control over the YouTube ad market has just destroyed companies in its wake. Like AppNexus was a great company, on track to IPO and be a big company, their business was literally destroyed because Google said, well, we're going to take control over the YouTube ad ecosystem. But that is the danger, right? I mean, the danger is Google can just keep doing that, and Facebook can just keep doing that.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  But YouTube as a standalone company could do the same thing.

• 32:30Nilay Patel?

  At least the, I guess the consumers in this case would be ad buyers, right?

• 32:34Speaker 03

  This gets us into a conversation about artificial intelligence.

• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 32:37Speaker 03

  Right? Because that's what's driving all the advertising decisions and ecosystems. Right, this is not ten years ago, twenty years ago, where we were sitting around at broadcast.com and saying, you know, okay, here's how we're gonna do advertising, here's the markets we're gonna go after. You know, now, all these big companies with all that data, data is so valuable and so leverageable, they have scientists that just say, how can we optimize our returns?

• 33:03Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Period, end of story, and let the data drive us from there. And so we've gone from, you know, experienced executives, for better or worse, making decisions, to data driving the decisions using AI. And whether your WhatsApp is a standalone company, Instagram is a standalone company, Facebook as a smaller company, YouTube and etcetera, broken up out of Google, AI is gonna be driving all the advertising decisions and a lot of the business decisions. And not all neural networks are the same, not all machine learnings gonna get you to the same destination, but you're not gonna be able to, to prevent X, you know, XY, you know, the, the top five, um, AI scientists from jumping around companies, from going

• 33:47Speaker 03

  to conferences together, from working with each other, talking to each other, and that's gonna drive the decision-making mix more than the old-school perspective that, well, if we break them up into multiple companies, the executives will make independent decisions, and those independent decisions will take on their, their own wins and losses, or successes and failures, and we'll go from there. Those days are gone.

• 34:10Nilay Patel?

  This is about as close to an argument that there exists an objective business truth as I've ever heard, right? You're saying, okay, the computers are gonna do it, there's but one set of right answers, they're gonna divine those right answers, and these companies are all going to look the same.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  No, I don't think there's one set of right answers, I just think it creates a new set of problems, right? So we haven't got into bias in AI, we haven't gotten into auditing black box, we haven't gotten into the fact that neural networks, we fully don't even understand how they get to the decisions that they get to get, get to in nonlinear environments, you know, so there's a whole realm of conversations that we can have about the good, bad, and ugly, um, of AI, but it's a completely different set of decisions than the viewpoints we took of open market and free markets versus regulated markets. The better answer, I think, is, okay, when do we get to government as a service, so government audits the AI algorithms and can at least... Understand the choices that were made that got to this neural network making this decision.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  And when are we going to offer government as a service so that if all that data, under blockchain or not, is available, then it's either available to everybody or nobody. So there's just, we're just starting to create, you know, 22nd century discussions, you know, early in the 21st century. And so we're just moving into a different realm. And I don't think we've really begun to accept the fact that when we talk about AI having a dramatic change, everybody says, yeah, it's going to, but most people who get into it don't understand AI. And I'm far from being an expert, but I will say I've done the tutorials and I've read a lot. I can sit down and do a three-layer neural network and do some machine learning and understand how it works.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  And I did that because it's critically important to, you know, the future of business and the future of regulation and the future of government, for that matter, in this country.

• 35:58Nilay Patel?

  So you're saying, in order for government to effectively regulate the next version of the open market, A, they're going to need to understand it, which is always an open question.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  Always the case.

• 36:09Nilay Patel?

  But B, you're saying that the next step is, okay, I've written this AI system that does this thing, I need the checkmark from the government. How can I just have the government come in as a service, do this job and get out?

