Mark Cuban on Sports, Healthcare, and Social Media

Summary

a16z Podcast – Mark Cuban on Sports, Healthcare, and Social Media

Date: September 9, 2025
Host: Andreessen Horowitz (Chris Dixon, Ben Horowitz)
Guest: Mark Cuban – Entrepreneur, Dallas Mavericks co-owner, Founder of Cost Plus Drugs

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Overview

In this episode, Mark Cuban joins a16z's Chris Dixon and Ben Horowitz for a freewheeling, lively discussion on the intersection of technology, business, politics, and sports. Cuban explores how AI and algorithms are changing media and business distribution, shares firsthand lessons from owning an NBA team, offers his blunt analysis of American healthcare, and delivers advice for entrepreneurs and politicians alike. The episode captures Cuban's trademark candor, and covers a breadth of topics from group chat debates, the future of social media, AI’s disruptive potential, and the inside game of NBA economics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Cuban’s Philosophy: Business, Independence, and Group Chats

• Business as Sport & Intellectual Challenge
  • Cuban approaches business with the competitive spirit of sports, always relishing a new intellectual challenge.

    "I look at business as a sport and I just love to compete. I just like to be intellectually challenged." (00:00 - Mark Cuban)

• Group Chats as High-Level Debate
  • Candid group chats are where "billionaires argue," pushing each other's thinking. Cuban values challenging perspectives, not party lines.

    "I want to be where different viewpoints are an intellectual response rather than just a 'you suck' response that you get on social media." (00:11)

• Political Independence and Pragmatism
  • Strongly identifies as independent; votes on issues, not partisan loyalty.

    "I'm an independent. I don't care about parties. I could care less... I actually voted for George Bush.” (02:22-02:29 - Mark Cuban)

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2. Salesmanship, Politics, and the Power of Algorithms

• Trump as Master Salesperson
  • Cuban analyzes Trump’s skill as a PR and sales expert, likening it to entrepreneurial strengths—cutting through with narrative, leveraging platforms.

    “People always hear me talk about sales cures all... And he's brilliant at it. He understands how to sell.” (02:44-03:16)

• Media Platforms—How Content Distribution Changed
  • Early adopter of Twitter/social; Cuban discusses the “flood the zone” strategy, where content dominates every algorithmic feed, echoing Trump’s tactics.

    "No two people have the exact same feed." (04:26) "What Trump has done well is learn how to flood the zone so that no matter what that algorithm finds for you, he's gonna find a way to you, whether it's positive or negative." (04:10-04:26)

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3. AI & the Fragmented Future of Social Media

• AI’s Transformative Impact on Content and Platforms
  • AI enables everyone to personalize and mass-produce content—Cuban predicts both unprecedented creativity and skepticism over authenticity.

    "Pretty soon it's okay. Everything just videotape everything that I do... and just flood every single account that we create." (04:55) "Do people find themselves saying, 'I'm gonna use social media less because it's all AI generated, and I don't know what's real'?" (05:25)

• Fragmentation and Opportunity for New Platforms
  • Predicts emergence of novel platforms focused on connection and high-quality content, moving away from rage-bait and algorithmic echo chambers.

    "I think we're tired of rage bait and... the algorithm presents what you seek effectively. Instead we are going to get unique offerings that don't seem to make sense right now." (07:15)

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4. Political Messaging and Economic Populism

• Cuban’s Advice for Democrats: Get Practical, Learn to Sell
  • Critique: Democrats focus on abstract threats ("the end of democracy" or "oligarchs") instead of tangible results that impact voters' daily lives.

    "You have to know what people want to buy. And people want to buy, quote, unquote, just a better life." (09:17) "How are you changing anybody's life?" (11:33)

• Asset Ownership and Reducing Inequality
  • Advocates for employee stock ownership plans to narrow the wealth gap, rather than solely demonizing billionaires.

    "Appreciable assets change your life. And if you don't have any, there's no way you can keep up." (13:40)

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5. Artificial Intelligence: Democratization, Disruption, and Opportunity

• Democratizing Education
  • AI as the great leveler for access to personalized learning, even for young kids, and a game-changer in teaching methods.

    "A kid with a cell phone can... go to any large language model and ask anything." (17:43-17:50)

• Healthcare Transformation
  • AI will boost healthcare’s quality but also present new challenges around intellectual property (IP) protection for research institutions.

    "If I'm [a] scientist in healthcare, you're an idiot if you publish it... because it's immediately going to get absorbed into a large language model and you've lost control of it." (19:19)

• Explosion of Specialized AI Models
  • Predicts a “million model” world, where organizations own or license their own LLMs, with flourishing frontends and tools to navigate.

    "There'll be millions of models and there [will] be front ends for those models... that help curate what's best for what you're trying to accomplish." (21:17-21:26)

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6. Fixing US Healthcare: Disintermediation, Transparency, and Patient Power

• Remove Insurance Companies and PBMs
  • Cuban’s solution: eliminate insurance and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) to cut cost, confusion, and misaligned incentives.

    “You get rid of the insurance companies and the PBMs because they do all they can to not take risk. And they do all they can to introduce opacity to the system.” (21:32)

• Radical Transparency and Consumer Tools
  • Use AI and market tools to empower patients and employers to directly shop for care, government as the backstop for what individuals can’t afford.

    "You create tools that allow patients or their employers... to go out there and find the best solution for them and to shop." (27:50)

• Rationale for Cost Plus Drugs
  • Built out of frustration and as a demonstration that bypassing PBMs can produce real savings—an example of operating outside the system.

    "Costplusdrugs.com is still the only pharmacy company that publishes an entire price list. The only one." (26:06)

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7. Advice for Today’s Entrepreneurs

• Go All-In on AI, But Focus on Domain Application
  • Domain knowledge + AI savvy is the killer skillset; Cuban advocates for students and young founders to go 'AI native' and help SMBs optimize.

    "If you have a business background... and you become an AI native, you can walk into a small company and say, I can help you." (30:11) "Those days are gone. It's about how do we change the process by removing pieces to make you more efficient, more productive, more profitable." (31:27)

• New SaaS: Custom Agents for the Long Tail of Business
  • Instead of generic software, build, deploy, and monitor AI agents tailored to specific small business needs—create value in overlooked corners.

    "It's SaaS at one level. But it's customized SaaS... That's the new SaaS, potentially." (32:20)

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8. Inside the NBA Business and Streaming Wars

• Mavericks: A Passion Project, Not a Financial Investment (at first)
  • “When I bought the Mavs, did I think it'd be worth an order of magnitude more? No… From a financial perspective, it was awful. Plus I was losing money every year, so it had nothing to do with money. But I loved it." (35:32 - Mark Cuban)
• Media ‘Death Wars’ and Exponential Franchise Value
  • Value is driven by the explosion of competitive media rights deals and streaming, not just stadium attendance or team performance.

    “I always look for death wars. Where you've got competitors... and they have to go all in. Just like with AI right now.” (36:26) "A little bit of real estate. So you can build around. But it's 100% streaming TV.” (37:09)

• The New NBA Economics—Draft Picks and the Second Apron
  • Shifting CBA rules make patience and draft picks more valuable; big contracts harder to offload.

    “Every new CBA creates transitional issues... And now it's even more difficult with the second apron... The problems of being over the second apron are far more draconian than anything we've ever seen.” (40:52-40:55)

  • “Draft picks have become so much more valuable, and that's changed the valuation approach.” (41:32)
• Player Valuation & Team-Building Strategy
  • Maximizing value with fewer true "max" players in the future, the importance of intangible traits like work ethic and fit.

    "Personnel selection is hard. It's more art than science... What mental capacity do they have? You know, their athletic ability. But will they work hard to improve their skills?” (48:12-49:05)

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9. Cuban’s Investing and Operating Style

• Leans On Passion, Not Maximizing Wealth
  • Stepped away from Shark Tank to prioritize family; prefers direct, early-stage investments often discovered via cold emails.

    "I'm not looking... to make as much money as I can... honestly, it's just shit people email me." (50:52)

• "Long Shot Tries," Small Businesses, and the Joy of Bootstrapping Success
  • Example: Alyssa's Cookies—from a founder living in his car to $25M+ in sales and profitability, all without outside capital.

    "Helping a company never have to raise more money and making them profitable so that they're insanely profitable... That stuff's fun." (53:13)

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10. Policy Vision: Focus on Entrepreneurship and American Dream

• Policy Overhauls Cuban Would Push
  • Simplify business creation with AI-enabled government services; champion the American Dream through small business support.

