Masters in Business: Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban (Audio)

Shark Tank, he's one of the sharks. Or if you're at all a fan of internet history, you will know that in he sold broadcast dot Com to Yahoo for five point seven billion dollars with a B and then immediately or as soon as he was allowed to collard his share of that in order to protect himself from what he saw as a popping bubble. And that turned out to be a very savvy move. When the market collapse,

it didn't hurt him at all. He took his proceeds at the time, bought a Gulf Stream, bought the Dallas Mavericks, made a bunch of other investments, and proceeded to uh live large. And the conversation we had with him was really absolutely a delight. I'll let you in on a little secret. I wanted to get his book to have him sign it for me. Every one of my guests I bring books for them to sign, and I couldn't

get his book delivered in time. It only comes direct from a publisher and the kindle wasn't gonna do me any good. So I was scratching my head and trying to figure out what can I do to have him sign. And I was a huge entourage fan the HBO show Um that Mark Wahlberg produced and he had a starring role in it as one of the people behind the behind the alcohol Avianne. It's Avian tequila, and UM, my office is around the corner from a liquor store. I

ran over there. They had a bottle of avian and so when we were done with the interview, I said, by the way, I have something for you to sign. I pulled it out and I wish we had the tape running because he just started to crack up. Hey, no one's ever asked me to sign avan before. This will be the only bottle I'll ever sign, and um, I don't know if that's true, but I have the bottle sitting in my credens in my office with his signature on it. He was absolutely charming and a delight

to speak with. He's you know, a rarity in modern times. There's no holds barred. He says exactly what he thinks about iron Rand, about gay marriage, about legalizing marijuana, about the sec Ask Mark Cuban a question and he tells you, honestly what he believes the truth to be very refreshing, not the sort of thing we see um amongst billionaires. It was really a fascinating conversation. So rather than have me continue to babble without further ado, here's my conversation

with Mark Cuban. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My guest this week is Mark Cuban. You should know who Mark is, and if you don't, let me give you a brief introduction to his extensive curriculum vitae um. He's probably best known these days as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, or if you're a fan of venture capital investing and television, he's on Shark Tank on ABC S, which has been on since two

thousand nine, a very successful show. Mark, Welcome to the show. That is literally the best introduction I've ever heard in my entire life. It's certainly the best one I've done in the past ten minutes, to say the least. So you basically left high school early a year early, went to University of Pittsburgh, and subsequently transferred to Indiana University. I want to go over some of the things you did as an entrepreneur as a kid, which is really, um,

quite astonishing. So you, at one point in time asked your father for some money because you wanted to buy a fancy pair of sneakers. And one of the guys playing polka with your dad, probably drunk out of his mind, told you to do what Well, my dad said, you know those shoes and your feet look like they're working pretty well. If you want new pair of sneakers, you need a job and you can go buy them. Um. And I'm like, Dad, I'm twelve years old. Am I going to get a job. And one of his buddies

popped up, it was their Thursday night poker game. It was just happened to be their turn at our house, said I got something for you. I got these garbage bags I need to sell. Why don't you go out there and sell these garbage bags, garbage bags like in a big roll, like actually was a box. It was a box, right, And they were just flat and um, they were a hundred for six bucks is what I sold him for. And they cost me three bucks. So I made three bucks a box. And I literally would

go door to door to door. Hi, does your family use garbage bags? And who could say? No? I mean, And that's where I learned to sell literally every objection. Of course you use garbage bags, and I bet you you pay more than um whatever it is a hundred, you know, six cents apiece. And so I went out from there. That's amazing. So you did that somehow in the middle of of your education, you became a disco ballroom instructor. Um, it wasn't ballroom. It was pure disco,

pure disco disco dancing was the disco dance instructor. But I only taught girls, and I only taught preferably well, not only, but preferably in sorority houses, preferably minimum of ten girls at a time. So this had nothing to do with making money Whatso I had everything to do with making money. But I had because I needed, because I was looking for the person I was going to spend the money on. But it was twenty five an hour, twenty five I would do that on what year, nineteen