• 36:19Speaker 03

  Yes and no, right? So there's truthful elements to that in that it's not so much that you'll need government as a service to come in and check it. I mean, services that we offer that are driven traditionally by bureaucrats should be government as a service going forward. But what I'm saying is, just like we had rules for telecom, 1934 was it, when they started, when it was new, when they were starting to try to manage it, we're going to have to have a way where the neural networks that are created can be audited in some way, shape or form. Business competition will be so dramatically different 30 years from now, you know, 40 years from now, assuming something crazy doesn't happen, that it'll be much more algorithmically driven, much more neural network driven, and there's going to have to be ways that we can publish and audit those.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  Particularly as we want to look for bias, particularly as we want to question domain expertise. That's why I've always said, you know, or said recently that going forward 10 years from now, let's say, there'll be more value to a liberal arts major than to a basic computer science major, simply because domain expertise and critical thinking skills will be desperately needed as we evaluate neural networks.

• 37:28Nilay Patel?

  I think that is a rebalancing that is somewhat long overdue. So you just invested in an AI company, Node. How do you evaluate that kind of investment going in when you think about these future costs that might arise?

• 37:39Speaker 03

  When you look at node.io, effectively what they're able to do is simplify the process of implementing AI in a business. It may be something like where the Mavericks use it, where we'll say, okay, here, we're going to plug in all the attributes of our season ticket buyers, and then we're going to go out and based off of other data that we're able to accumulate, we're going to have node.io look for the commonalities and tell us which prospects are most likely to buy season tickets. It might be in other businesses that say, we're going to look at our best writers. We're going to have, we're going to put in, plug in the data as best we can ascribe it to each writer, and then we're going to look at this population of potential writers and

• 38:20Speaker 03

  say, based off of what node.io tells us, these are most likely the best writers to hire for the future, based off of what we're trying to accomplish today. All businesses, large and small, but even the smallest of businesses have access to their data, but the smallest don't understand AI enough to implement any type of machine learning or neural network solutions. Node.io, they call themselves an intuition engine, meaning that based off of what we know about a company, whatever category you want us to look at, inventory, sales, hiring, whatever, here's your best place to approach it first. Compare that to the way we used to do it. Okay, you're a sales rep. Now you understand this advertising business. Go out and find our best prospects and sell them.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Now it's going to be, okay, we've looked at the universe of actual customers. We looked at the universal, universe of actual prospects for ad sales. Tell us which one, which ones have the best probability of being buyers and send our salespeople to those first. And the effectiveness increases significantly.

• 39:20Nilay Patel?

  I guess when you look at that market, right? This is another one where I'm like, okay, there's a lot of competitors right now. Right, there's a lot of businesses starting up. There's a lot of places for you to invest your dollars. So the first question is, how do you pick? And then the second question is, every AI company that we talk to is like, the name of the game here is data. We need this like expansive data set to train our algorithms. Once you get ahead, doesn't that immediately shrink the, is this winner take all, just like everything else?

• 39:45Speaker 03

  No, there's a finite amount of resources available within each segment of data. Right, there's no ubiquity of data within a company that solves all your problems. So you've got to set, so I took a Coursera class on AI. Forget the name, from, I forget the name of the professor. But what he said, which was right on, first you've got to know what problem you're going to solve.

• 40:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  And you can't just say maximizing profitability and scale for your company is a problem you're trying to solve. So it's got to be discreet enough that you can, you can put together a solution using AI. And, or any, you know, AI can mean, encompasses a lot of different things. It could be machine learning, neural networks, different types of neural networks, GANs, RNNs, CNNs. I mean, there's just, it's never ending and the research out there is never ending. And so there's a lot of complexity to picking the problem and solving the problem, which is why so many companies fail at it. So you don't, you're not seeing a widespread, you're not seeing all this incredible momentum where every company, there's just this light bulb going on. And all of a sudden, the profitability is going through the roof. You just haven't seen that at all.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  What you have seen is a lot of companies, a lot of the biggest companies like Google and Facebook, who have been doing this for a decade, have been going through and failing enough times that they're starting to get results. Those companies have been out there spending, you know, trillion, zillions of dollars on AI talent, knowing that the talent is going to drive the results. Smaller companies aren't in a position to do that. And even medium to big companies, there's a lot of big companies who have failed at it. And so there's a lot who have failed and they're not quite sure what to do. And that's where companies like Node can come in and come in and help.