    "I would put a focus on recognizing and encouraging and rewarding people starting businesses and using AI... where you simplify all the friction that's involved in starting a business." (54:03)

• American Dream as US Differentiator
  • “There's no Chinese dream, there's no French dream, there's no UK dream, there's only the American dream.” (55:13 – citing Joe Biden)

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11. AI, Jobs, and Public Perception

• Defusing Backlash and Fueling Optimism
  • AI will disrupt and reinvent jobs, but Cuban argues the net effect will be new opportunity and continued economic growth—just as with prior tech revolutions.

    "I don't think the net number of jobs is going to decrease. I think everything gets reinvented." (56:17) "When the Internet first hit, we used to think kids who can do HTML coding were geniuses... AI is kind of the same thing." (59:39)

• Call to Silicon Valley: Communicate Upside, Not Just Disruption
  • Engage with “middle America,” invest in education, and help all communities benefit from the AI wave; Cuban’s own boot camps focus on underprivileged youth.

    "Valley needs to go out there and engage more in middle America so people see where the upside is." (59:16)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Social Media and Algorithms:

  “No two people have the exact same feed.” (04:26)

• On Political Messaging:

  “People don’t want to hear about the end of democracy. They don’t want to hear that Trump is an ultimate cancer. Put aside whether or not you believe it’s true. That’s not the goal. The Democrats always lose track of the goal. ... How are you changing people's lives?” (10:57-11:33)

• On Tech and Education:

  “AI is going to change everything, you know, how can we not use this in government to be more effective?” (15:49)

• On Entrepreneurship:

  “You don’t have to be in power as a Democrat to go to the local employer and say, ... ‘We’re going to protest you unless you create an ESOP plan that everybody gets to participate in.’” (13:05)

• On Building for the Long Tail of Business:

  "Domain knowledge combined with understanding of AI is the win." (32:09)

• On NBA as a Business:

  “I look for death wars. Where you've got competitors that one’s going to win and one's going to lose. And they have to go all in. Just like with AI right now.” (36:26)

• On Tech's Economic Impact:

  "I'm old enough... I would walk in selling PCs and I saw you're out of work... But as it's all turned out, the economy just keeps on growing. And I think the same thing is going to happen here." (58:31)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00–02:22: Cuban’s business-as-sport philosophy; value of independent thought and group chats
• 03:16–06:16: Social media as distribution, algorithms, and the implications of AI
• 09:11–13:44: How Democrats/Republicans sell vs. connect, asset ownership as policy
• 16:47–18:32: AI democratizes education, Cuban’s advice for teachers
• 18:32–21:26: Healthcare: AI’s impact, IP dilemmas, future of specialized models
• 21:32–29:15: Cuban’s diagnosis & fix for US healthcare—transparency, patient cost, government as backstop
• 30:01–33:23: Entrepreneurial advice: AI, domain knowledge, SaaS is now agents
• 33:46–43:55: Owning the Mavericks, sports media rights, new NBA economics and team-building strategies
• 50:47–53:11: Cuban’s investing style, examples from Shark Tank and early email pitches
• 54:03–55:13: Policy focus: entrepreneurship, simplifying formation, American Dream
• 56:07–60:06: AI, jobs, public perception, education boot camps, call for tech optimism

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Tone and Language

The episode features Mark Cuban in full candid mode—irreverent, direct, pragmatic, and always seeking practical, high-leverage solutions. He critiques conventional wisdom (in both business and politics), shines a spotlight on overlooked problems, and peppers his arguments with real-world anecdotes and blunt assessments. The tone is dynamic, optimistic, and entrepreneurial throughout.

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Recap

Listeners come away with a comprehensive snapshot of Mark Cuban’s worldview—from politics and business to AI, healthcare, and the NBA. The conversation blends Cuban's relentless drive for impact with a broad, systems-level analysis of how technology is shaping markets, media, and societal opportunity. This is essential listening for anyone interested in disruptive innovation, practical policy, and the future of America’s tech-driven economy.

Transcript

[Mark Cuban]

I look at business as a sport and I just love to compete. I just like to be intellectually challenged. I'm an independent. I don't care about parties, I care less. I want to be where different viewpoints are an intellectual response rather than just a you suck response that you get on social media.

[Podcast Host (A16Z Intro)]

What happens when AI collides with salesmanship, streaming era sports and America's most broken industry Healthcare? On today's episode, I'm joined by Mark Cuban, entrepreneur, Dallas Mavericks co owner and founder of Cost plus Drugs. We get into why he likes fiery group chats, the sales playbook behind modern politics, how algorithms and AI are reshaping media, what he fixed first in US Healthcare, and discuss the hard won lessons from owning an NBA team in the streaming era. Let's get into it.

[Chris Dixon]

Mark, thanks for coming on the podcast.

[Mark Cuban]

Thanks for having me on. Excited to be here.

[Chris Dixon]

So we've spent a lot of time last couple years or so, but most of that time digitally and on group chats. And one question that often I get in the group chat sphere is how do these billionaires have so much time to be on group chats? To which I say, oh, that's actually the highest form, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Once you really make it, then you want to argue with your friends and have interesting conversations. What's your reflection on what you get out of these or what you spend time on?

[Mark Cuban]

You want to learn, you want to challenge yourself, you want to see what other people think and why? Yeah, because, you know, in a world that's changing the way it is, I want to be where different viewpoints are and have it be an intellectual response rather than just a you suck response that you get on social media.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

And one of the things I appreciate most about one of our group chats is that, you know, you're one of the lone dissenter. Originally it was on the election and it had more of a right leaning crowd and you were one of the most prominent Democrats.

[Mark Cuban]

I was the dissenter. I'm not even a Democrat.

[Chris Dixon]

I was just dissenter and willing to sort of be independent and go, what did you get out of that? You just get sharper, get your argument smarter.

[Mark Cuban]

It wasn't even so much that to me there was a lot of things that didn't make sense and to them it didn't make sense where I stood. And I wanted to get to the root of why people came to those conclusions and typically it just came down to trust. But you don't know that that's going to be the underpinning log until you ask the questions. And so I think a lot of people presume in any type of group chat. Right. That you know where everybody stands and you think you understand why.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

But it's. Until you start kind of challenging them, and then on top of it, it makes me reconfirm why I feel, how I feel. And that's a win for me as well.

[Chris Dixon]

Totally.

[Mark Cuban]

I'm an independent. I don't care about parties. I could care less.

[Chris Dixon]

Have you ever supported a Republican?

[Mark Cuban]

Have I? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don't care. I voted for Republicans. I just don't care. Right. I tried to look at each individual issue. I actually voted for George Bush. We can argue about the quality, but it's about the alternatives. Right. And then, like, the first time I ever. Well, I don't go back that far, but in terms of the comparisons to Trump, we're both salespeople. And I think that is a strength for me to understand him, because at his heart, he just knows how to do PR and sales. That's who he is. And that's how I've grown my businesses. People always hear me talk about sales cures all, and you have to understand your market and context. And he's brilliant at it. He understands how to sell, he understands how to use pr. He understands where leverage comes and when it doesn't exist and how to zig and zag when it doesn't work.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And, you know, I think those are actually skills of people who have built businesses. Those are entrepreneurial skills. Now, when you actually run the business, you have to do all the work behind it. And as a politician, that's not always the case.

[Chris Dixon]

And when did you realize that business people would have platforms that would give them kind of distribution advantages in reaching customers?

