Prof G Markets - AI, TikTok, and the Battle for Media’s Future — ft. Mark Cuban

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

Ed and Scott are joined by Mark Cuban, serial entrepreneur and investor, to discuss the challenges facing today’s media ecosystem. Mark shares his take on what happened with Jimmy Kimmel, his thoughts on the TikTok deal, and how he believes AI will ultimately impact employment. He also explains why he thinks social media should be age-gated — and why, despite the concerns, AI could end up helping Hollywood rather than hurting it. Subscribe to the Prof G Markets newsletter  Order "The Algebra of Wealth" out now Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Scott on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram and X Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned and folded, so you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like Tea Time You. Or this Tea Time You. Or even this Tea Time You. Said you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm.

So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rince. It's time to be great. Today's number 68. That's the percentage of the world's population that is lactose intolerant. True story, Ed, I spent most of my college years as a waiter, and I remember one time someone came in and said, I am allergic to shellfish, lactose, and peanuts.

What should I get? You know what I said, Ed? What? The fuck out. Listen to me Markets are bigger than I What you have here is a structural change In the world distribution

Cash is trash Stocks look pretty attractive Something's going to break Forget about it Yeah I think the dirty jokes are better I think I've got a good dirtier again You know, I'm not exaggerating it I have been fired from some of the most interesting

food establishments In Los Angeles I interview really well Which is no surprise Which also is no surprise I'm a terrible employee I got fired from Shaky's Pizza, Islands Burgers,

the Chart House, Monty's Steak House, I've been fired from some of the best restaurants. L.A. Sports Club had a restaurant. I got fired from there, and I became a trainer. I was much better at that. You became a trainer? Yeah, I used to train all these old white dudes.

When were you a personal trainer? My senior year in college. Oh, you kind of did that as well when you were starting out in banking. Is that right? you offering training sessions to to the MDs. Am I remembering that right? Yeah, I used to, every once in a while in New York,

they had a great gym at Morgan Stanley, and I used to take guys down. If you're an investment banker by the time you're 45 or 55, you're just a fucking hot mess. I mean, you just look like shit, and then they start freaking out, and they get diagnosed. Anyways, yeah, I used to, it's fun. I kind of enjoy it.

I do it, one of the nicest things, most parts of my day, I FaceTime my son, and I take them through a work, out. It's a ton of fun. I really enjoy it. Where are you? Are you in London? Back in London? I'm in New York. I'm here for two more days than I go to this fancy conference in Aspen, which I'm excited about. And they'll be there two days, and I go home to London. What have you been doing in New York? Drinking. I don't been doing in New York. I'm going on the Today Show this afternoon. Oh, wow. They called me

and said, do you want to come on this morning with Meredith Vieira? You know, and I'm like, yeah, oh, yeah, great. And they're like, how long segment? I'm like six minutes. I'm like, no, I'm not coming on for six minutes. So you can ask me one question and then sell pharmaceutical ads, like convince people that have restless legs or whatever. Yeah, I'm not hauling my ass up to Rockefeller.

Anyway, so they call back, this comes out after I'm on. Okay, I can say this. And they said, we'll do a 30-minute piece or whatever. So I'm going up for a sit-down with, gosh, I don't know her name. I'm sure some woman who was the most talented, attractive woman and then went to McGill College of Journalism or the one at Northwestern, and is now hoping to be the next Barbara Walters and is finding out that all of her friends are making more money on substack and podcasts. So I'm about to go find someone who's about to make a career change. So when you say no to these things, how do you word that response? It's nuanced and sophisticated.

No. I'm very honest with them. I was supposed to be on with Gail King on. What's that show? Is that the today's show? No, CBS Sunday morning. I don't know. What do they play at the rest homes?

I couldn't tell you. I haven't watched these shows. Well, that's because you're not 90 yet. Although, you little endless NBC man whore. Oh, my God. By the way, you are out, I got to give it to you. You are outstanding. Your last appearance.

You were so good. I think you got more play on social. You were really strong. Well, this is the interesting thing about. this TV stuff. You go on TV, you think that's the performance, but it actually turns out it's the clip that goes on social media after. That's where all the action's really happening. 100%, which they don't monetize, or at least I don't think that. Do they monetize? I don't know. They post on YouTube, but, you know, I don't know how they're monetizing that. I guess they're just

doing the ad sense, but that really is the future for these TV companies. The format is amazing for social media, actually, because there are these quick, very passive. it hits, when you clip him into like one or two minute segments, that plays really well. So we all seeing sort of a resurgence of the cable model, except it's just not happening on TVs. It's happening on people's phones. I see it as organ donation. I see it is there this giant corpus that has lived a long life. It's taken a ton of energy and love and resources to keep this person alive. And then they're next to death, and they donate their hearts and lungs to social, where it's like the social basically clips the only 90 seconds it was any good.

in the last hour on, you know, name your broadcast network. Why do you, can I just, in terms of the six minute versus 30 minute thing, is it the idea that they're not giving you, is it more of a respect thing? Like, I'm Scott Galloway, you should be giving me more of your time. Or is it that six minutes you don't, you just don't want to have to put in the work for such a small amount, such a small performance? It's total fucking game. I mean, Nome Chomsky and Sam Harris aren't doing fucking six minute hits.

I mean, if Nicole Wallace or Anderson Cooper invite me on for like 20 or 30 minutes or 10 minutes or a longer hit, I'll do it. But I'm not going to go up there, have them ask one questions and have them thoughtfully looking to my eyes and go, this is an issue. We definitely want to keep on. Thank you so much for coming in. Oh, God. Get me to fucking Dunkin' Donuts. But see, you're in the stage that I like to call, that I was in for 30 years, called being a total fucking media whore.