• 41:29Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're going to take a quick break for an ad. We'll be right back with Mark Cuban.

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• 42:40Nilay Patel?

  All right, I want to come back to media because that's, I think, where my heart is, hopefully where your heart is.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  My heart's everywhere.

• 42:46Nilay Patel?

  Clearly. Yeah, you've got more, you've got more stakes in the ground than I do. I just got this one little media company that I'm trying to make happen. It's streaming war season, right? You did broadcast.com. You participated in what I would say was the sort of HD war of how are we going to distribute higher quality content at that time? It's Disney Plus, it's Warner Media, it's Netflix, I mean, just Apple TV Plus, for whatever reason they're doing it. I have a thing called the Go 90 scale of Doom streaming services that goes from zero to Go 90. And if you've gone 90, you're dead. And it just seems like more things are closer to 90 than not. How do you see this playing out?

• 43:22Speaker 03

  Okay, so first you have to understand the value of streaming. And it's changed. There's more bandwidth and the cost of bandwidth is now minimal and that's changed everything. So the marginal cost of distribution, like we talked about earlier, has dropped to almost nothing. And so the way I look at all streaming is the way I used to define TV. The definition of television has, was, and continue to be, the best alternative to boredom. Period, end of story.

• 43:50Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  So the question is, how much will people pay not to be bored? In aggregate. So it's not about any one streaming service. It's about, how much are you willing to pull out of your pocket and write checks for, or have debited from your account? To not be bored? And I don't know what that exact number is, but I know it's going to be more than the cost of the five top non, go ninety, three, over the top streaming services that you mentioned.

• 44:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But this, this is just the cable bundle? Is, are we just headed towards another cable bundle?

• 44:25Speaker 03

  Well, that's what Amazon hopes. That's what they're trying to do, and I think Apple's gonna try the same thing. In some respects, yes, but you're not tied. You know, when television was a cure for boredom fifteen years ago, you were tied inside your house. You're no longer tied inside your house with streaming. I mean, when we had broadcast.com, it was always, you know, the minute we can leave the house, Katy bar the doors, because we're gonna dominate everything. And we couldn't convey that to Yahoo when, when they bought us. Just be patient for wireless, because wireless was very nascent, just starting to happen. And then we would own everything. Because we had, you know, back then, we had hundreds of internet radio stations. We were Pandora, Spotify, YouTube, you, you name it, all in one. And, you know, now it's coming to fruition, where the cure for boredom is anywhere and

• 45:10Speaker 03

  everywhere. You know, there was a time when you were in office, and you went to somebody's office, and there was a receptionist at the front desk, and they were playing Solitaire. You know, now people play games, but most people stream.

• 45:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:22Speaker 03

  You know, or watch people streaming games. And, and so, it's a cure for boredom. And how much is that worth? Is it worth more than the old cable bundles? Yeah, because it can go anywhere in the world. And so I think the amount of money that we'll spend to not be bored is risen, is rising exponentially.

• 45:41Nilay Patel?

  And so you think that there's not gonna be subscription fatigue? That people aren't, there's not a cap?

• 45:46Speaker 03

  There'll be a hassle factor, right? Jumping between subscriptions, just like we get into app fatigue, right? So the problem won't be the money, because I think that there will be an equilibrium. People will realize that, you know, I like this one better than this one, so I'll pay more and pay less. And then the providers themselves, just like they negotiated fees from the MVPDs in terms of cost per subscriber, and ESPN got more than Access TV did, at least for a while, not always, will find that equilibrium.

• 46:14Nilay Patel?

  Like Netflix is gonna hold firm at 15. On my scale of 0 to 90, right? Netflix is about as close to zero as it gets.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 46:20Nilay Patel?

  They're successful, they got a huge audience, they're making shows, artists love working with them. I would say Disney Plus, and they have to launch, it has to work, but they have a good track record. They own MLB Media or whatever, bam.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  Look at it this way, think of everything as an arbitrage on time.