[Mark Cuban]

Just when social media came out.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

You know, you were early to this. Yeah, very early. Like you and Trump, like one of the early people.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah. I mean, right when Twitter started, not 2006, but 2009 at south by Southwest, when they were all pumping it up, when it was all about just, where's the party at? But, yeah, I mean, social media, obviously, it's like, why are people following me? And it's just. It's aspirational at some levels. And I owned the mav, so it was informational, and then just with the technology background, it was informational there as well. So I could reach into different domains and interact with people, and that creates a platform. And each platform has its own look and feel, and you just learn how to deal with it accordingly. It's going to be really interesting because of AI, Right. AI has multidimensional impact, and how you create content, how that content is absorbed effectively. We all have our own feed.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

No two people have the exact same feed. And you know what Trump has done well is learn how to flood the zone so that no matter what that algorithm finds for you, he's gonna find a way to you, whether it's a positive or negative. And then you look at Kamala and Brad Summer and fell off a coconut tree. Brilliant. She had everything going for her, but the Democrats didn't have anybody who knew how to sell. And so, going back to your question, it's not so much reality stars or business people with followings. It's people who know how to use algorithms and understand how they work. And now, as AI is evolving very quickly, knowing how to use AI and what's the impact? Because if it takes two seconds to generate on veo, and then pretty soon that becomes agentic, and pretty soon it's okay. Everything just videotape everything that I do and everything and just create videos and just flood every single account that we create, and then all of a sudden, do people find themselves saying, I'm gonna use social media less because it's all AI generated, and I don't know what's real. There's nothing social about it. Or do they think talking babies and gorillas as videos is the way to communicate? And so it's gonna be fascinating over the next three years because we don't. And so we may find ourselves in a scenario where we diverge from the traditional sales person, putting it out there like Trump, and find our way to. Okay, let's understand how we do this. It's just like polling. Polling is useless now.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You're always behind.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And any one social media comment can change how everybody feels in a nanosecond. And so how do people start integrating surveys? Yeah, you know, I'm just continuously surveying with all those questions, we get online and what direction does that take us? How do I integrate that into video creation? Right. And how do I. I mean, what's the limit?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

So you experimented with the social network a few years ago. The dust was called. When you look out five years from now, ten years from now, do you think there's a new platform that emerges, or do you think it's kind of this, like, fragmented ecosystem that we have now? What is your prediction for the future of social.

[Mark Cuban]

Well, I mean, look at blue sky.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

They, you know, have Been around for a little while, but then all of a sudden when Trump got elected, their usage just boomed.

[Chris Dixon]

I call it the fragmentation of, like, people didn't like Elon.

[Mark Cuban]

Right.

[Chris Dixon]

It's not just that, but.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah, but, yeah, so they moved. Right. But now it became silo. And so I think it won't be social media. Right, but there'll be media.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Because the depends on how much you believe in AI and where you think it'll go. I always look at it as creative people. They'll be able to amplify their creativity and iterate incessantly.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And that will create some amazing, incredible things. Are you just going to put it on X? Are you going to put it on LinkedIn? Are you going to put it on Blue Sky? Are you going to put it on TikTok? You don't have control of the algorithm and so I think there'll be something new and I think how people connect to that content will be the foundation of it. Because I think we're tired of rage bait and we're tired of the fact that the algorithm presents what you seek effectively. I think instead we are going to get unique offerings that don't seem to make sense right now. And I think part two to that is like, if you go on X and you use Grok, it almost always, unless it's something that Elon is individually interested in, it comes up with a legitimate answer. Right. And you get people who say, well, hey, Grok, tell me which. And it doesn't give them what they expect. And I think that's a huge positive. And it's the same on other platforms as well, where you can just go to ChatGPT, perplexity, whatever you use, or all of them, and ask questions. So you'll see a reduction of misinformation, I hope. And by. With the reduction of misinformation, you're going to have less rage bait.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And with less rage bait, what's the connection? And hopefully it's better quality content. Hopefully it's. I don't know, it's just like if we were sitting here just going to brainstorm and just say, can we create our own new network? Right. What would it include? And what were the, what were the parameters be.

[Chris Dixon]

And when you did it maybe five years ago, maybe it's more. Was that like a Snap competitor? I'm trying to remember.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah, no, it was 10 years ago.

[Chris Dixon]

10 years ago?

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah. 12 years ago.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And it was more because of what happened with the sec, where, where I got charged by the sec. For insider trading. And they basically just took anything and everything I said out of context. Right, right. So I gave them everything I had and I got cleared in like, 15 minutes.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

But the point was I wanted something that was truly private.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And so. And it still exists today, but I just use it for mostly internal communications with our employees.

[Chris Dixon]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Mark Cuban]

The.

[Chris Dixon]

Let's go back to the messaging on Democrats, Republicans. If you were in charge of the dnc, the Democratic Party, and controlled both the platform and the messaging, what would you advise? What would the.

[Mark Cuban]

Well, first, you gotta have people that know how to sell.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know. And second, you have to know what people want to buy.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And people want to buy, quote, unquote, just a better life.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know what the Democrats do is they project, they extrapolate. Trump did this. So it's the end of the world. The Republicans are just like, what's the price of tea in China? Right. Because I drink tea from China and they deal directly with what's happening with you today. And 99% of people in this country, that's what they care about first.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And so I would go to the Democrats and say, look at the price of beef. And I think that's what the Democrats miss. They're so intent on the T word. Right. Everything is just a trigger word because they want people yelling and screaming at rallies. And that's great. Just like Trump did. If you have 10, 15,000 people with Bernie and AOC and you want to get them all riled out, it's a pep rally. Right. Say what you got to say for the pep rally. But if you want to get people to pay attention, I'll give you an example. I was in Indiana. I have a company, shark tank company, Guardian Bikes, and we move 80% of their manufacturing to Seymour, Indiana. And so they invited me in and we celebrated. And they've grown from $200,000, a shark tank. They'll do $120 million now. And so we got into a little bit, and then we had a question and answer and somebody stood up. I saw on the news and they started getting the question and I just blurred up. I don't watch the news. And the place went nuts. It just erupted. Right. Like, of all the things we talked about for an hour and a half, that by far got a 10x response. That said volumes to me. Right. In terms of where people's heads are at, they don't want to deal with all that shit anymore. They don't want to hear about the end of democracy. They don't want to hear that Trump is an ultimate cancer. Put aside whether or not you believe it's true.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

That's not the goal. The Democrats always lose track of the goal. They lose sight of what the end game is. If you want to replace Trump, if you want to win the midterms. It's not about ripping on Trump. That's been said for the last 10 years, but how are you changing people's lives? And then I got into it with somebody else on the Democrat side via email and it was about oligarchs and billionaires. Go get them. I'm like, fine, I'll pay more taxes, I don't care. Right. But do you think other than the 942 billionaires in this country. Right. Other than getting people riled up, how are you changing anybody's life?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Right. People want to know that you're impacting their life. They want to know that things are going to be better. We hear about housing, we hear about should they go to college or not, the threat of AI in their mind. Right. All these different things that they truly worry about and talk at, talk about at the dinner table.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

How often do the Democrats talk about it? And then it's like, well, let's go get the billionaires. And I'm like, okay, if you want, what's gonna do you want to reduce income inequality, then go to the billionaires and give them incentives, which really made them mad.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Companies incentives, not the individual 942to, you know, your taxes will go. Instead of 27%. Let's say you'll stay at 21% if everybody gets equity in the company. And it's on a. Peripassua is not the right word, but it's on an equal percentage of take home pay that you get relative to the CEO, down to whoever. Right. Now, you know, you have, you have appreciable assets upside. Yeah. When, when people have appreciable assets, you know, beyond just a home, A, if it appreciates they can buy a home and B, the wealth gap doesn't increase.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, and it gets closed down. You know, if you do go, if you do a little research and, and because I was just curious about all this and I went to perplexity and I'm like, what's the earnings of people who are in ESOPs, Employee Stock Ownership Plans versus everybody else? It's dramatically higher.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

It's not even close. They make more than union employees and there's less turnover. And so there's a Lot of good reasons. And you don't have to be in power as a Democrat to do those things to go to the local employer and say, why, you know, we're going to protest you. Unless you create an ESOP plan that everybody gets to participate in at the same level as a percentage of earnings. As the CEO, I think that's the.

[Chris Dixon]

Best form of ubi, which is instead of free money, just upside in our SB 500, upside in the economy.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah. And there's places UBI too. Right. So if you're a caretaker, you're taking care of your parents.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

I got no problem. Because you're paying for it one way or the other, you know, through Medicare, through Medicaid, some way.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

But to your point. Right. Appreciable assets change your life.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And if you don't have any, there's no way you can keep up.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, because the stock market's going up.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

Do we think that. I guess, you know, it seems like the Mamdani sort of like socially progressive, economically populist sort of, you know, combination AOC in a different way. You know, Bernie without sort of, you know, he was the proto version. It is that the future of the Democratic Party.