You're saying yes to everything. And then you go on and you're awesome. And this is the thing, you're under the illusion that you're making progress. And to a certain extent, people saying the brand, like, I got to believe a ton of your friends have emailed me like, oh, my God. Ed, you're on MSNBC? The guy that we did Rails Academy with in our junior year and the guy who dressed up as a tiger for the Princeton Tigers game and who cheated off of me on the classics, the dudes on. I can't imagine the group text ripping around Princeton Tiger douchebag.com right now. The first time I went on TV, it was I got a text from my call to group chat.

And there was a picture of me on the screen at the gym. And he just said, my friend just texted me. He's like, I'm just trying to work out, man. He's like, dude, stop it. Stop it. No, you have been. I mean this sincerely. And I call out, go to TikTok or wherever you go and type in Ed Elson,

MSNBC. You are really good. I mean, you're just okay on the pod, but you are really outstanding on MSNBC. You are really good. I think it's because I'm not sure. I think you got the hots for Katie tour, Ari Melburgh. I think you really bring it when Ari or Katie are on. You're like, oh, yeah. I get it. I get it. Yeah. You understand. I get it. All right. Enough of that. Enough of you dominating this conversation with banter. Ed, let's get to the headlines. Let's get into, we have a conversation, a great conversation coming up. Don't correct me, bitch, just because you're on MSNBC. I'm sorry, go ahead. We're speaking with Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban, serial entrepreneur, investor, a total legend. Mark, so good to have you on the show.

Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me on, Ed. Thanks, Scott. So you've started many companies. serial entrepreneur you've also started a lot of media companies you have a lot of experience in media this is a very interesting time for the media space a ton of action in the past few weeks let's just start with the thing that everyone's talking about and that is jimmy kimmel disney or next star ABC cancels jimmy kimmel and they uncancel him just a very open-ended question

your reactions to what's happened with Jimmy Camel thus far. I mean, it's not the first time a major media company has put a star on hiatus for any number of reasons. You know, go back to Disney kicking out Gina Carrano from a film, you know, and I know when I was on Shark Tank, the guys in charge of standards and practices were very clear about what we could say or not say. and when my name kept on coming up as a vice presidential candidate or I'm a presidential candidate, they told me with no uncertain terms that I would have to leave the show if I took that path. So there's a lot of precedent for a lot of the stuff, so I wasn't surprised at all to answer your question. Just interject here, this is different, Mark.

This looks like there's a direct connection between the government, specifically the FCC chairman, threatening to revote their license. This is more than just standards. It is and it isn't, right? On one hand, we haven't heard an FCC commissioner talk like this ever. And so it's natural to connect it. On the flip side, there was just, you know,

a different set of pressures with identity politics that, you know, put people under a microscope if they did or didn't make certain decisions. And so where before it was coming, you know, from social media and, you know, people with influence, Now it's coming from the top down. So it's different, but it's the same. The players are different, but the impact's the same. One is cultural pressure from progressives who, quite frankly, seem more concerned with virtue signaling than the material or psychological well-being of Americans. And what happened with

Gina at The Mandalorian was unacceptable. They're allowed to do that. They're allowed to be stupid. This, to me, seems much more frightening. Two different things, right? You're alluding to Jimmy Kimmel, right, and what ABC did, putting his show in hiatus. Now, if we want to talk about an FCC commissioner or anybody in a position of power in the administration making comments like that, yeah, it's terrifying. But I don't think there's, you know, there may or may not be a direct connection between the two.

It seems like there are, but I think they're two different issues because it's just a question of what kind of pressures would impact Disney or ABC to make a change in a brand name host versus what would lead an FCC commissioner or president or anybody for that matter to make the type of comments that they're making. It sounds like you're less concerned about what happened with Jimmy Kimmel

than, I would say, some other people, perhaps Scott and I are about this. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, again, two different topics. Does it terrify me when the head of the FCC makes the comments he does? Yes, right? Does it surprise me that a network would, virtue signal one way or the other, depending on who they think has the leverage or not? No. Yeah, there's some other interesting things that we're seeing going on in media right now,

and that is the TikTok deal. It appears that Trump is really quarterbacking. It will likely go into the hands of Oracle and perhaps the Ellison family. And more recently, he's been talking about how the Murdoch family could get involved in this deal. I also wanted to just get your reactions to what's happening with TikTok, putting that algorithm in the hands of these families? Well, there's two parts to it. One, it's scary because there was no open auction. There was, you know, there was only a discussion about, you know, someone should be interested in buying TikTok and let's see what happens. But then the second part is when you bring in new cooks, the soup might just get destroyed, you know, and so there's no, you can't make an assumption

that its success will continue. Because if they do take over the algorithm, that's part of it. But remember, when we were looking at TikTok closing, they came out with a new product called Red, and they came out with other products that were out there. And, you know, a material number of people just switched. What would be insane to see is if TikTok came out with their own Red again and competed in the United States with the U.S. version of TikTok.

But I guess my point is there's no assurances that this new version of TikTok with Larry Ellison, his son David, the Murdochs, whoever it may be, are, you know, that they will be successful. I mean, kids are very persnickety. And those algorithms, if they take control, I mean, what is it about the TikTok algorithm that differentiated it from the meta algorithms for Facebook? You know, they both have their own goals, and we don't yet know how those goals were influenced the uptake when, if we have new TikTok management, you know, or how they'll even influence what meta and others will do, you know, meta and it doing with Instagram and Facebook. So there's a lot of interconnected pieces there. Are you concerned it all about, I mean, you mentioned there that it wasn't really an open

auction. Are you concerned about the extent to which the president is really setting up these deals? Is this something that we've seen before? Is there precedent for this? Or is this new? The idea that the president would figure out a way to get the seller to sell and then choose the buyers? Well, it's not new under Trump, for sure, right? We've seen it with MP, we've seen it with Intel, we've seen it in his efforts with others. You know, he's a dealmaker. He wants to be the figurehead for every and any deal. Now, what are the consequences of that happening? That's to be determined because interjecting himself doesn't mean it's going to work. You know, we saw, then we saw Intel when they took the 10%, then you saw Nvidia take another 5%. You know, it doesn't change