seventy nine, So that was real money. I would do that job today at the phones will light up and get plenty of plenty of business. So you graduate Indiana and you say, I'm not gonna spend the rest of my life in Pittsburgh. I'm moving to Dallas. Unsun money and women, money and women. That's what's going on in Dallas. My buddies were down there and they're like, you gotta come check it out. We're having a great time. I moved down there. Um there were five guys living in

a three bedroom apartment. I was number six. UM. There were no beds left, no rooms left. So I got on the floor. Oh, not even on the not even on the floor. And you joined the company as a salesman, which, if Memory serves, was called Your Business Software. UM. It was one of the first PC software stores and UM. I went in there and I had seen I had had UM not a recruiter, but just one of these UM services that were out there back then. And he

sent me over there. And when the first thing they said, they said, look, we can't afford to pay for the service, or you will like to go around. And I'm like, I just need a job, a real job. And I hadn't worked in in technology at all. I really had done very little no technology that minimal, minimal, right, um, taking like one class in college and and really just tried to teach myself basic programming. Um. But he goes, Okay,

you've got I've got one question to ask you. Customer comes in and they have software problem and you don't know the answer. What do you do? Said, well, that's easy. I opened up the manual, I read it and I figure it out. He goes, You're hired. And that was it. And that was the start of my technology career. So you're there for a year or so, not even um, not even yeah, maybe nine months, and and shortly thereafter you get fired because you said i'll open the store later.

I was an open store later. So it was a retail store and Barbara Depew, who I'll never forget you, went on to work for me. I was working with me, and um, I was like, Barbe, I've got this deal. I've got to close. Would you come in open the store, sweep the floor right, clean, make sure it's open, ready to open. She's like sure, because I'm gonna I'm gonna make some money. My first big commission show go to the boss and told him what I'm doing. He goes, no,

you need to be here to open the store. Name was Michael Hugh Mickey. And so I used my first executive decision, and I fairly look when I bring in a check for fifteen thousand dollars fifteen commission for me, he's gonna be thrilled to death. Fired me on the spot, on the spot my check didn't give him the check, right, I went back and got the customer and started a company called micro Solus. That was your first confidence and which, by the way, I'm gonna tell people, was your first

big sale. You sold that to compu Serve a couple of years later for six million dollars. Wasn't just a couple of years, it was gosh, it was eight years seven eight years later. So now there's a gap in your CV between nine and I'm assuming that some of that six million dollars was spent in ways that we won't talk about. Um. Actually, I started and sold a couple of commies, including a hedge fund in there. Um,

but I parted like a rock star. I can imagine, Oh my god, twenty four you got a couple of million dollars in the bank, and I was making right because this is back when you know, the market so much more efficient now in terms of information, a number

of people throwing money at it UM. But I would, I mean, I literally would have some of the biggest names in hedge funds calling me every day, asking Art Sandberg, Lianes Lee, all these guys that own Maverick Capital, and you remember our UM would ask me questions about technology, and I was like, wait, I know more than you guys. I'm gonna start trading stocks. And so just based off of all the things I knew from um um your business software and um micro solutions, I started trading stocks

and did so well. I was making eight plus percent a year that we started a hedge fund, and then within less than a year ago bought Coming up, we continue our conversation with Mark Cuban discussing how he sold broadcast dot Com to Yahoo for almost six billion dollars. This week, be sure and check out our podcast extras. Especially this week, Mark Cuban goes off. In our podcast extras.