[Mark Cuban]

He learned from Trump. He's the progressive Trump.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Just lie.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, cheap. Day one groceries are going to be cheaper. I'll just open. I'll open the grocery store because they'll sound. We're progressive that way. Right. Day one buses are free. And then everything else, he kind of merely mouse back to the middle.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, and kind of gives a little bit on the edge to. For the progressive to be happy. But he's smart start saying, I'm reducing grocery prices. Trump is increasing. I'm reducing them. Day one, right. When we have the House back, we are going to reduce grocery prices. How are you going to do it? We're going to do it, trust me. Because that's the bifurcation between Trump fans.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And Trump haters.

[Chris Dixon]

But in terms of substance, do you think the future Democrat party is more like a Bernie Sanders economic populism or do you think it's more.

[Mark Cuban]

I don't know. Yeah, I think. I think whatever gets results.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, I give Bernie credit because he was the first to talking about a living wage and it took him decades.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

But we've gotten there and he kept on put pushing through. So he deserves a lot of credit. But it more plays to his base.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Than anything else. And you know, Elizabeth Warren had the CFPB Right. That's okay. Right. You can argue both sides, but she got something dumb. I don't know what the Democrats are doing. That's getting shit done.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, and that's the change in their focus and that's what's going to guide what type of candidate.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Because gotta be able to sell.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Gotta be understand technology and gotta be able to implement technologies. And I said this to Jason Calacanis 15 years ago, maybe I'm like, look, if we can improve efficiency and reduce the cost of government, you can increase the money you give to people.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Take half the savings. Here's a bigger check.

[Ben Horowitz]

Wow.

[Mark Cuban]

Right. That's what the Democrats could be doing. We want to give you more money. Right. That's what the Republicans do. Great. We're making a promise. Democrats, we're going to use AI and if we need to give it ubi. If we need to tax robots, we're going to tax robots. You know, the whole Bill Gates thing, a quarter hour, dollar an hour, whatever. And then we're going to take the benefit of that and write you a check that's going to be your ub or your tax credit or whatever. They just don't think like that. Yeah, they don't think, where is the solution? How do I get there? How do I sell it in a form that's easy to digest so people understand it? They don't get. AI is like going to change everything, you know, how can we not use this in government to be more effective?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

I mean, that's the whole point, isn't it?

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Chris Dixon]

Let's go deep there, because I know AI is one of the things you wanted to chat about, something you spend a lot of time thinking about. When you look out of the next few years, what do you think is underappreciated or under realized about how AI is going to change a specific category or specific way of life?

[Mark Cuban]

I think it democratizes a lot of things, you know, particularly education. Well, I understand the fear. And the first pass is never the way it ends up. I got two kids in college now, one in high school. Hell yeah, they cheat with it. You know, they do. But then I started talking to this teacher from Pennsylvania, I forget what town in Pennsylvania. She just emailed me and she was like, what can I do to integrate AI into my classroom where it's not just them giving me answers to questions? And I said, well, you know, make it more like Jeopardy. Right? And she's like, well, okay, Here are the four causes you use ChatGPT to find the four causes of the American Revolution and write up what it says. And then we're going to discuss in class, and you pick which one do you think is the most impactful and then we'll discuss that in class. Just changing the paradigm of how they would do things. And so. But back to your question. I think democratization of education is key because a kid with a cell phone can. An Internet access can go to, you know, any large language model and ask anything.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And ask it to, you know, hey, I'm eight years old and I want to learn to speak Polish because my grandmother's from Poland.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Would you put together a class for me and give me, you know, and teach me how to speak Polish?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, it will.

[Mark Cuban]

How else are they going to do that? You know, sign up for Duolingo. Right. You know, you know, I'm really curious about baseball.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, right.

[Mark Cuban]

Who are the best baseball players and why? And, you know, teach me about the statistics behind it.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

And always on tutor. Yeah, absolutely. How about in healthcare? It's an area you've spent a ton of time in with cost plus drugs right now, you know, healthcare is like 20 or something of the economy in the future. Is that number going higher? Is that number going lower? You know, talk about what's going to happen there.

[Mark Cuban]

It'll go higher, but because we're going to get some amazing treatments.

[Chris Dixon]

Oh, so the product will get better, the service will get better.

[Mark Cuban]

Right. Because now you get, you know, single treatment cures that might cost $3 million that, you know, that jacks up the total cost. But in terms of how we do health care, everything I do I put into ChatGPT project first.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, and share it with the doctor. And then I asked my doctor, do you use this stuff or open evidence? Like, hell yeah, we do it. I think healthcare will get better qualitatively. I think we'll be. We'll benchmark ourselves a lot more and that'll make us healthier in a lot of ways. I think where the challenge and the hard part is, other than the obvious, you know, optimization and processes and hospitals and all that, the challenge is how we value ip.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Because if I'm Maryland. Anderson, if I'm Stanford, any research hospital, any scientist in healthcare, you're an idiot if you publish it. You're an idiot if you patent it, because it's immediately going to get absorbed into a large language model and you've lost control of it and you've lost ownership of it. And I think what's going to happen Is, you know, and I've said this as I've talked to CEOs of research hospitals, et cetera. You need to silo your stuff and you need to take what you siloed and either do your own model or put it out to bid.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And let the foundational models compete. Because they're in a death war.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, and then you.

[Chris Dixon]

Specialized data.

[Mark Cuban]

They need all the data they can get. Specialized or general.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Right. Because they. Everything that's accessible on the Internet.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

They're getting. Or got.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And so the people who are creating new things, whether healthcare or anything for that matter, are going to start siloing it and putting out to bid. And I think even within the government. Right. So we see all these research grants getting pulled.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

I told somebody I know, you know, in the administration, I'm like, no, keep on doing it, but put it out to bid for people, you know, for the models to get access to it. Back to your question again. It will change because there'll be millions of models as opposed to just singular foundational models. And I think I've talked to folks at Microsoft Meta and other places, I think they disagree with that.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know that they think there's just all this information is going to be available so that the hospital system or the university, whatever it is, or the, the grantors will just say, go ahead and take it.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Hell no.

[Chris Dixon]

Do you think there'll be a flourishing of startups that will have kind of access to specialized data and either put.

[Mark Cuban]

It to bid or just like MD Anderson will have their own launch luggage model, you know, and you'll just have to know where to go.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And just like right now, you know, ChatGPT is not going to give you the same answers, perplexity as cloud, et cetera. You're going to go and use multiple of them and you'll say, here's the input, the output I got here, here, here, and you'll put it in somewhere else to have assemble it. But I think there'll be millions of models and there be front ends for those models that can't go out and do a million of them, but that help curate what's best for what you're trying to accomplish.

[Chris Dixon]

If you could wave a wand and change anything about how we do healthcare in this country or where we can learn from other countries that what would you change?

[Mark Cuban]

You get rid of the insurance companies and the PBMs because they do all they can to not take risk.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And they do all they can to introduce Opacity to the system. And if you look at, you know, particularly on the drug side, if you look at all the other countries, we're trying to do MFNS to match their pricing, they don't have PBMs. When you look at the internals, the biggest PBMs cause all the problems. Literally. We get emails all the time. People who are on Medicare Part D for drugs come to Cost plus drugs cause we're cheaper than their co pays. That makes no sense. But it's the federal government that approves those plans. And those plans in Medicare Part D are run by individual insurance companies. Then if you look on a bigger platform just for healthcare in general, you know, think about how healthcare works here. 80, 16, you have an insurance company. Do you guys self insure?

[Chris Dixon]

Do you know I just joined some now.