Intel's business. Intel still has the same challenges. The fact that he's involved, do I like it? No. Do I think it's smart? No. Do I think it optimizes the opportunities for the companies involved? No. But at the same time, do, am I surprised? No. Just speaking more broadly about the media ecosystem, you know, it feels like it's concentrating. It feels like obviously certain channels and platforms are losing relevance, some are gaining relevance. Do you have any general thoughts about the media ecosystem and if and where, if you were going to invest in media, where you would invest, where you would go long and where you would go short, so to speak? There's no chance I'd invest in the media ecosystem at all, anywhere.

Yeah, just stay away from it. Yeah, it's brutal. Because it's hits driven. You know, creating a hit is hard no matter what the platform is. And going viral is hard, no matter what the platform is. If you look at what Mr. Beast does, I think he's figured out the best. He spends a lot of time reverse engineering the algorithms because that's what it all comes down to. What makes the media ecosystem so difficult is we all spend so much time on social media, and we all have our own unique feed. Ed's feed on whichever platform is different than Scots, different than Marks, and so that customization that really allows people to really go down all kinds of rabbit holes is

unique. You can't do that on traditional television, whether it's broadcast or cable. You can't do that necessarily with YouTube, even though they do use algorithms. and they feed you a lot of stuff with shorts and they're truly the largest distributor, but there's just so much, right? You can't get to all. Whereas short-form content,

they can make you think anything they want you to think. And that is the underlying challenge that this country has, that whoever controls the algorithm controls your thoughts. Well, do you think along those lines, I promised myself during this entire segment, I was not going to ask you if you're running for president. So I'll do something different. I'll say, let's cosplay president.

If it was a president Cuban, and to your point, the algorithms decide what we see. And sometimes those algorithms don't have most of the time, all of the time, those algorithms don't have our best interests at heart. They have shareholders' best interests at heart. And sometimes incendiary rage-filled content gets. elevated beyond its organic reach. So as a president Cuban, what would be your approach, if any, to regulating big tech and algorithmically elevated content? So one, I'd say you have to be 16 or more to use social media. If you go on X, you can be 13 years old and go on X, and there's

tons of porn. There's no shortage of porn at all. And it's just amazing to me that, you know, people outside the Republican Party don't bring that up. a cause of action because you can't be so strict on, I want to protect schools, I want to protect kids, et cetera, and not recognize that this is, you know, the worse than the playboys I grew up with underneath the bed, underneath my dad's bed that I used to grab, right? It just goes to no end. So that's part one. Part two is, and I actually said this to TikTok a couple years ago when they brought me in

to just have a discussion, I think if you are going to let kids under 18 on, you have have an HTML file that shows a link to all of the videos that they've watched so that parents can get a feel for what's going on with their children. I mean, literally as a parent, my son, who's just turned 16, gets so mad at me because I'll look at what he's watching on Instagram and TikTok and whatever it may be because it tells me who he is. That algorithm knows more about him than I do. And so that would be part two having a way to communicate with parents. But beyond that, I wouldn't do anything because that would make me a hypocrite, you know, saying, you know, when Trump or the FCC chairman tries to insert themselves into business, that that would be the way to work. But I would

also encourage businesses at that point in time to flood the zone, right? Whatever the message, let's just say as a president, I was trying to get a particular message, unity among the American people. I want people to come together. I would use AI to create nonstop billions of 30-second videos that communicate that message to get to the point where people are so sick and tired of seeing it all. They stop using those platforms. So just along those lines, not intervening, I mean, I like the idea of capitalism, just being competition that's refereed. But are you comfortable with the concept of Larry Ellison having a lot of influence over CBS, TikTok, potentially Warner Brothers, CNN? Do you think there's a place for intervention around antitrust

and ensuring these media ecosystems don't get too concentrated? No. And just like when George Shore bought all the Odyssey stations and there were 200 of them and there was a big or, you know, big to do about how he's going to change them over, you know, the American people will speak with their their attention. And I don't think somebody putting in cash to effectively dying industries is something the government should get involved with. You know, most of those are end-of-life type situations. And there's still a lot of uncertainty. And I think, you know, with AI, we still haven't seen the next generation of media developed yet. Do you think Hollywood is dead? You talked about Mr. Beast there. And I totally agree. He's absolutely nailed it. He's now getting more viewing

time than the top series on Netflix. Is this the end of Hollywood? No, because AI, again, I keep on going back to it, AI makes creative people more creative and more efficient. So whereas before, you know, with Shark Tank, we would shoot in June and nothing would appear to go on TV until September at the earliest. And it just took time for the editors, the storytellers to put together stories. With AI, you can iterate so quickly so that somebody who's very skilled in storytelling and graphics, it doesn't replace them. It amplifies their skill sets so you can do more quicker. And so I think you'll see more great content created by great content creators and more junk,

a lot more junk, but the great content creators like they always have will stand out. And those will, you know, I'm not saying movies will come back. They won't because people aren't leaving the house. but long-form content will, I think, be better because AI allows people to, you know, turn it around more quickly and less expensively. We'll be right back after the break. If you're enjoying the show so far, be sure to give property markets a follow wherever you get your podcasts. to a spot track side. So being a fan