He discusses the SEC what it was like to be the target of one of their prosecutions, how satisfying it was to be vindicated, and why he thinks the SEC is an agency run amuck. That's on our podcast extras. You can find that at Bloomberg dot com and at Apple iTunes. I'm Barry Ridholts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. I'm Barry rid Hult. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest today

the famous and infamous Mark Cuban. Earlier we were discussing his some of his early accomplishments and business sales. But you started a company in the mid nineties called audio Net, ostensibly for the purpose I want to get this correct of broadcasting who's your basketball games? Who who's your basketball Games's your who's your daddy basketball games? For people who were interested in hearing it mostly for a lum another

folks who may not have access anybody right right. So basically, back then, Um, it was and the Internet was new to everybody, and the concept of multimedia or streaming over the Internet was unheard of, and so audio one demand just did not did not exist, not at all, not nothing. And so a friend of mine, UM had a friend who said he was trying to get a way to listen to send scores and information on beepers and pagers and stuff like that, and I'm like, look, that's the

wrong way to do. Let's start a company that that tries to figure out how to put audio online. And so nobody was doing it. So we had to go out there and figure out how to make the whole thing work. And so I literally to to get started.

I bought a Packard Bell computer putting in the second bedroom my house, bought an I S d N line, hooked it all up, went to the local radio station KLi F that did sports talk radio, and we told them that I don't know what this internet thing is going to turn into, but there's going to be multimedia on at some point and it could be like cable who knows, and this could be the way to go worldwide.

Would you let me take your radio feed? And so we bought an eight hour VCR and and a VCR that had supported eight hour VHS tapes connected to a board just like we have here, took the output in our c jack, put it into the VHS um the

VCR recorded it. Then we went back and figured out how to encode it, put it on a server that's in my second bedroom, and then we would put we put it on a site called audio net, and I would go on to every online forum, a O L compy server, whatever, and tell people, you got to check out this side audio net and tell me what you think. And it immediately blew up. People want nuts, and were you doing anything other than Indiana basketball? It wasn't even

Indiana basketball. From the local radios, from the local radio station called KLi F Dallas, and literally we would take an eight hour VHS tape and then put it into hours worth of broadcast radio, right, just like we're doing here, right, So we take the output of what like we have here, put it onto a VHS tape, take it, put it in a VCR at my house, put it into my packard bell PC, encode it there, and then stream it.

It was a horrible way to stream it back then, but when it was on demand, and so when anybody wanted to listen, they'd have to download the player software

and can listen. But people fell in love with it because if you were from Dallas or interested in Dallas sports, or Dallas anywhere anywhere, this is the only way to so there was no other real audio on the Internet never And so as much as people have made fun of Yahoo paying what a hundred times sample making funds, are idiots, right, because this was really way ahead of its time and enormous potential. Okay, so there's two elements here. One,

what were we doing? Right? There was so little that YouTube does today that we did that we didn't do pretty much. The only difference other than obviously quality because of broadband and higher speed um processes, except that those pipes didn't exist back that you were doing. You were way ahead of the It was even more than that, right, So, I mean we were doing indexing so that we would take the live feed and do audio to text so that you can then go to index dot broadcast dot

com and search for what did Rush Limbaugh say or whatever? Right, we were doing every We would have internet radio stations, on demand radio stations, so if you wanted all Elvis, if you wanted all in early Pandora and Spotify, all ahead of that, we had CDs and songs on demand. We actually helped the group Matchbox twenty I'll break that group, you know, by putting it out there and getting them out there, for the very first time. UM. Then we did the same thing with video. As video started to

happen and we evolved from audio net to broadcast dot com. Um, we went and did a deal and actually bought back then what would turn into be ten percent of lions Gate Studios, and so we would take their shows and we would stream them, so all this video we would put out there. UM. And then we bought a company called simple Net which allowed us to do user generated content uploads. So we were doing uploads of user generated

content in two thousand, long before YouTube. So from whatever and one last thing, right, well, um, our revenues we did at least I remember the exact number, but I think our last quarter was twenty three million we did in revenue, and we were cash flow break even. So we did close to million dollars for our our full year as a public company, or almost four years of public company. And that's in ar So, how did dio net become broadcast dot com? How did that domain we