• 46:34Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  How do you value your time? All the decisions, because life is becoming a service, right? We're talking about streaming, which is a service to avoid boredom. We're talking about, you know, connectivity, which is a service to connect. We're talking about government, we're talking about AI. Everything is starting to become valued as an arbitrage in our time. How much do I value my time? Can I pay somebody less to do what I need to have done to increase the value of my time? And so if you look at it that way, then it's not about any individual streaming service. It's not about, you know, service fatigue. It's about, you know, what simplifies my life. That's why privacy is much more of a media issue than it is a personal issue.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  People don't wake up in the morning worrying about their privacy. We hear about all these privacy breaches and data breaches, yet you don't know people who have been negatively affected by them, do you?

• 47:28Nilay Patel?

  I mean, when people are negatively affected by these issues, they email us, like, they email reporters. So I do.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Their name being in part of a breach is one thing. Having somebody steal their data and take advantage of them and steal their identity, that's another thing. That's rare. Where all, all of us have been part, have been part of a data breach, whether you know it or not, right? But whether or not you've been impacted by it is a completely different question. And so the trade off between the risk of you being, you know, one of the chosen few whose identity is unfortunately and tragically stolen, that risk is small. On the other hand, the value of your time that is saved, the arbitrage of your time, the return can be incredibly high. And so when it comes down to, okay, we're using facial recognition, I can get in someplace

• 48:19Speaker 03

  and get out of someplace and buy whatever I want, so I spend more time with my kids. Am I willing to risk that, you know, some foreign government's going to be able to identify me? And yeah, I'm willing to risk that. My data might be stolen and my credit card might be more at risk than it otherwise would have been. But yeah, I trust my credit card company enough, or maybe I need to find a better one, and that's a marketing edge for, or marketing angle for, for a credit card company. Or maybe it's a sales pitch for blockchain. But I'm willing to, to take that trade off because I value my time. Time's the one asset I can't buy, I can't get back. I value my time more than anything, and I value my time with my kids, you know, or whatever it is I love to do, more than anything at all.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  And so am I willing to take incremental risks that I really haven't been able to quantify because I don't know anybody who's been affected and, and take those risks and accept them versus simplifying my life and making it easier? Of course I will. So when we talk about streaming fatigue or even app fatigue, it's all within the context of how do I retain and value my time the most? What's my arb on time? And so I think that's the point that people miss when they go through this. Time is the most valuable asset you don't own, and until someone takes time away from us and causes us to spend ungodly amounts of hours doing things we don't want to do, I mean, we're overblowing the risk.

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think there's a, there's a deep connection between you saying it's the cure for boredom, which is wasted time, and time is the most valuable asset. That's probably like a philosophy PhD thesis out there, but, right? Like that is a rich vein. We could go another five hours just on that alone, probably, but there's a deep connection between I need to pay this money to kill this time, and time is my most valuable asset, I'm willing to trade some privacy for it.

• 50:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it? You talk about the ultimate irony or hypocrisy, but it's true. Right, because, you know, when we, when we consume content, we think we're doing something. When we entertain ourselves, we're, we're creating value for our time. And that's a positive in, in our ledger of life so far.

• 50:23Nilay Patel?

  So, just to put a bow on, on, on the media stuff, how do you see streaming wars shaking out? Do you think, who do you think are some obvious winners and losers?

• 50:31Speaker 03

  I think it's no different than cable. You know, I think great content will, will survive and come, there's, there's like four companies, give or take. So, there's HBO, there's Netflix, there's Disney. You know, there's those three or four companies that have a feel for making great content. And great content, great storytelling will always drive everything. When you see volume content and people just creating it for the sake of creating it, there's going to be challenges there. So, if you're going to pick winners, then it's those three companies. Creating great content is hard and it's expensive. And to a certain extent, it's a numbers game. You have to create a lot of it, which is expensive, but that's what it takes to build a library.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  If Disney hadn't spent hundreds of billions of dollars on content, they wouldn't be Disney. You know, Netflix is criticized for overspending, you know, and spending beyond their means. But that's the only way, when someone asks, what are, what are we going to watch tonight? What are we going to do tonight? Let's, you know, let's see what's on. Now, let's see what's on means, okay, television for seventy, seventy-two percent of households plus virtual MVPDs. And then everybody else, which is primarily Netflix. And then we'll see if HBO can stay there and then Disney Plus can get there.