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visit square.ca to get started we're back with ProfiMarkets just on AI I mean this is the massive investing trend of the year of the past two years what are you thinking about when it comes to your investment strategy, how are you incorporating AI into your investment strategy? What do you think the future of AI is really going to look

like? Well, there's two types of companies, those who are great at AI and those who used to be in business, you know, and so you've got to incorporate into everything you do. Like with cost plus drugs, we have a manufacturing plant in Dallas, Texas. That's cheaper than what they can manufacture in India and China because it's all robotically and AI-driven. It doesn't take many people, but more importantly, we can turn from one drug to the next in ours. And so the same type of concept applies to all businesses. Now, what's interesting, I know, Scott, you've talked a lot about this in terms of jobs

and kids coming out of school. I think the big adjustment is that, like my daughter goes to Vanderbilt and she's getting ready to graduate, and they all want to go work for a big company. And I keep on telling her that, no, what's changing is big companies have the money and resources to train and implement AI and become more and more efficient. Small to medium-sized companies don't. They need AI natives, not necessarily just to be prompters. That's not going to get you there. But to understand how agetic AI works, to understand how to integrate, to understand how to look at processes from the consumer's perspective and re-event how you do things.

And then the great unknown beyond that, which will open up more doors for kids coming out over the next few years is robotics. Because right now, everything we know about AI is pretty much, it's multimodal where you have pictures and text, but it doesn't really incorporate video at all. It's not training on video to understand what's happening in the world. You have to tell it very discreetly, if somebody gets hit by this, it rolls, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas with robotics, they've got to capture video. I think this is where Elon is smart and ahead of the curve, and where robotics companies might supersede what we're seeing with the big AI companies. But think of it this way.

Put aside humanoid robots, I don't think that's the future. But being able to tell a robot, clean the house, without giving discrete instructions, is what's going to happen, right? It's going to know, you know, what socks go together. It's going to know how long to wash. It's going to know to look under the bed for dust for the kids. It's going to have to understand these things inherently because it's been trained on those things. Being trained on video and understanding the rules of physics without having to be told and having some common sense and context because you're seeing it all, reduces latency,

a lot makes it smarter, and imagine that, you know, that approach relative to a chat GPT, which are you going to use, right? It's great to get text-based information back and pictures-based, right, and allow it to create fun videos and all that. But in terms of helping your business or changing your life, I mean, I think we'll take it to the point where homes will be redesigned, you know, to become more efficient, because now it's designed for people to do all the tasks. But if your washing machine is designed to be run by, you know, a robot that looks more like a spider or whatever they come up with because

it's been optimized to fit, the game has changed and we can talk differently about building homes and connecting homes and all kinds of stuff. Now, parallel to that, we've got the ultimate war between all the AI companies. You've got meta, you've got Google, you've got got chat GPT, you've got XAI with GROC, you've got perplexity, you've got clod and anthropic. All of them want to be the winner. Not all of them will be the primary destination when people download their first AI app. And so how deep will the ability to be financially successful and have that network effect, will it go? Will it just be one? Will it be two, three, four, five, we don't know. But as we start to find out, you know, that could be the delineator in the

stock market with the Mag 7, right? You know, will they acquire each other? Will they go down swinging? You know, will they be the next IBMs from the 60s to the, you know, the 2010s? It's not preordained the way we see it today. That's the way I believe. And you just look at these companies spending tens of billions of dollars a year, borrowing money beyond their cash flow because they believe it's a zero-sum game. Kissing the ass of the administration because they have to. It's their fiduciary responsibility. So that's generally how I see everything. I think we're still, it reminds me of the early days of streaming. When we first started streaming, you had to download a TCP IP client. You had to have an ISP subscription. You had to get a piece of software.

And then it all changed, and people don't even think twice about streaming. It's just there. We'll get into it, and it becomes comprehensive. It went from audio to video to 3D to AR, whatever. We'll see that type of generational change with AI as well. Yeah, I mean, you bring up the comparison to streaming. I think a lot of people are thinking of the comparison, really just to the dot-com boom at large. and a lot of the dynamics you described there do feel at least similar.

The idea that we all know that something's going to happen. You've got Zuckerberg saying, you know, we might piss away hundreds of billions of dollars, but ultimately superindeligence, it's too big of a fish to just not really go for it. So we're going to go for it anyway. So, yeah, but it also portends if we saw what happened when the dot-com bubble imploded, and a lot of people did get massively burned. Yeah, we don't know who AOL is. We don't know who Yahoo is, you know, to create analogies.

But we know a couple of these big AI companies are either or. Yes. And so how do you as an investor deal with that? I mean, we're seeing these massive valuations, open AI, anthropic, everyone's trying to get in on these companies. And yet there's this little thing in the back of everyone's mind, which is maybe it's only going to be one or two winners in this whole game. and yet we're still willing to invest tens, in some cases,

hundreds of billions of dollars into these companies. I still think you have to, right? You don't know who the winner's going to be. Chat GPT is in the lead, but Gemini's catching up with nanobanano. I mean, it just came out of left field, right? And now all of a sudden it's just changed the dynamics of users using AI products.

And so I still think you've got to go all in. I don't think there's any issue there. And part of the issue is, that there's just fewer places to put your money. You know, particularly in the public markets. When we took Broadcast.com public in 1998, there were 8,500 public company, plus all the pink sheets and everything else.