[Mark Cuban]

Okay, so you know, let's just pretend you self insure, you want a bigger company. So an insurance company comes to, you know, when you self insure.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Right. And they put together a list of plans.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And then those plans, no one ever asks why were those plans defined the way they were? Yeah, they just assumed we just get our choice of plans and we pick them.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Well, there's an inverse relationship between premium and deductible. Right. They never check do credit checks on the deductibles, do they? And younger, younger people, they're taking the higher deductibles because they presume they're going to be healthier. But the people who are making the determination that they're using the higher deductible plan, half of them don't have enough money for the deductible. Right. So we've got an insurance system driven by these insurance companies, even if the risk is absorbed by companies or partially by the taxpayers. Right. That are designing plans that they know the people who are buying the plans can't afford to utilize. And what happens then that turns the hospital into a subprime lender.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Because now they go in either through the emergency room or they show up not knowing what their deductible is and then the hospital will loan them money because they want them to reach be able to pay the deductible. So then they can then charge the insurance company or the employer if they're self insured. But wait, there's more. Right. So then let's just say someone went in, gets a hip replacement, pays their $5,000 deductible and they own $10,000. Right. The insurance company, even though they have a contract that says it's $15,000 between the provider and the payer. The insurance company, they don't just write the check for $10,000, right? They say, we'll give you 7,000. If you don't like it, come and get us. And so when you talk to a hospital CFO, they're like, we lose 3 to 5%, we can lose as much as 50% on the subprime lending. And so they have to event all these costs to compensate for what's happening on the other side on the payment process. Then of course you have the pre authorizations and most of the pre authorizations get approved after everything is said and done. But they get the time value, the money of the premium and not having to pay it. And they've eaten up all these doctors time and the doctors are the ones getting underpaid. So you're going in for a heart transplant and you know, the doctor might make $10,000. Unless it's a big name surgeon. I want my doctor making a shit ton of money, right. To make sure that, you know, so you have this connectivity between all the pieces that really hasn't been thought out, right. And those insurance companies either own the PBMs or are owned by the PBMs and what they. Because they're together and they also are vertically integrated to own clinics and hospital, not necessarily hospitals, but clinics and other providers, right. So they have all these intercompany transfers that allow them to game the system. So with the aca, you, depending on the circumstances, the insurer has to pay out 80 to 85% called the medical loss ratio. And so you would think that's just straightforward. But if you're vertically integrated, you can put some over here, put all the profits into your PBM and show that you've spent all this money because you wrote that check to the pbm and so that's what happens. One of the biggest insurance companies had $161 billion of intercompany transfers.

[Ben Horowitz]

Oh my God.

[Mark Cuban]

Intercompany transfers, that's 0.3% of our GDP.

[Ben Horowitz]

Wow.

[Chris Dixon]

Just moving money around to make.

[Mark Cuban]

Just moving money around to make more money.

[Chris Dixon]

So if you get rid of them, would you, who should take the risk? Would you replace anything?

[Mark Cuban]

So yeah, so it's great question, right? So healthcare is easy, right? Presuming, you know, if you get the right doctor and everything, you go to the doctor and they tell you what's right or wrong. Right. Go home. Wrong. Okay, what do I need? Then once you know what you need, there's only two questions Whether it's medication, surgery, whatever it is, how much does it cost and how do you pay for it? Yeah, costplusdrugs.com is still the only pharmacy company that publishes an entire price list. The only one. And we've been in business three and a half years. That in and of itself is crazy. But then once you get into the system, right, and you don't know what anything costs, then they can charge you whatever. And then in terms of how do you pay for it, that's the who takes the risk.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And so deductibles are going up no matter whether it's Medicare Part D, even Medicare Part A and B have higher deductibles. Medicare Advantage, they shrink the network and create networks. So out of pockets going up. So patients are the first line of defense that the insurance companies are trying to push the risk on. But better in my mind is to combine kind of a market where you get rid of the insurance companies, there's no premiums, get rid of the big PBMs, there's no, you know, manipulation, if you will, of the funds with intercompany transfers. And you say to you, create tools that allow patients or their employers working with them to go out there and find the best solution for them and to shop. And hopefully you've saved a lot of money from your not paying premiums and you can pay for what you need, but what you can't pay, the government will loan you that money if it stays within the price parameters that have been set. So it's negotiating without negotiating. Right. And they've done that to a certain extent, reference based pricing with Medicare care, you know, and Medicaid for Medicaid patients. And so now if you or I can pay for it, we just pay for it. But we've saved all that money and not paying premiums. And slowly but surely we're getting more and more reinsurance options for individuals. So for catastrophic insurance, so, you know, in case, God forbid, the worst thing happens, you have an option. So that's one place of risk. But if you're not paying premiums to an insurance company, you can pay for your reinsurance. And then if your hip replacement's 15,000 and you have 3,000, you can use financing, but it's guaranteed by the government, kind of like we do with college. You know, you can use the financing the school has. Right, but it's guaranteed by the government, kind of like we do with houses. You can use the mortgage plan, but it's guaranteed by the government. The most important Thing that we have available to us, our health care care, the government's like whatever.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, so if you take the risk and allocate it within a price control. Price control is right, wrong word. But if you want, if, if you're, if you're a patient, you're shopping for care and it stays within the benchmarks that are set, then go for it. If you want to spend more. Yeah, right. You think the doctor doesn't participate, you want to get better, go for it. But then all of a sudden you've got all this money that's not being paid in premiums, that's available to people to use to save, whatever. That's how I would look at it.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

So you've built cost of risk drugs partially because you have this, well, you care about it, obviously you have this distribution advantage, you have the capital advantage to get it started. Let's imagine if you were a young entrepreneur, you know, a mid 20 something Mark Cuban in 2025 and trying to, you know, be immensely successful like you've been. How would you think about that? Or what would you pursue for cost plus drugs?

[Mark Cuban]

No, no, no.

[Chris Dixon]

You as entrepreneur.

[Mark Cuban]

Like if I was just getting out of college right now.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Oh, I'd be all AI every day.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Because I think the disconnect, I think employment for computer science graduates. And I said this 10 years ago, I got crushed. 2017 actually. I said, you know, AI is going to put programmers out of business at the early beginning stage. Programmers and people just, oh, you're an idiot. But now big companies are going to find ways to use AI.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

They're going to reduce. You saw Salesforce or whoever laid off people. Small companies have no clients.

[Ben Horowitz]

Clue. Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, and There are only 22,000 companies. I remember this from the Kamala campaign. 22,000 companies with 500 more employees. 30 million right now. A lot of them are single entrepreneurs. But, you know, 5 million have 500 or less. That's where you want to go, try to get a job. Because if you're AI native because you've been using it through your four years of college or two years, you know, or you know, two years from now, having had four years experience, they need you.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, maybe they have one person who's picked it up. Two people.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

But if you have a business background which you can learn in school and you become an AI native, you can walk into a small company and say, I can help you.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

I can create agents for you that'll go out and look for Things we had. One of my shark tank companies is Rebel Cheese and they added a direct to consumer business and they created an agent that compares the weight that comes off a scale for what they're saying or the box type and what they were invoiced by UPS or FedEx and compared to the price list always got overcharged. Always. This little company is saving, you know, thousands of dollars a week just by using an agent, you know, and it's not anything difficult or, you know, advanced. So being able to walk into a company and say, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this. It's no different than what systems integrators have done for decades. That's what I did in my first company, Microsolutions. You don't understand PCs. You're a small company. I do. I know networks I can program. I'm going to write you an application that emulates what you're doing, but faster now. It's no longer about emulation. Those days are gone. It's about how do we change the process by removing pieces to make you more efficient, more productive, more profitable.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

So you were the PC wave, as you say, then you were the Internet wave with it, with broadband, you know, had a big outcome there. If you were starting a company today, would you try to build a foundation model company or vertical application or.

[Mark Cuban]

No, neither.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

What would you do?

[Mark Cuban]

Because they're all going to be customized.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

I literally would hone my business skills as much as possible. Domain knowledge will be more domain. Novel knowledge combined with understanding of AI is the win.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Chris Dixon]

So you would go with some sector that hasn't yet been detected by AI.

[Mark Cuban]

And build or just small companies. Yeah, you know, regardless of sector.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

But if you wanted to start something that could be big one day.

[Mark Cuban]

Right. Because if I work with one shoe company and I analyze what they do, then I say, okay, I'm going to charge you X per transaction and I'm going to do the agent for you and I'm going to monitor the agents. It's SaaS at one level. Right. But it's customized SaaS where it, you know, and as AI advances, the model advances and the agent advances. And so, you know, factories, you know, talking now like at cost plus drugs. We have a robotics factory and we use AI agents to monitor everything.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, and our cost to run the factory is a fraction of pretty much everybody other than India and China. And we'll catch up to them, you know, and so understanding how business works, having that domain knowledge and then Being able to apply it and then being able to scale it by taking it to all those companies in similar circumstances or creating agents that modify the agents based off of the information you're getting from all your customer companies.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

That's the new Sass, potentially.

[Chris Dixon]

Yeah, totally. I want to zoom out and talk just general business success and advice. The Internet lists your net worth, I believe, at over 8 billion or. Or something to the effect. But one thing that, you know, typically when. When people become super wealthy, it's because of like one big thing. But it seems like you've sort of compounded wealth in decades. And I think the biggest liquidity events, though, if I'm wrong, are the. The company you sold and the stock.

[Mark Cuban]

And the maps and.