bought the domain for eight thousand dollars get out? That's a lot of money, that eight thousand dollars. Because you know that you know that someone in Yahoo was saying should we should we buy these guys. What do you think is this audio and video strap? Well, they do have the domain broadcast all right, Okay, so just kidding the side I probably had bought along the way trying to figure out ways to um connect audio and video

to different domains stand on them. So things from like police Scanner dot com to final four dot net I owned, to Sandwich dot com to baseball dot com to football dot com owned. All you still have any of these domains. Yahoo's had him and sold him was part of the transaction. Yeah, but that's worth five point seven billion. Hard. Look, if you want to do you think I'm giving you a hard No, No, you're no, No, you're completely you're completely

misunderstanding what I'm saying. Let's put this. Any time you have the opportunity to sell any sort five points a billion dollars, you do it. You don't, you don't think twice? That's given. Right, Let's look at the valuation. Right. First of all, we got it in stock, right, which you immediately spent twenty million dollars to wrap all. I had to wait six months to do it, but then I do right, because I had There are certain ways I

had to follow the laws right. But more importantly so by the way, for the listener, what a collar does is essentially locks of price in by using options. And so even if Yahoo stock substantly collapses from two dollars down to eighteen, not that that's gonna have happened, which went down to five, right, You're locked into your price, so it's not like they paid us in cash. But more importantly, we had of the streaming market that's huge.

What was that word? Don't think in terms of dollars per user, because the number of users back then was nothing, but the growth was going to be exponential. Billions of people we were doing. We were doing more, So if you took for inflation, we probably did more five years in than then YouTube. Did you know YouTube wasn't doing a hundred million dollars whatever that translates to. So two quick things before before we run out of time for this segment, you immediately do what what was called the

biggest online transaction. I bought a Gulf Stream right away, and then within a few months you buy the Dallas Mavericks. Will continue our conversation with Mark Cuban talking about what life was like being a young, upstart NBA owner and what it was like turning around really one of the laughs of the NBA, one of the worst place teams, really underperforming and taking them to a championship. You're listening to Masters in Business with Barry rid Holts on Bloomberg Radio.

I'm Barry rid Helts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest today is Mark Cuban, owner of hd net Access TV. We changed Access TV. I keep calling, okay, um, the Dallas Mavericks, a number of different problem theaters, Magnolia Pictures. So let's talk a little bit about. Look, you're probably best known as the Maverick owner who sits up in the stands with the fans.

Let's talk a little bit about I know you're sick to death talking about the Mavericks, but there's so much stuff that's so fascinating. I would be remiss if I didn't point out a couple of interesting things. First, I

didn't realize this. You bought the Mavericks from Ross Parro, and you also did some early transactions with him, um in some of your early companies, and any any coincidence to that or yeah, totally coincidence and not Yeah, when um I had micro Solutions, Pro Systems Ross Pro Senior. They couldn't ever make the local ay networks. My first company, micro Solutions, what set us apart. We're one of the first three companies in the country that did local ay

networking integration. So back then in Night three and eighty four, no one thought about hooking PCs together. So but nineteen eight we were probably, I mean, we were the largest IBM Locuary networking integrator in the country. Apple came out with Locquary Networks. Ross Pro was a big integrator for with Pro Systems and they couldn't make it work, so they brought us in to make it work. So that was my original connection. But that was ross Pro Senior,

and then this was just a coincidence. So you buy in two thousand, you buy the Dallas Mavericks. Let me just explain for people who may not be a hoops fan, how awful they were the twenty years prior. They had a win loss record below they got they got voted the worst professional sports franchise of the nineties. It's unbelievable. In two years before you bought them, they were twenty and sixty two. That's that's just terrific. The year you buy them, they go fifty three and twenty nine, they