Now there's, you know, 5,000 maybe, you know, and it's easier to deal with private equity than it is to go public. But to me, that's unfortunate because it doesn't create the liquidity for your employees or early investors. I mean, you can with early investors, but it doesn't, you know,

I always looked at going public, as a way to reward our employees. And I think going back to if I was the president again, I would create tax incentives for companies that rewarded all of their employees with a peri-passeau-type ratio of stock rewards, whether it's warrants, restrict the stock, you know, absolute stock, whatever it may be, to income. So if the CEO gets $100,000 worth of stock and makes a million dollars,

that's 10%. the person working the front desk at the office who makes $40,000 gets $10,000, $4,000. Because I think that's a path to income equality because you have to increase people's asset base in order for them to have assets that appreciate and keep up. Because if you don't have assets that appreciate, you can't ever keep up. So it's kind of jumping around again, but I think AI is still where you invest. I think part of the reason is there's so much money coming in and there's no place. place else to put it, you know, you don't see the midcaps, you don't see the Russell, you don't

see them breaking out at the same, because between tariffs and the investment in AI, but at some point, we'll figure out who the America Online is, we'll figure out who the Yahoo is, and then bam, it all changes. I just don't know when that point is. I'm really glad you bring out this idea the fact that we are seeing so many fewer public companies today than we were 20, 30 years ago. This has been a big theme on our show, this idea that AI is happening, and yet all of the action is happening in the private markets. The only place you can really invest, as you say, is you've got Nvidia, you can invest in Google, and we believe that Google's pretty undervalued right now, Oracle, but aside from a handful of big tech companies, which everyone already

knew about, all of the consumer AI investments are still sort of siphoned off from the public. It's been a big concern of ours. I'm wondering if it's a concern of yours, idea that regular people can't get in on this stuff. I've been saying it for two decades that there aren't enough public companies, whatever the latest technology is, people, you know, employees and investors should be able to participate. I used to jump all over Gary Gensler because he made it so hard to go public. It should be easy to go public. Now, there should be strict reporting and auditing standards to make sure the numbers are real. But beyond that, it needs to be easier than it is now and look you give president trump credit to do a six you know a six month instead of

three month reporting cycle that's fine it doesn't change the economics of the business but it makes it a little bit easier because you know that week or two before you report earnings is always just a stressful time when you have to write and rewrite the same nonsense over and over again let me ask you this though because you said and i think i agree with you but i just want the strong man here the steel man the i went and saw the fantastic four 3,400 people working on the film and i think sooner rather than later it's going to take 300 and i don't think we need 10 superhero films i don't think people are begging for more content right now and when you reference kimmel the problem with kimmel the bigger issue other than uh censorship is that it's 160 people to produce that show

It's just too damn expensive. It's not that he's not talented. It's not that he doesn't have an audience. It's just the juice isn't worth the squeeze. It's too goddamn expensive. And it strikes me that there's just certain industries that are going to see a fairly severe reduction in employment in the short and the medium term.

Oh, for sure. That always creative destruction. I mean, they don't make records in Terre Haute, Indiana, anymore. RCA is gone, right? Or there may be some semblance of it left. So there will be destruction at various points. But I think as an entrepreneur, oh my God, there's going to be people creating businesses and having access to, you know, a large language model, whatever, as long as you

understand when it starts hallucinating, when you start getting eight, ten, you know, layers deep, right, you have every business professor in the history of business professors at your disposal to put together your business plan, to review, to use Gemini research. That, like, when I started my companies when I was 16 and 18, and I had to go sit in the library and read books to try to figure out all this stuff. You know, now it's like that. And just it'll democratize business education. It'll democratize education in general.

It's like when Andrew Carnegie built libraries around the country to try to democratize education, This is that to the millionth level. There's nothing a kid can't learn right now. And when you tell me that there's a tool that allows any child to learn anything they want within the constraints of self-harm and all that kind of stuff, right? But allowing a child to learn anything they want, nothing makes me more excited. Because if you believe that, you know, the curiosity of a child can lead to, you know, something we haven't even imagined you.

Like when I go talk to kids at school, one of the things I always do inevitably, you know, when I say kids, I mean anywhere from 10 to 18, I point at the screen on the wall. I said, one day that didn't exist and someone came up with the idea. That chair you're sitting on. One day a chair looking like that didn't exist and someone came up with the idea. Everything you're wearing, everything you've seen that's not natural, someone came up with that idea. Now, with AI and the access to everybody, literally, then that kid with that idea can get direction in exactly what to do. One thing that's been a concern for young people, though, is, I mean, this creative destruction, which is absolutely true. And what we always see with technology is it comes in, it tears up a bunch of jobs, and then some new jobs show up. But I think one of the big questions is, what do you do in the interim? and what we have found, and we've been discussing this study that came out recently, which found that there's been a reduction in job openings that are related to AI of 13% specifically for young people.

So AI is kind of taking your job, but more specifically it's taking young people's jobs. And I think one of the big questions that we've been trying to get to the bottom to is, as a young person, you mentioned your daughter there at Vanderbilt, as a young person, how do you not get replaced by AI? If AI is so capable at all of these things, what are the kinds of skills that you double down on? Well, in order for AI to replace you, somebody has to know how to implement AI in order to replace you, right? And that happens in big businesses, like I alluded to earlier. But there are only 20,000 businesses in this country with more than 500 employees.

That's it. And there are millions and millions of businesses that create 62 percent. of new jobs every year. The challenge is you've got to just look in different places because the big company already is going to have somebody because they're under the pressure to get all their numbers down to do it. The little, small to medium size companies are under far more pressure to compete with the bigger companies. And we saw that to a certain extent, you know, with HTML and the internet in the mid and late 90s and kids were considered geniuses if they could do web pages, but I'm not talking about prompting, right? Small companies don't have the resources

or the knowledge or the ability to just say, okay, this process, we're going to just turn it into an agent. At cost plus drugs, we have one person that's young in her 20s. All she does is look at processes that are manual right now, just go through the list and try to automate them. track them and manage them. That is the job that every small to medium-sized company needs, but may not know that they need it because the CEO may not be literate enough. And a kid coming in there saying, I just spent the last two years living and breathing and cheating with chat GPT and perplexity to get through my classes. And I did an agent that went out, as long as you can do agents or learn agents, and if you have a tech, you know, a programming