[Chris Dixon]

And so. And then there been other. Other effort. What do you think is the thread, the through line when you look at the ways in which you've made money that others can learn from?

[Mark Cuban]

I look at business as a sport.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Right. And I just love to compete.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, and that keeps me going. Just, you know, there's always something new and always something changing. And it's almost like the. The forums. Right. I just like to be intellectually challenged.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

When I first started, I was always the youngest guy walking in the room. Now I'm the oldest guy walking in the room. And I like kicking everybody's ass where I can. Right. You know, you went, you got your CS degree from Harvard, you. I don't care. Right. Sounds like Clingarry getting Ross. You know, But I like that challenge and I understand patterns and I understand being able to create new things, and I think that served me really well. It's like cost plus drugs. You know, we launched in January of 2022. We're serving millions of customers. We're changing people's lives. And everybody thought I was an idiot. You know, you're taking. And we're working outside the system.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, everybody Amazon everybody else. Okay. We're going to work with the big PBMs, because that's where the money is. And I'm like, no, they're the problem. You don't work with the problem. You know, it's the innovator's dilemma.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, we're going to take what they can't do. And, you know, when you run with the elephants, there's the quick and the dead. We got to be quick and aggressive and. And so I think that's a big part of my skill set. You know, whether it's starting Audionet, which is the first streaming Company, HD Net, the first all high def network. You know, cost plus drugs. What I do with the Mavs, in terms of bringing in technology, it was always about, about, you know, Steve Jobs said it best. Everything's a remix.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, it's about taking what I know.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And just learning whatever's coming up and what new technologies and remixing it to apply to something different.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Chris Dixon]

When you bought the Mavs, did you have a sense that 20 years later it could be, you know, worth the order of magnitude more?

[Mark Cuban]

No.

[Chris Dixon]

It wasn't a business.

[Mark Cuban]

No, no, no. In fact, like I paid 285 million for the Mavs in 2000. In 2010, the NBA couldn't even sell the New Orleans franchise.

[Ben Horowitz]

Really.

[Mark Cuban]

There were no buyers and the valuation had gone down.

[Ben Horowitz]

Down, wow.

[Mark Cuban]

Not up. It wasn't until.

[Chris Dixon]

So you thought it was a bad purchase from a financial perspective.

[Mark Cuban]

From a financial perspective, it was awful.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Plus I was losing money every year, so it had nothing to do with money. But I loved it. Right. That was the key part.

[Chris Dixon]

And it elevated your profile in a.

[Mark Cuban]

Way that helped your other. Oh, yeah, for sure.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And then Shark, that got me to Shark Tank and the rest is history. But you know, I just. The way I looked at it back then is I'm having fun, I'm blessed. Right. I'm going to make the use of my time, so I enjoy every minute of it. But what changed the economics of the NBA was, you know, linear media being competitive.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, and that goes back, you know, things I look for, I always look for death wars.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Right. Where you've got competitors that one's going to win and one's going to lose.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And they have to go all in.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Just like with AI right now.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

They all. They're spending tens of billions of dollars a year. You know, they're making obscenes amount of cash flow and they're spending it all. Right. They're paying a billion dollars to people to.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

What does that tell you?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

That anything you can sell to them, that really differentiates them, they're going to buy. And so. But you know, with the Mavs, it was. I didn't see it as an investment, but it wasn't until the death wars hit. Linear television.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And then all the TV deals went. Skyrocketed.

[Chris Dixon]

That's what made it, you know, the difference between 2025 and 2020 in 2010 in terms of why the NBA teams have got so much more valuable is TV percent.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah. A little bit of real estate. So you can build around. Right. But it's 100% streaming TV. The question becomes what? You know, how long does this sustain?

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, if, if you look at. So like Major League Baseball didn't get a deal done with ESPN and saw their rights start to decline.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

But it was right around the time I think it was Peacock who bought just one NFL playoff game.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, and got like 100,000 new subscribe or a million 100 million new subscribers. Something ridiculous. Right?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

That all of a sudden sent a benchmark mark. So this season. Right. Starting with the NBA season, how well that does in terms of driving subscriptions and reducing churn that's going to make or break everything that comes forward.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

For all sports.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

I also wonder if, you know, one thesis I have is that, you know, value capture will reflect value creation. It's just when the market gets more efficient and so. And NBA players, it seems like, don't have equity in, in the league. And I wonder if in the future they're going to band together and just.

[Mark Cuban]

Say, I don't think you can. Right. Because Father Time's undefe defeated. You know, so at what point do you stop?

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And the, the price of the franchises now are so high. I mean, how much can you give them? Right. And I don't. I'm not going to say it's never going to happen, but you know, I think it could be a question. But the other, the other point is that there's only like two players that fill an arena.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Steph and LeBron.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Like when Luca played for the Mavs and I had nothing to do with the trade. When Luca trademark. Yeah. Luca played for the Mavs. We didn't play to sold out buildings. He would draw f. Get me wrong. But not every building was sold out. When Giannis would come to Dallas didn't necessarily mean we were going to sell out. But the whole concept of what drives attendance has changed dramatically. And what drives viewership on television in particular, because now fans are fans of the players more than they are the teams.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Like when we grew up, it was like you were. I grew up in Pittsburgh. So you're a Steelers fan, you're a Pirates fan.

[Chris Dixon]

That's why I wonder if they're going to team up and say, hey, you know, when Banyama the new generation, you know, we could could start a new league and get Cooper flags.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah, exactly. It's expensive, right? Start a new league. Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

There's a lot of infrastructure.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

The NBA is its own and Even with Caitlyn Clark.

[Mark Cuban]

I don't know all the WNBA numbers now, but most of them aren't making money.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Even in the NBA, most teams aren't making money before revenue share.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right. Right.

[Chris Dixon]

The. I know that you were dismayed at the Luca trade. We were sort of in the group chat when it happened, but I just want to reflect. Yeah. I. I was so devastated by. By it that it seemed so unfair for the Mavs not to get picks back or Austin Reeves or whatever. I don't want to.

[Mark Cuban]

Really.

[Chris Dixon]

I was complaining to my girlfriend at the. Like many people were. And I even remember reading this. This conspiracy theory that it was on purpose to take the value of a franchise to then move to, you know, Las Vegas.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah. No.

[Chris Dixon]

And I was like, oh, this is the only way it can make sense.

[Mark Cuban]

No.

[Chris Dixon]

How do we not get more for Luca in this?

[Mark Cuban]

I wish I knew. I wish I knew.

[Chris Dixon]

But. But then the Cooper flag thing, I mean, it's. The world works.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah. Basketball guys were looking badly upon us. Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

The world works in. In mysterious ways.

[Ben Horowitz]

But.

[Chris Dixon]

So I have a dream to be a part owner someday as. As well. And I've wondered if. If the strategy is either to compete for a championship or do the Oklahoma City Thunder, where you trade for picks.

[Mark Cuban]

So what do you think? I think the Thunder methodology is better now.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

With the new cba.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Every new CBA creates transitional issues.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Where your. Your decisions were made in a legacy environment and they just changed all the rules.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And now it's even more difficult with the second apron.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Because the. The problems of being over the second apron are far more draconian than anything we've ever seen.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And so I think the patience approach that. That San Antonio and OKC have taken is going to. To lead the way.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Whereas with me, I was never patient.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And that worked against me a lot, too. You know, I wanted to win. Now when. Now we have Dirk. Let's get there. Now.

[Chris Dixon]

What's something you would have done differently?

[Mark Cuban]

We kept Steve Nash, but drafted Giannis. Drafted Giannis. Yeah. I. I think I just would have been more patient and waited guys out to see how they turn out.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Rather than, okay, I'm going to throw in a draft, because time you could say, if you didn't have a pick from 15 before, below 15.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

The odds of them being a player.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Was minimal.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And so if I was getting somebody that I could already evaluate, that worked in my favor.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

But now draft picks have become so much more valuable.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And so that's changed the valuation approach.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Chris Dixon]

I heard one argument that was somewhat sympathetic too, which is, hey, the. The argument for how you could understand a Luca trade is, you know, obviously, legendary, iconic player, but. But so expensive and with the way that the contracts were structured is if you gave, you know, kept giving him the supermax, how much room do you have to build it? It's kind of like the Trey Young. Like some of these players are so expensive. But are you really going to win a championship if you don't have.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah, it's not. It's like, can you have two max players?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And that's the challenge.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, in the past, you could reward somebody with a max contract.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Knowing you had some wiggle room.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And more importantly, you can always find a way to get off that contract.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Not anymore. That. Right. If you have your one generational player. Player, you pay them whatever it takes.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Because because of the. The max contracts, they by definition are undervalued.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

So the. The generational player, you always pay whatever it takes. It's the next person. If they're not a generational player, how do you deal with that?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

That's the hard part. And when you see, like you saw with certain players that teams couldn't get off of them.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Either because of age or, you know, they were max player by the rules of the game. Eight years ago.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Four years ago. But they're not any longer. That's where the challenges happen.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Chris Dixon]

If you were making decisions for the Mavs now, given where everything is, what would you be thinking about where the.