make it to the second round. In two thousand and six, they make it to the finals only to lose it lose to the Heat. And it looked in the beginning of that that series, but you had a shot. We did have a shot. We kind of got tushy tapped, you know. But to be fair, they were really they were a phenomenal team. You were I wouldn't go that far. Come on, they were a really strong team. Let me, when one player goes to the line, there was on

an average more than the other team. Right, yeah, there's something wrong, but you know, there is no shame in losing to that oh six team. They were really there's there's one winner and everybody else is tied for last place. So let's go to two thousand eleven. You get your revenge, you get to play the Miami Heat and and actually win. And you were just overwrought with emotion. We I want remember seeing you on television and it was just it

was it was wild. It was really As a fan, look, I used to sit in section two oh five and watch the Knicks play when it was Charles Oakley and Patrick Ewing and actually just passed Anthony Mason on the street the other day. He's still you know, and and you know, the thought of an owner sitting in the stand with you know, with fans is just astonishing. So the first question is what did you do to turn the MAVs around? Because you actually so. When I took

over the team was January of two thousand. We were nine and twenty three, and the general manager and coach at the time, Don Nelson, who came from the Knicks, actually um said, you know, we can we we can lose and try to get a good draft pick and dout it out it up. As it turns out, there was one of the one worst drafts ever, And I'm like, no, at some point, this team has to learn how to win. So we focused on winning, and as it turned out, we had a nucleus of a great team and we

just didn't People just didn't expect us to win. So the players didn't expect us to win, and so I walked in this that I expect you guys to win. We're not gonna mess around anymore. If you don't lay it out, if you don't put it on the line, I'm a trade your ass and you know, guess what, this is going to be a premier destination in the NBA. You can laugh because that's what everybody did. But I'm gonna kick everybody's ass. They just don't know it. And

you had Dirk from the previous year. We had Dirk, Steve Nash, Michael Finley, Sean Bradley. That's quite a cord to build a team. And everybody thought, I mean, we literally couldn't trade Steve Nash. They had tried to trade Steve Nash really got there and they couldn't do it. That trade Michael Finlay. They didn't try to trade Dirk yet. Um, but yeah, it was crazy. Every people who were in Dallas say, going to a Mavericks game is not like going to any of the basketball game. Yeah. I really

try to make an experience. I mean, the thing about going to a sporting event is the one place where you can scream and yell and they have fun and it's all good. And we expect you to do that unless you get fine, well that's me right. Everybody else can do whatever they want. And I try to make it like a good wedding. You know, it's memorable. That's you don't remember the scores, you don't remember the jumper time, Yeah, and you remember who you were with and why and

all that kind of stuff. So I want to spend too much time talking about the fines, which every time you get fined by the NBA you do a match charitable deduction. But there was one thing that stood out and I have to ask you about because it's almost like an urban legend. So at one point in time you called Ed Rush, who's the league's manager. Officials, Hey,

he couldn't manage a dairy queen for a day. And then subsequent only the folks at dairy Queen said, it's harder than you would imagine, and I you actually managed the dairy. Yeah, it's probably the best pr thing I've ever done in my life. You know. It's just people lined up for I got there at six thirty in the morning and there was a line a mile on.

There was helicopters, and look, it wasn't me. I gotta give There's a guy named Paris Chapman who was a local dairy queen franchise who mark oh, smartest guy in the book when it comes to marketing, because he turned it into a circus. Benefited his business, sure, and it helped me too. And the urban legend was that Warren Buffett sent you a thank you, not what you did.