background at all, you're good. You're going to be able to get a job. It's just, you know, the tipping point really is when those small companies realize they're falling behind because they're not able to implement AI to get the cost savings that their bigger competitors are. Then they'll have no choice but to hire those kids. If I were to sort of summarize your approach to this, I mean, it's really, you've got to lean into AI. You've got to use as many agents that are at your disposal and you've got to learn how to use it. But, if I were to sort of summarize your philosophy, it seems as though one of your biggest priorities in business, and I think this has been true across your career, is you need to be

curious and willing to adopt technology. It sounds like that is the big, that is the real alpha that you see in your career. Whenever a technology comes along, you cannot write it off, you cannot think that it's too confusing, you have to be willing to go through the hard work of understanding how do I actually use this thing and how do I figure out a way to be more productive? It's actually a little bit backwards. You look at the industry and you look at the processes and you look at the interrelations

and you say what's right, what's optimal, and what's a mess. Like in healthcare, how can we start costplusdrugs.com and literally change the pharmacy industry so that the $100 billion plus competitors are telling their customers, they're going to emulate what we do and they haven't been able to do it

because of their cost structure, because I went in there and I looked at the processes and realized just how opaque they are and was able to simplify it to something as simple as all we have to do is be transparent because nobody trusts anything. If you look at what's happening now with health care on the on the health care side, right, it is so back-ass halfwards. I'll give you a simple example. You've got, and we'll go back to politics if Mark Cuban was president, right? You've got the Democrats talking about the continuing resolution to keep the government open, and they're saying what are the things that we want is to have the premium subsidies for the ACA continued. Now, I'll take a little step to the side

here. What type of company is the most hated company in all of America? Health insurance? Yep. Now, when you create those, when you create, when you have those premium subsidies that you're trying to keep alive, right? Who do 100% of those premium subsidies? Tens of billions of dollars or more for the 12.5 million people receiving subsidies on the ACA. Who were those taxpayer checks written directly to? Health insurance. Yes. Now, why do health insurance companies love it?

And everybody hates them? Because you have premiums, but you can't get access and benefit of your insurance until you've paid your deductible and you're out of pocket. And the deductibles are going up. And so, you know, and we can take a little side. trip, again, you want to talk about the economy, right? Everybody's paying more and more premiums, but even worse. And what everybody's missing is the deductibles and out of pockets are going up even faster. And if you can't afford to pay your deductible, you can't afford to get

health care. So President Cuban would say, look, we already have, we guarantee mortgages. we in some states they'll even put the down payment down for you for $25,000 worth we'll guarantee student loans we'll guarantee SBA loans maybe not 100% but a big chunk of them but if you're about to die

right you can go into an operating you can go into an ER to try to get stabilized but anything else if you can't afford your deductible your shit out of luck why don't we guarantee

the deductibles and instead of sending that premium those premium subsidies to the insurance companies, use them to, not subsidize, but guarantee the amount of money that it would take to go and get the care you need so that your health insurance kicks in. Because the other thing that happens is part of this, think of it you're a hospital, and God forbid somebody you know gets hurt, and they go to the hospital and they look up your insurance from your insurance card, and you have an ACA silver plan, you have a family

of five, and your deductible is $5,000, and you don't have $400, 40% of people in this country. Now, Chunker on Medicaid, but 40% of these people don't have $400, right? So there's a really good probability that people going in to need care can't afford their deductible. So you know what the hospitals do? The hospitals work with companies or they do it themselves. They loan money to these people just so they can get access to the insurance companies' premiums. which in turn turns those providers, the hospitals, etc., into subprime lenders. And they collect maybe 50%, and they're the ones that are creating all the bills

that everybody's talking about, the health care bills that cause bankruptcy or did cause bankruptcy, right? Not because they want to, not because, but they were put in this position because of the way we allow health insurance to work. And those people, if you can't afford your deductible, do you think you're going to be willing to take a chance on a house or moving, right, or changing jobs? Hell no. And so all these things, we have to start understanding the real pain points that every single American that's not wealthy has. And that starts with your health care deductible because there is nothing more important

to any individual or their family than if something horrific happens, or even little things. You know, if it costs, if your deductible is higher than what you have access in credit and cash and you can't make up the gap to be able to use your insurance, you already know what we call people like that. Eft. Stay with us. offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures. And see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute. This September, lease a 2026 XC90 plug-in hybrid from $599 bi-weekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Condition supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com.

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A cabana? That's a no. But a banana? That's a yes. A nice tan. Sorry. Nope. But a box fan? Happily yes. A day of sunshine? No. A box of fine wines? Yes. Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol and select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details. So, Mark, where you think a lot about the struggles of young men face. You have two daughters and a son. And the other thing that I thought you could offer a unique perspective on is that we see, as the owner of the Mavericks, you get to know very personally and intimately these young men. And we, I think just by their physical stature and just their excellence, we forget that a lot

of these men are really more boys. They're so young. And one, I'd just be curious to get your thoughts on the struggles of young men facing America and what's in potential solutions and approaches to it and how your views as a father, having both daughters and sons and being around so many young men has informed your view on this. First, on the players, it's actually a lot easier than it used to be 10 years ago because of NIL. Back in the day, they'd never opened up a, you know, a credit card account or a checking account. What's NIL, Mark? That's the money that kids in college can be paid for playing sports. Oh, I see. Thank you. So now they understand how economics work, right? And they have agents, and that's been great for athletes. For my 16-year-old son, his friends,

it's terrifying, you know, because it's hard for 16-year-olds and parents to connect, male or female, for that matter, boys or girls, because when I want to talk to him about Andrew Tate, he's like, shut up, dad, you know, but, you know, so I'll just go on a little soliloquy and say, you're going to listen to this, and here's what's important to me, and here's what's not. And if you have questions, but it is terrifying. It really, really is because the influence is there and there's no independence whatsoever. It's either far left or far right. And I think there's a lot more far right winning right now than we'd like to see. Like Nick Fuentes, you know, he has a following that goes younger and younger. And that's terrifying. Any thoughts or ideas regarding