[Mark Cuban]

Big questions or develop Cooper, first and foremost, you know. No, we've got A.D. we've got Anthony Davis, we've got Kyrie, who will be coming back. But just in clay, just having those hall of Famers there, you couldn't ask for anything better in terms of development, support. And so I think we. We have to focus on staying healthy.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Getting Kyrie back.

[Ben Horowitz]

Back.

[Chris Dixon]

It's interesting thing with two timelines. You know, warriors tried to do it, but they couldn't exactly pull it off. Although they've done great. But these sort of, you know, older players and then, you know, it's hard.

[Mark Cuban]

Like where the warriors are now.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, Father Time is undefeated and you're trying to stay committed to the guy who's got you there.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, and he's. The players aren't dumb.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, so they know they only have, you know, a finite number of years left.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And so they're trying to maximize their earnings in that point in that during that period. It's just hard. And so, you know, the whole second apron restrictions really just kicked in last year.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And so now teams are having to deal with it. And so you're seeing players get stretched, you know, not just weigh, but stretched. And I think the strategy is changing right in front of our eyes. I think there will be fewer Max players.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Coming up.

[Ben Horowitz]

Interesting.

[Chris Dixon]

And there used to be this thing where in order to win a championship, you had to have one of the best players in the league. You know, the Pistons were an exception to that. You know, I'm, I'm wondering my, I'm a Knicks fan. I wonder if the Knicks have a, you know, possibility to. To question that. But if, if you're playing for a championship, do you think that you have to have, you know, one of the five best players in the league or.

[Mark Cuban]

Sure. Helps.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

It depends on the skill set. So what's changed a lot in just six years, seven years, certainly, you know, last 10 years is you used. There used to always be one guy on the court who couldn't shoot, that couldn't get a bucket. They were there for defensive purposes or they protected the rim.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Now they all can score offensively at some level. And so, you know, whether it's the Knicks or anybody else, if you have enough guys who can put pressure on the defense. And that's why, you know, the Knicks made the deals that they did.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

But if there's one guy that you're playing against that's always the best player on the floor.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And you're. You don't have that player.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

It's going to be tough.

[Chris Dixon]

Totally. Well, I think with the Knicks are asking, I guess Boston's asking is like, can offense win championship? Like if you just stack the.

[Mark Cuban]

Well, yeah. I mean, the Knicks have got some defenders.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

You know, but Brunson and Cat are weak defenders.

[Mark Cuban]

It's going to be tough. Yeah. It makes it tough because, you know, once you get to like, even against Indiana.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, Indiana didn't have, you know how they didn't. We tried to get Halle so hard. Right. Halle is not a top five NBA player. He's good.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Maybe top 15. But he was better Right. In that moment because. Because you can do matchups over and over and over again. Of course, across up to seven games. You can play certain players off the court.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

So you saw Cat.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Not even. Even being out there at certain times.

[Ben Horowitz]

Totally.

[Chris Dixon]

You know, if face was won the championship, that would have really questioned.

[Mark Cuban]

And you know, and they took them to seven games. I know. And their best player gets hurt. You know, and we, the Mavs, injured and all without Luca, beat OKC three out of four games.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah. Wow.

[Chris Dixon]

By the way, Dallas, one of the deepest teams right now, too.

[Mark Cuban]

Oh, we're really deep. Stay healthy.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

But yeah, there's so many teams like the. The Raptors, the Bulls, the Kings, kind of like in perpetual. What I would call mediocrity. And they're expensive and they're old. And I'm like, you just got to rebuild. Just admit to rebuilding. And there's a number of teams and like that.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah. And part of the problem is that there's an. A salary cap floor.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Right. You have to spend up to a.

[Chris Dixon]

Certain amount because that's competitive, I guess.

[Mark Cuban]

Right. Well, it's just. That's the deal. We deal with the players. They want more money spent. And so 90% of the salary cap is a lot of money. Right. So it's like $153 million, right? Yeah. 7, 170, give or take, times 9. And so spending up to $153 million, that's 10 million million average.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

That means you're overpaying a lot of people.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, and so I might have the cap number one. But in any event, you're paying a lot of people a lot of money. But if you keep them short contracts.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

You'll get guys wanting to come just to get overpaid.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, and you almost have to tank and you just.

[Chris Dixon]

Is it. I have a theory that there's these guys, like, you know, maybe I'm being unfair, but Kuzma, RJ Barrett, Brandon Ingram, who are sort of like built for losing, for getting a lot of money and a lot of points on a losing team.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah. I mean, mean.

[Chris Dixon]

And we're seeing more of that.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah. They're freer on a losing team and they. They do it to get paid more money.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Right. But teams are smarter than that. But at the same time, there are teams that need scoring.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And you know, if. If you fall into that category.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You're going to go after those guys if you have the space for it. But I think what. What's happening actually now you're. We're seeing all the salaries kind of con revolving around the mid level exception, which is $14 million, give or take. Right. And so the. That if you're guys now realize with the second apron, things have changed.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

So if you get paid more than a mid level.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

You're a good player.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

If you get paid at the mid level, you're a decent player. If you get paid below, you're you're roster piece.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Unless you're young and you're on your.

[Chris Dixon]

Way up for advice. For me as a future owner, what's the big. What are the biggest ways an owner can influence winning? Is it sort of personnel selection? On coaching gm, like, are you always.

[Mark Cuban]

Looking for an edge? Yeah, always looking for the edge. You know, personnel selection is hard.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

It's more art than science.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

You don't, you know, like I told Jason when I did Jalen Brushton, when I did his pocket, he was just some chubby guy. Right.

[Chris Dixon]

You know, I'm sorry we took it from you.

[Mark Cuban]

No.

[Chris Dixon]

Or you gave away.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah. I was not happy about that. Yeah. But you know, we picked him 33rd.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

32, you know, chances to draft him and they didn't. And we like just his pedigree of winning at Villanova. But it's his effort. Effort.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Like when he was with us, his go to move was either a spin or a move to the left and he'd fall away doing a layup.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And he never got the foul because he was always falling away.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Now his mid range jumper is money.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

But he worked on that.

[Chris Dixon]

Totally.

[Mark Cuban]

And that's what you don't know when you draft somebody.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

What mental capacity do they have? You know, their athletic ability.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

But will they work hard to improve their skills? Will they work hard to improve their basketball iq?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

If the answer is yes and they have the, you know, the athletic side of it, you've got a chance. But you don't really know that because no one comes in and works out.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And says, okay, I'm an idiot, I suck. Right. And shows you they suck. You know, they've all been trained on how to work out. You know, and they're in college maybe one year.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

So, you know, and then if you're going to a college and they're getting paid now. Right. It might be that they're just doing what the coach needs them to do there.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Which may not match what they need to do in the NBA.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

You've got the hardest part for players that aren't superstars coming, coming right in is you've got to learn how to fit in.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Even with Luca, we didn't know he was going to be a superstar. We thought he was going to be really, really good. Right. And we Thought he had superstar mentality.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

But I was terrified because I made a trade, right. I gave up a pick, you know, to Atlanta. And I remember we played in China, the first game, the preseason, and I had Sean Marion, that was an ambassador of the NBA. I'm like, tricks, what do you think? Tricks, what do you think? What do you think? Like, I'm terrified. I'm terrified. You know, but we know how that turned out.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, yeah. And.

[Chris Dixon]

And by the way, so funny. Just the basketball gods, Lakers made all the wrong moves for so many years and we're in such a tough spot. You talk about warriors, they were in a tougher spot going forward, trading all their picks, being so old. And then Luca falls into the lap just to keep it, keep it interesting.

[Mark Cuban]

I think we've done enough of this.