That's unbelievable. That's a fascinating story. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Mark Cuban discussing his venture capital investments and how he became one of the stars of Shark Tech. You're listening to Masters in Business with Barry rid Holts on Bloomberg Radio. I'm Barry rid Holts. You're listening to

Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest today is Mark Cuban, uh fame trade her investor, star of the ABC television show Shark Tank, which really has been building up a lot of momentum and has generated a lot of buzz and now it's really getting killer. Took a year or two to get it ratings, but it's blown up. Well actually before I was on. No, it's amazing how big the show has gotten. It's the number one show

and all of television watched by families together. And really, yeah, what I didn't get when I went on as a guest Shark in UM season two, I think UM was I thought Okay, this is a business show. I'd watched it, I'd liked it. I'd yell at the TV, don't you um? And I just thought that was it, right, maybe I'll get a good deal. But I go on and I do these deals, which actually turned out to be my worst deals I've done on Shark Tank. But then all of a sudden, I started getting you know, emails and

comments from people on the street. Love the show. Because my seven year old loves to watch it. My twelve year old now understands valuations. We talk about businesses we thought, you know, when you see some you know, a family from Iowa standing on that carpet on Shark Tank talking about the company they started as a family and makes

kids realize they can do it too. And it's so aspirational and so not only is it kind of a new age liminate stand where it encourages people, but it also gives them examples of others who have done it, and it's the old thing. You know, if they can do it, I can do it. And that's literally what's happened. So you started out as an entrepreneur, you know what it takes to make a business work. Now you're looking at new entrepreneurs. Let me ask you a few questions

about what you think are the most important things. So when you're looking at an early stage investment, is it the person, the idea, the cash flow of evaluation? What manners most? Idea? Execution, UM, vision, person? Because they all go hand in hand. Everybody's got ideas, so that ideas alone are worthless. You've got to be able to take it from an idea to a business which says something. Right, you took it to the first step of execution, then where do what's your vision? Where can you take it

from there? And do I believe that you can get it there? Those are the key elements. So who do you end up investing with most? Meaning? What other shark do you seem? So I try to avoid them all? Is that? What? Well? What do you think of the people you co invest with? UM? You know there they all as investors were. Look, we're all smart. We all wouldn't be there unless they have some level of intelligence, right,

each of us have different skill sets. So where it plays to my strengths it's technology, marketing, whatever, than I pretty much take control of the deal and they can have some of the economics. I don't care, Um, but I would say probably Barbara. I like working with Barbara the best because Barbara's always got a unique spin on things. Lorie's not bad Lorie Lorie because she can put things through QBC. But I would say, in uh, mating retail. But if you tech sort of products coming, I've had

all kinds. I mean, I'm up to like fifty deals. I've done more deals than from just from Shark, just from Shark Tech and and including season six and stuff that has an are yet, But I've done more than all the other Sharks combined. Really, and you never seem to do more than a million dollars it rolls. No, No, I've done at one point seven million, will be one. I bet at one point five what you're at? What's the average? I don't even know, but they all they

seem to be half millions. No, No, So what happened early early in the show, Um, the first couple of seasons I was on, the deals are fifties seventy five k right, and now last season in particular season six that we're in right now, the deals are you know, two fifty minimum for the most part K seven fifty multimillion deals Um, so they've gotten a lot bigger. The companies are a lot more solid than they were in the past, more developed. Further, little question about because people

recognize the value of getting on the show. Well, even if you don't get a good deal, someone sees it. There's marketing value. You're gonna be attracting others. Twelve million people that watch you within the first week of airing. Then it's going to repeat on ABC at some point. You're gonna get a lot of pr and any entrepreneur recognizes that it's part of our job actually being up there. I call them gold diggers, right to separate the gold

diggers from the companies who really need support. Do you do You still do a lot of VC and angel investing outside the questions about it? Yeah, but I thank is just for fun and Shark Tank sends a message, Right, I do Shark Tank. The deals are good and I enjoy it. But to me, the importance of doing Shark Tank UM is more sending the message that the American

dream is alive. And well, there's no other platform where um, whether it's in school, whether it's on television, there's absolutely no other platform where you can go out and reach kids and families and entrepreneurs and encourage them and support them and train them and really fire them up and give them some guidance to go out ahead and go ahead and start that business. And that's fascinating that families are watching the show together more than any of it's