• 51:46Nilay Patel?

  How do you think Apple's going to do?

• 51:48Speaker 03

  I don't know. I'm, I'm, do you know what Apple's going to do?

• 51:50Nilay Patel?

  No, it, it seems very confusing. They seem like they're spending a lot of money, uh, but they haven't, they haven't said a lot.

• 51:56Speaker 03

  It's hard. Look, okay, I always use YouTube and Google as the example. No one's got more data and history of data than Google and YouTube when it comes to viewership, right? Name one YouTube hit.

• 52:08Nilay Patel?

  You mean like a YouTube original hit?

• 52:10Speaker 03

  I mean, you've got, you've got creators and look at the life of a, of a YouTube creator. You have no life. If you're not streaming continuously, you're gone.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we write about this all the time. They burn out. They burn out really, they burn out really fast and they all hate YouTube, which is remarkable.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  Yes. Well, it, I mean, because they, they just extract more and more and more, which again, let's go back to breaking up these big companies. I went and talked to Google, I don't know, five, six years ago, and said they had turned into Microsoft and they hated me and not invited me back. And they said, why? I said, because you put a tax on people called search. Microsoft used to have Office and Windows. That was their tax. And they tried a thousand other things and they all failed. Now Xbox has become stronger. And now cloud, uh, with Satya and Nandela has become a, a lot stronger. But with Google, they have search. What else?

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 53:03Speaker 03

  They're making a ton of money, but that's just basically advertising, which effectively is search on YouTube. But all these resources, and they haven't been able to create anything else.

• 53:13Nilay Patel?

  Right, that monetizes the way search does. I mean, they've made other products.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  But that's AI.

• 53:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  That's AI, that's data, that's their benefit. That's where they've been able to really take advantage of the technology and the, the fact that they've been doing this as long as anybody. And so they're able to monetize in ways that only Facebook and Amazon and some other, you know, a very few others are able to. But the point being that creating great content is hard. And it's not just about having data. So creating great, great content is not a function of AI. There is no such thing as content as a service. And so going back again to the streaming wars, it's not really a war yet.

• 53:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  It's, you know, it's, you've got only a few companies that are great at creating content. And the mere fact that you have scale doesn't mean anything. Just look at Google.

• 54:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's actually a really interesting take on it. Cause they, Google has tried and they, you know, they, they just, it was just VidCon and they were making promises to creators and the creators like, well, what if we all just go to TikTok?

• 54:15Speaker 03

  All the way back, that goes all the way back to net neutrality.

• 54:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Look, the nightmare scenario is Comcast or Charter, if someone says, well, look, okay, YouTube is free now. Right, and every other video service will will cost you a lot. That YouTube monopoly gets even more powerful.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  But that's effective, that's effectively giving, paying Google through advertising, right? That's an ad share where they get zero share.

• 54:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I mean, what you want, the creators want is another platform to go to. That's why they're all excited about TikTok right now.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  And they've tried, right? So the safe harbor, back in the day, when when we were negotiating the DMCA, was meant to protect the bell Atlantics of the world, where, you know, if somebody posted something on, let's just say there's some horrific person that's posting kiddie porn, but no one sees it, it's not public facing, it's private, but somebody finds out, the authorities arrest this guy and sees that it's all on, he stored all his kiddie porn on Bell Atlantic. That's what the safe harbors were there to protect. Then YouTube turned it around and said, no, we're going to make this public facing. And then the EFF got behind them and said, okay, we're going to protect you through safe harbors rules. Well, safe harbor has backfired on the entire internet. Because instead of it opened the door for there being many YouTube-like services,

• 55:22Speaker 03

  there's two, there's Vimeo and there's YouTube and there's who else?