potential solutions? Yeah, it goes back to what I said. This is all algorithmically driven. You know, and so if you didn't allow kids, you know, or maybe you just start with not allowing them to have their phones at school as a starting point, which I think is a big plus, but you can't let kids under 18 or under 16 at least get on social media. You just cannot unless you make sure that the algorithms are fully published and available all day, every day for every change, and or, there's a link for parents to see everything that they've watched so you know what to have a conversation about because as I said before those algorithms know our kids better than we do and the easiest way

for me to know what my son in particular is into is by watching him scroll through his phones you know as long as it's basketball basketball fantasy fantasy football fantasy football hot girl basketball basketball I'm okay but when I you know every now and then I'll see you know

not an Andrew Tate but somebody you know that's selling, you know, the macho approach, right? And that scares me. You know, you've built so many different businesses. You've had successes in just so many different areas. I mean, you've built businesses, internet businesses. You've had success in entertainment. You've been a TV personality.

You've owned an NBA team that went on to win a championship. Now you're in the healthcare business. I feel like, you know, a lot of the big thing that we're trying to do on this show is we're talking about markets, but we're also just trying to figure out how do we get rich and how do we become successful and what is that all about? I would be interested to know

just given the diversity of success that you've had, what really drives you? Like, you're building this healthcare company right now. What is driving Mark Cuban? And what are you trying to do? What kind of legacy you're trying to leave? To me, business is the ultimate sport.

Period. End of story. And I may not be able to play basketball as well as I used to. But I want to compete still. And there's no better way to compete that in business because it's just a matter of my taking the time to learn what I need to learn. And Steve Jobs said at best, he said everything's a remix. And so I start with a base of technological information. So when AI comes along, you know, I read books about machine learning. Then I get into, you know, training models and all that kind of stuff. But I'm willing to put in the time. And what I tell kids, and they ask me, how do you get there, right?

You find something you love to do, and then you just commit to time to be great at it. And I'm not, you know, if you happen to be a special athlete and playing tennis, basketball, whatever, great, do what you do. But in business, most people don't take the time. And especially now with AI, you can ask AI any question on the planet. There's nothing you can't ask. And so I do it all the time.

Like I was giving a speech, I won't even, I won't blow my cover here, but right before the speech, they asked me to cover a topic that I was going to be asked about. I didn't know shit about it, right? So I just pulled out perplexly in chat, GPT, so I had two different answers to compare

and said, this is what I'm going to be asked to talk about. What are the ten top things that I should mention? And they all made perfect sense to me, so I went in and they thought I was smart, you know? That's what I should do.

Every kid, the hardest part about AI is not being embarrassed about asking their questions. you normally would only ask a human, you know, that's the hardest part about AI. And so as it pertains, again, there's no better time. I've said this forever, but there's no better time to be an entrepreneur than now. I mean, I remember buying books how to build a business plan or your business plan for this, I opened up a bar in college, your business plan for your bar and it has all the fill in the blank stuff, right?

Now there's no industry that I can't ask about, like there was a product. today. I had Gemini research, do deep research for me, and it took them eight minutes, and I knew everything that I would have learned if I would have gone and done all the searching online, you know, and I checked the sources and confirmed and all that. But anybody, if they're curious enough, and they're excited enough, and they want to learn, can dig in and learn. And if you have the capacity just to start building a base of knowledge, then for all businesses, right, you start with that base and then you may fail at a business, but you learn. Then you go to the next one and you learn and you go to the next one. And I say it all the time these kids. You only have to be right one time. It doesn't matter how many times you fail. You don't know about my powdered milk company. You don't know about my bar. You don't know about all these businesses that failed. But I just kept on compounding my knowledge and kept on always learning, always reading, and just always being curious, always being competitive. That's what it takes. You know, and how you define success may be, different than me, but however you define it, you can get there. That moment where you're asked

to speak on this topic, and you have two options there. Either you say, I'm actually not that knowledgeable about that topic, but I'm happy to talk about these topics here. I can do that. Or you say, you know what? Fuck it. I'm just going to figure out what this is, and I'm going to talk about it anyway, and I'm going to make sure that I say something that I really believe and that I think is correct. That is, those are two choices. I'm wondering, one of them has a sense of caution, the other has a sense of risk, danger, and bravery.

Has that always existed in you, this desire to go above and beyond to push yourself, no matter what the situation is? Or is this something that you've trained over the years? I mean, it's all imposter syndrome, right? And I just don't want to get busted. You know? and I'm not afraid to say I don't know.

You know, even like that speech I alluded to, they really zigged off into other areas I knew, so this is just a starting point. But I don't have a problem. You know, and I'll bring, going back to AI, the one thing that humans do, that AI can't do, they say I don't know. You know, and AI model,

the programmers behind it will set thresholds above which they think the probability that they're right and they'll give the answer. But they have no context at all. Humans, inherently, we understand what's going on around us. And if there's something we don't know, we have the capability, we might not do it, right? And maybe that gets you elected president, but most of us are able to say, I don't know. And that's always going to make us different than technology.

That's the difference, right? Right there. You mentioned this idea of achieving success and everyone has a different version of success and yours might be different from others. What is your version of success? What does success mean to you at this point? You've kind of conquered the money game.

Everyone wants you to run for some form of elected office. People keep on doing this and you keep on saying, no, I'm not going to do it. But that's an area of life that you could go on to conquer. What does success look like for you at this point? Just waking up every day, excited. I was happy when I was broke. When I was sleeping on the floor with five roommates

in a three-bedroom apartment, I was enjoying my life. It was stressful in a lot of different ways, you know, getting the credit cards cut up, the phone ringing all the time and his bill collectors, etc., etc. But I knew I was going to find a way, maybe not financially,

but I was going to find a way to take care of myself and enjoy myself. And it's the same way now, But that's one of the reasons I sold the Mavs. That's one of the reasons I got off a Shark Tank because that joy for me comes from my kids and comes from my family. And Shark Tank was always in June and September, which is my wife's birthday. And effectively, all but one of my kids is in August and the other two are in September. And my anniversary is in September.