amazing data point. It's crazy. I mean, parents walk up to me just to brag about their kids watching the show. It's it's the new age lemonade stand. It's how you learn about business. So let's talk a little bit about some of your public investments. You've been pretty public about the stuff you've looked at. You happen to mention Netflix. I think you said a hundred and fifty thou shares plus options um it shares that body plus I already sold previous to that on a hundred thousand plus UM puts,

you had sold puts. So you hope in somebody Well, I said, if if if a craters, I'm happy to own a stock and if it goes up, I've taken in premium. Now walk us through the thought process. Is this Are you looking at Netflix like you're making a venture investment in a company because you like their long term perspective? As a business and you don't care we've gone through. You've got to look at the big picture, right, So within a macro positioning, there there are no more

small I p o s, certainly not lately. No, And that we'll go back to the SEC. Right. They crushed the I p O market, And so without the the I p O market, there's not a big risk of companies come up to to bang on you. Right, there's no broadcast dot Com, there's no you know two thousand for Googles. Right, it's so hard to go public that it's gonna be very, very difficult for up and comers to knock off an incumbent, which I think Netflix is. So in otherways, the SEC rule changes for allowing all

these pre public private investments. Now all these companies are No, it's not even that, right, So put that in your in the pipe, right, and we'll go to Netflix first. So in the bigger picture of things, if you look at the whole entertainment environments and you say, what is the most disruptive force in media today? Netflix, no doubt about it. The estimates are at night it's Enginet traffic more now, right, And so I hadn't always looked at

Netflix that way. But what's happened now is that all the um the pipe companies, right, the risings, the A T t s, they've all invested so much money in infrastructure that delivering Netflix. They can do it. Now You're not getting the buffering like you used to. I mean, there's still some, but it's not nearly as bad. So all the infrastructure is there for Netflix. And so that's part one, Part two. There's nobody who does what they do at the scale of what they do, at the

price of what they do. There's others that are coming in like HBO Go. There's others that are coming in like CBS, but those you know, there's Hulu, but those are more in the fringe. Right. If you look at Netflix with you know, forty million with or fifty million global subscribers, and ask, okay, if they can get to fifty and they're just starting to grow international, can they get to a million? Yeah? Can they get the five million? Yeah? Because CBS, HBO, they're not all of a sudden going

to entrench themselves. Now, then you look to the flip side of that, what is the impact of all that on content and entertainment? Already today, if you wanted to create a high end show, you don't go to um HBO and ask for an output deal like you would have ten fifteen years ago. You go to Netflix. If when CBS wants to start a new TV show, when Access TV or Magnolia Pictures Entertainment want to do a movie or show, we go to Netflix to see if

the money is there that they want to participate with us. Right, Netflix, years ago, you would have gone to a network or a movie studio right right. Used to be that Showtime and HBO said okay, ten percent of the box office, we'll give that to you, right and exchange for the rights to the movies. That's pretty much gone. So now Netflix and ess and subsidize the whole content industry, the whole and that's extending to the global content industry. Now.

The short sellers say, well, that's an eight billion dollar um hickey on their balance sheet of in some respects undocumented or off the books on liabilities. I look at and says and say, everybody needs Netflix really really bad to survive, and they both need each other. Right, Netflix needs all that TV content to be created and put on TV because it's a cheap source of content and

gives them breath. And every major TV show um on television, whether it's cable or broadcast, needs Netflix to subsidize them. Movies look for Netflix to subsidize them, so that it's that symbiotic relationship is going to allow Netflix to grow. And they're locked into the infrastructure of the infrastructure the media, and nobody else has access to they don't have access. What Netflix did that was brilliant when they really got going, they it was what they did an ARB, right, that

was the most brilliant ARB of all time. So up until Netflix really started to push, it would be okay if I want to sell on iTunes, if I want to sell on Amazon, if I want to sell anywhere. I got a commission. It was basically on consignment. If I sold it for fifteen dollars, and look, I have movie companies, right. So one of my my first movie ever, Greenlit,