• 55:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I don't think Vimeo counts. I don't think, there's no creators who are running to Vimeo.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  Right, yeah, I mean, they're just, but it's just a place to store that that's public facing, right? But if you got rid of the safe harbors and it became more like traditional, over the top, right? It's not like HBO Go could just say, okay, we're going to be like YouTube and we're going to just every, let everybody upload. They just won't do that, right? Because that kind of diminishes the value of their own content. But if you said you had to have a license for any content that's posted publicly, not privately, but publicly, like you do on traditional television, then all of a sudden, you wouldn't see all this nastiness that you see. You wouldn't see all the political realm, you wouldn't see the beheadings that you see. All those are a function of safe harbor. Now, if safe harbor really helped the general population and really, you know,

• 56:12Speaker 03

  benefited the internet as a whole, okay, you take the bad with the good. But that's not been the case. The only true beneficiary of safe harbor is YouTube.

• 56:20Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if I agree with that. I mean, safe, safe harbor is a copyright law, right? I don't think ISIS is out there making copyright, like making copyright claims on beheading videos.

• 56:28Speaker 03

  Right, but you have to have a license. So is it, now you have to have, it's up to the copyright owner to do a takedown notice.

• 56:34Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I see, you, you want to move the burden to the uploader. So you have to, you have to prove that you have, you own it first.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  No, I want to move the burden to the relationship, right? So that there has to be a, a contract between the two before you can upload. As opposed to, under safe harbor, the burden is on the copyright owner. And it's the same on Twitter, right? I had a situation where somebody got a hold of one of my personal pictures. And I wanted to use, just, and not because I cared about the picture, but I was just curious if I could use the DMCA takedown notices to have it removed. It is the worst process possible.

• 57:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:09Speaker 03

  I couldn't get it removed simply because it wasn't already posted on a website somewhere publicly. It's just ridiculously bad. And so, the, the safe harbor laws under the DMCA only protect YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, right? I'll expand it from just YouTube. Companies that get value from just the general population uploading, you just use user-generated content. And so, that's the problem. The risk reward, the value proposition originally of the safe harbor laws were to make the internet open so that the internet could grow and consumers can get the full value of the internet. That's not what's happened.

• 57:49Speaker 03

  What's happened is, it's become a way for big companies to get bigger and for bad content to get horrific, to turn from bad to horrific, and it only benefits a few companies. It hasn't benefited the overall internet, and it's time for us to take a second look at it.

• 58:06Nilay Patel?

  We write a lot about how copyright laws are stand-in for every other law.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 58:10Nilay Patel?

  Because it's, it's all we got. So, you, you have a revenge porn problem, where, where's, where do revenge porn lawyers start? They start at copyright law.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 58:19Nilay Patel?

  And it's, that seems pretty upside down to basically everyone, but it's where we are.

• 58:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and it's not the way it was intended, because I was there when it was being discussed, and it was certainly not what was intended at all. And so, it got flipped around, and look, I'm a big supporter of EFF.org, but at the same time, it, it just got bastardized to the point now where the net result is, we have this horrific content, we have fake news, we're going to have deep, uh, deep fake videos that are even worse. I mean, I invested in a company, Synthesia.ai, because they're great at deep fakes, so that we would use, they would only be used for business, and that we would watermark everything so that they'd always be detectable. But deep fakes go away completely if you get rid of the safe harbor laws.

• 59:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right, let's send in a happy note, because I've taken up almost an hour of your time. Beyond AI, which you've talked about a lot, give me two or three places where you're excited about investment. It seems like investment in consumer startups, kinda over. Where's the big action now?

• 59:15Speaker 03

  So, personalized medicine. Plant-based foods, AI as we discussed, but with vertical applications. Look, at its base, AI is impacting everything. It's like saying you can't talk about the internet, you know, twenty years ago. The internet, in fact, impacted everything. I'm investing in this company. I'm not gonna give you the name of it yet, but what they've done is, it's great. They took effectively all the nutrients that are in salmon. And they said, okay, we're gonna create those that in, not a pill, but in a cube. A gel-based cube, so that you would have four hundred calories with all the exact same nutrients of salmon and sweet potatoes and kale, as a matter of fact, in one cube.