[Chris Dixon]

Yeah, exactly. Mav's got coupe and go train him and you'll be good. The zooming out, closing here, the how have you thought about how you want to spend time? Like you, for example, have your own ASIC and Z, big venture firm doing all these investments, all this stuff. You seem to run kind of a lean operation or flexible. How have you thought about the efforts that you want to get involved with, not want to get involved with, how thin to spread yourself, so to speak?

[Mark Cuban]

Well, I mean, I got out of Shark Tank.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

I got out so I could spend more time with my kids.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know that that's number one because they're 16, 19 and about to turn 22. They're heading out on their own. So I just want to spend that time that I can with them. But I think the difference is for me versus everybody, I'm not looking. My goal is not to make as much money as I can like I do investing, but honestly, it's just shit. People email me. I mean, like I saw a list of who has the most unicorns and I was like, I had like 11 and all of them were just from email. Somebody emailed me saying, check this out, check this out, check this out. Like Synthesia. You know, I was their first investor, you know, gave them a million dollars. And now, you know, so I can get 20, 25% of a company, sometimes more, and then help them grow. That's what I like. Yeah, right. Taking, you know, long shot tries as opposed to, okay, let's raise a fund, let's get a team together. We'll put in 10 to 25 million. And then, you know, if they're doing well, we'll put in more, do follow ups and, you know, we'll have these big scores. Yeah, I like it better when. And you know, it's dude wipes. Yeah, right. Comes on Shark Tank. I give them 200 grand for 15%. Now they're worth a billion dollars easy. You know, they're a primary brand and they never had to raise another cent. You know, helping a company never have to raise more money and making them profitable so that they're insanely profitable. I had this company, Alyssa's Cookies. Guy Doug was living in his car with his family and he sent me these cookies.

[Ben Horowitz]

Wow.

[Mark Cuban]

They were this big. They were the best cookies I've ever. Cause I always do like, like the nutrition thing first. What's on the back? No added sugar, lots of fiber, et cetera, low net carbs. But when I took it out of the plastic, it all fell apart. So I said, I'm gonna give you money. Right. And I got like a third of the company, but I'm gonna guide you through what it takes. So we changed it and I told them to make them into bites instead of cookies and put em in a plastic container and go to stores and we'll sell em. I'll do a tasting, you know, where I'll go to a grocery store one time and hand out now no more money in. Right. We'll do 25 million this year. But that's not the important number because we don't spend money on advertising or anything.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

Profitable. Makes 12 to 14 million a year. And we, we just added Whole Foods, we just added Costco, we're adding more and more, you know, outlets. He can get to 100 million and make 50 million a year.

[Ben Horowitz]

Wow.

[Mark Cuban]

That stuff's fun.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

Right, Right.

[Chris Dixon]

So if you could clone yourself a few times or when you look into the future, are there other businesses like Cost Bus drugs that you want to start or incubate or.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah, education. If I, if I can do what I want to do with health care, which saying a lot, right?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah. Effort.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah. But it would be education just because.

[Chris Dixon]

Like AI first K12 or what kind of. Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

I mean more, more secondary education. Right. Simply because the, the cost structure is all up. Right. And it's all built on accreditation.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And, and that's kind of a mafia. And when I see a maf, I just ignore the accreditation and just go do it anyways. And if you get the results or guarantee your results. Yeah, you'll get plenty.

[Chris Dixon]

We talked about your health care platform, we talked about your messaging. Are there any other policies that if you could, you know, be in charge of Democrat party or, or sort of running America that you would be most excited about in terms of its transformative potential.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah. You know what I would say? I would say a focus on entrepreneurship.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know that right now, whoever the candidate is, particularly if it's for president, takes credit for everything.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And that's ridiculous. They do less to impact the startups and the start the building of businesses than anybody, you know. And so I think what's missing, definitely missing with Biden, maybe less so with Obama, been definitely missing with Trump. Like, when you hear Trump talk about tariffs, he never talks about small businesses. It's always, hey, I've got this company investing $500 billion, $600 billion. When you've got all these Shark Tank companies that are getting crushed, you increase from a 2 1/2% average tariff to a 15% tariff. That's their profit margin and it's gone. So I would put a focus on recognizing and encouraging and rewarding people starting businesses and using AI kind of as government, as a service where you simplify all the friction that's involved in starting a business from the paperwork to get, get all the requirements, the incorporation, et cetera, to a bank account. All of it. Just simplify all of it. So entrepreneurs can be entrepreneurs. Because I think that is what Joe Biden told this to me, of all people, when, during the Obama administration, they invited us from Shark Tank to go do a thing for entrepreneurship at the White House. And he said, he gave a little speech and what he said was, was, you know, I've traveled around the world and there's no Chinese dream, there's no French dream, there's no UK dream, there's only the American dream. And people come here to, to live it and experience it. That's what makes us unique.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

And on that note, what advice in closing, what advice do you have for us in Silicon Valley or just tech more broadly, who are building with AI on how to make it more popular so that we don't have this big backlash class.

[Mark Cuban]

You have to get with either party and communicate to people the upside.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Chris Dixon]

Because they see the down. They see, hey, maybe my job is being taken away.

[Mark Cuban]

Yeah. And they, and that's, that's, you know, going back to what I said earlier, there will be disintermediation, but I don't think the net number of jobs is going to decrease. I think everything gets reinvented. Because AI right now is not smart.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, it's statistical in a lot of respects. Robotics, on the other hand, is getting smart. You Know robotics, if you, you know, clean my bedroom, it has to know, you know, to pick up the sheets and all this stuff. But I think the combination, the two will create unique opportunities for jobs.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

I think domain expertise is always going to be necessary to train models. Models. But I think bigger picture, when like we look at a house, everything's designed for the human form. And right now robotics is trying to emulate the human form because that's what we've always done with software.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

We just emulated what we already did and tried to optimize it. You don't just, if you can create devices, robots that can look like anything and you want them to be domestic in some way way. You don't build houses the way we do now.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And I think there's going to be a lot of jobs that go in different directions. And I think Silicon Valley has got to do a much better job demonstrating those jobs, hiring people for those jobs, supporting people that are concerned about their jobs, even teachers. You know, now when we look at AI tools, you can read papers fast, faster. That's not going to change anything. You're just doing it the same way, you know, but if a teacher can use AI to customize responses to kids, to help them learn, like you said, AI tutors. Right, but in a classroom, you're going to keep your job longer. Yeah, we, we need more teachers, not fewer teachers. Right, but AI doesn't, I mean, Silicon Valley doesn't communicate that at all. Yeah, because when you're raising money, it's about what you're going to change, not what you're going to sustain. Yeah, but there's so many unique opportunities.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

I mean, I'm old enough. Like I would walk in selling PCs and I saw you're out of work, you're out of work, you're out of work. But as it's all turned out, the economy just keeps on growing.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And I think the same thing is going to happen here. And I think the other side of it is going to, you know, inner cities. Like I have this thing called the Mark Cuban AI boot camp. And all we do is go into, you know, underprivileged schools, you know, and encourage kids to sign up for the boot camp. And it used to be just machine learning. Right. Where we taught you that. Now it's, you know, learning how to use AI the way with models and everything and agents for 15, 16, 17 year old kids. And it's great. Right, because they're going back and they're coming up with new ideas Right. Valley needs to go out there and engage more in middle America so people see where the upside is.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

You know, you're getting this rejuvenation of San Francisco and all the spending is pointing there.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

How is anybody else going to understand that or see that?

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

You just. They don't at all.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

When in reality, if it's open to them, and that's why I did the boot camp. More things are going to happen. People don't realize. Like? Like when the Internet first hit, we used to think kids who can do HTML coding were geniuses.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right.

[Mark Cuban]

And when they moved up to JavaScript, they were even smarter. Right. Cause they were building all these websites that were getting ready to go public. And AI is kind of the same thing. It's not hard to build agents and it's getting easier. But knowing an application that you can use to start something, improve something, everybody can do that. Every kid, every mom, every dad. But Silicon Valley is making it sound like, you know, this is the Jetsons and we have no chance.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Mark Cuban]

And I think that has to change.

[Chris Dixon]

That's a great note of advice and optimism to end. Mark Human, thanks so much for coming.

[Mark Cuban]

It was a lot of fun. Thank you. Appreciate it.

[Podcast Host (A16Z Intro)]

Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at rate this podcast.com/a16z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time. As a reminder, the content here is for information purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com disclosures.

[Ben Horowitz]

Sa.