And I was always missing it, you know, and then the season started. And so I was gone. I'm a lot. And I was like, no, you know, of all the things I want to, um, say on my deathbed, being president, being rich, being called dad, yeah. Mark Cuban is a serial entrepreneur and investor. He's founded several companies, including microsolutions, broadcast.com, and most recently, cost plus drugs, a company focused on reforming U.S. drug pricing.

He bought the NBA's Dallas Mavericks in 2000, led them to a championship in 2011. Sold majority control in 2023. His ventures and media include HDNet, Magnolia Pictures, 29-29. and Shark Tank, he lives in Dallas with his wife and three children. Mark, this was excellent. So good to have you on the show, and we really appreciate your time. Thanks, Mark. Yeah, thanks, Ed. Thanks, Scott. It was always a lot fun. Thank you, guys. Scott, your thoughts.

Look, I like Mark. He's very likable. I don't know many people who don't like him. I like the fact that he tries to be centrist. I like the fact that he's very much a capitalist, that he tries to give both sides sort of equal airtime. I think it's refreshing to have someone who really is sort of, I'd call him sort of center-right. I like what he's doing with Cost Plus. He's always entertaining.

I think he's definitely personally, I think he's leaving the door open to run for presidency because I'm just not entirely sure why he would come on shows like this. And less, I mean, there's just not a lot of people looking to buy, you know, zolopram on cost plus who listen to the show. I never know. You never know. I do think he's probably thinking that he wants to leave the door open around president. But in general, I think he's a good role model for young men.

I think he's smart, thoughtful. I think he'd actually be a really interesting voice. I'm not sure I want him to be president, but I'd like him to run. I think he'd add a lot of really interesting dialogue and also always make sure that the race was keeping their eye on capitalism, if you will. Your thoughts, that? I was very interested to hear his thoughts on those last few questions on, especially around imposter syndrome, this idea that, you know, he really has a love of the game, the game's being business. He's never down to not be playing in the game, whether that's in sports or in media or in entertainment

or in technology or in healthcare. I mean, he just has this absolute love of business, this love of competing. And I feel like that's a big part of why he's been so successful is that he basically doesn't seem to say no. And I just wanted to get your reactions to that philosophy. What do you make of that? My sense of Mark, and I don't know him well, but I know him a little bit, is that he's good at life.

He's just really, he's taken, he also got really fucking lucky. I mean, broadcast.com got bought for $6 billion. Do you use broadcast.com? I don't. It was internet radio, I think, and he sold it for $6 billion. So back in the kind of go-go days of $98 or 99. But then again, he kept trying until he got lucky. So I don't begrudge his billions.

Well, let me ask you this then. Do you have the same approach? I mean, when he was describing his approach, I feel like you have a similar philosophy, which is you're always going to be in the game. You're going to be competing, whether that's in e-commerce or podcasting or investing. I feel like that's a big part of your philosophy too, now?

This for me is a solid day, because when I was your age, I was working just so hard and doing so many things I didn't want to do to try and establish an economic base. and working harder than I wanted and playing golf with people I didn't want to play golf with and managing crazy young people

I didn't want to manage and now that I've gotten some economic security I can do exactly what I want and exactly what I want and I think it's similar to markets to do fun stuff or you're in the game

where you're trying to build shit trying to make money and if you don't like it you can leave and if he was still trying to make money and awareness you wouldn't have left Shark Tank But now, the biggest luxury in the world is no. And one of my role models, Barry Rosenstein, he said there are three buckets in life. There's things you have to do.

There's things you want to do, and there's things you should do. If you're biggest investors in town, you have to do it. There's things you want to do. Yeah, you want to take your son to see, you know, Arsenal play wolves or whatever. And then there's things you should do. And that is you think, well, Scott's got this event. I don't really want to go. but I should go because Scott's my boss.

Or my friend's daughter, my friend's sister is having her bat mitzvah, last fucking thing I want to do, but I should do it. There's a networking event. I'm exhausted, but I should go in case I meet good people. The key to getting to a point of economic security in a certain level of self-actualization is you can eliminate the should bucket. And I have a, that's the luxury. I get the sense Mark is doing a few things he has to do.

do, but mostly doing things he wants to do. But you want to stay in the game. You want to stay mentally active. It's fun to make money. You want to be relevant. A lot of it's ego-driven. I think quite frankly what I probably share with Mark, I think we both have pretty healthy egos. And you want to be relevant and in the game and get the affirmation of others. But also as you get older, if you have a certain amount of economic security, you do get some perspective and you're like, you start recognizing the finite nature of life. And that is you're like, Okay, I got to start spending more time with people that I care about and they care about me, especially your kids, because your kids are leaving. So you do change, you absolutely do change your perspective and start, you know, there's nothing like impending death that creates perspective.

And it's getting increasingly impending when you're 60 and 67, which I am and which Mark Cuban is. So it just changes your view on things because when you're your age, you can't imagine it. ending. So you don't think that way. And that's healthy because you should be taking risks and doing things. But in terms of imposter syndrome, what I would suggest, Ed, is that when you feel imposter syndrome, it's common sense. You are in over your head. You are out over your skis. Little humor. Little humor. Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our research team is Dan Shillan, Isabella Kinsel, Kristen O'Donohue, and Mia Silverio. Drew Burrows is our

technical director and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow and join us for a fresh take on markets on Monday. You have me in kind reunion as the waters.