• 59:59Speaker 03

  And it's four hundred calories. And right now, the cost is three ninety to make, but the cost will go down to two dollars to two fifty, and then lower, once we get to hundreds of thousands. These cubes, you're gonna be able to just eat them, and so kids who aren't fully nourished or malnourished, kids who can't get breakfast, kids, you know, instead of grabbing candy at school, these things taste like little candy gels. Not as good as candy, but close enough, so that they can get four hundred calories for three dollars, let's say, or three fifty. And so, that's the type of investment that is not AI per se, because it's food, and it's healthy food, but it's AI-driven, because that's how you do the analytics to determine how do you match up ingredients

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  to the nutrients of salmon and steak and kale and sweet potatoes, et cetera. And it's crazy when you think about it, but it also is gonna be a thing for dieters, because when I eat these things, like, when there's one more french fry to eat, you're gonna eat that french fry.

• 1:00:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57Speaker 03

  Right? When there's more ice cream in the pint, you're gonna eat the rest of that ice cream. With this, that's all there is. And so, you don't have that inclination to just keep on eating, like I do. And so, just changing the nature of how people consume food is AI derivative, but that's the type of thing that I think is gonna have a huge impact. And then, ten years from now, those gels will be personalized, because one thing I'm learning as I age is that I could eat anything before, and I wouldn't feel any different. You know, you get into your 40s and your 50s, now all of a sudden, it's like, well, wait, if I sweat too much, I need to eat a banana because of the potassium and I immediately feel, I immediately feel it, right? Or if I eat gluten, I never used to care, now I

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  get itchy, right? So these little things that are, that are how we personalize our diet and adapt the foods we eat, those are all going to be built into personal algorithms that'll define the food that we eat. And we'll have the choice of just consuming traditional foods based on a personalized algorithmically driven diet based off of our bodies, which effectively are just this one big math equation and we're just learning the variables a day at a time. And then it'll also be extended into these little cubes. So going off on a tangent, but that's the kind of stuff I'm looking at.

• 1:02:12Nilay Patel?

  I love it. I just had the CEO of Beyond Meat on the show and the same vision, although he was much more of, you know, a cow is just a machine that produces meat and it was very, it was wild. There was some sci fi stuff. I think that stuff is so interesting. Mark Cuban, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for giving us all this time.

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  Oh, no, it's fun. You know, you could tell. I love talking about this stuff. So anytime.

• 1:02:32Nilay Patel?

  All right. That was a wild conversation. Thank you so much to Mark Cuban for coming on the Vergecast. You can obviously find him. He's very available on Twitter. I'm sure he will tweet at you if you tweeted him. So thank you. You can listen to other shows on the Box Media Podcast Network. Why'd you push that button? Put out a great episode last week. Ashley and Caitlin talked about why people are still using Snapchat. They interviewed our own Casey Newton. That is a powerhouse combination of personalities. Go listen to that episode of Button. It's available right now. Also subscribe to Land of the Giants, the new podcast from Recode and the Box Media Podcast Network. It's a show about the major tech companies that have reshaped the world, hosted by Jason Del Rey. This season, all about Amazon. Episode one is out now. Go check it out. It's Land of the Giants. Also subscribe to the Vergecast if you haven't. It's free on your favorite podcast app. Apple Podcasts is a monopoly, so if you're going to rate us and review

• 1:03:16Nilay Patel?

  us, do it there. I'm just being honest with you. It's a monopoly. That's where the ratings count. Go rate us and review us there. Give us five stars. Talk to me on Twitter. I'm at Reckless. I'd love your feedback on the show. Love to know who you'd like me to talk to. Love to know just what you think. What'd you have for lunch? Let me know. I'm at Reckless. Lastly, we're back on Friday with Dieter and Paul to talk about the week in tech.

• 1:03:47Speaker 05

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