was in Ron the smartest guys in the room. So if I sold a DVD UM of of Enron and I got my fort or whatever, the margin was okay, great, and I didn't know how many I would sell well, and then I might have some other content from Access TV or wherever or that was just dusty. Netflix said, you know what, we know how we're going to market that, we know how we're going to get money. I'm gonna write you a check up front. We're gonna pay cash up front. So it was an arb my cash versus

how much revenue I can create using your content. And they made it work. They marketed, their marketing was brilliant, and their subscribers grow and it created a dependent field. Thank you, Mark, We appreciate you spending so much time with us today. This week, be sure and check out our podcast extras. You can find them on iTunes and at Bloomberg dot com. And I really mean this week,

be sure and check it out. Mark was nice enough to hang out with us for an hour after the broadcast portion was over, and we discussed everything from his continuing interest in picking up a major League baseball team to a deep dive into his experiences with the SEC, some of which were absolutely hilarious. He had us cracking up in the studio. If you've enjoyed these sorts of interviews, check out all of our archive of previous conversations. You

can find them at iTunes or Bloomberg dot com. My daily column shows up every day at Bloomberg View dot com and you could follow me on Twitter at rid Holtz. I'm Barry rid Holts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Welcome back to the podcast half of our show. I'm Barry rid Halts and my guest in the studio tonight we're recording this Monday night is Mark Cuban. You're you're in town for a handful of NBA meeting. What is that like when you go to an NBA meeting?

Are you like well behaved or you renegade? And the renegade? What is Mark? No, no, no, no, it's actually the opposite. Mark. You're gonna talk about this right because so all these guys who are proper I don't want to talk about down low. It's like, hey, here's what you got it. And things have really changed the less since Adam Silver came in, because guys are a little bit more comfortable

with Adam. Um. David was a little bit. You had good things to say about I like David was a little the things we disagreed on, but I respect them. Like David, he did a great job. He was a great ambassador for the NBA. Globally he was. He was a hero for US. Um. But just the just the approach is a little bit different. Adams a little bit lighter and David's was a little but not I wouldn't say formal, just more um. Oh, what's the right word. David had his way of doing No, No, it was

just he had his opinion. He was opinionated in his own way, and he wasn't as open to disagreement. Okay, well that goes on. Well why we buy bad at heads but respected each other. Well we see how that sort of disagreement has worked out in the NFL these days. Yeah, it hasn't helped them at all. And you've you've been pretty outspoken. I'm sure you're tired about talking about that by now. But the NFL had a couple of issues and they just never really dealt with it, right, Yeah.

I mean, you know what I basically I was saying is that when you're building a business and you're climbing up the mountain to be the best, it's one set of skills, and when you're there to stay on top, it's a different set of skills. And it's really really easy when you're in top to to feel entitled and to feel like you're invincible. And when that happens, you know, pigs get that m Hoggs get slaughtered, and it's it's

a recipe for disaster. Now, they haven't had disaster yet, but it's not like people haven't had second thoughts about the NFL. They've certainly taken a pr hit. You know. We we go through that same conversation with people who spend their whole career accumulating assets. And when you say to them, all right, you gotta take a breath. You're now you're no longer in the asset accumulation business. You're

in the asset preservation business. That's a mental transition. That's a hard time to Part two, that is, everybody's a genius in a bull market. Sure, right, the NFL has gone through very much a bull market because of fantasy sports, because it's a great every everything, right. I mean, you go back twenty years there were teams leaving in the middle of the night, you know, and so look, they

deserve all the credit. Jerry Jones, is I really look up to you in terms of sales stadium awesome, unbelievable, it's literally actually wonder the world when we last time we were in Dallas, we went to a game just to see the stadium. A lot of people do. It's brilliant. It's really a million states got balls of steel to have, you know, put himself on the line like that. So Jerry deserves a ton of credit. But you know, it's

it's difficult. And the reason I know that they have problems now is because you saw Roger Goodell out front, and you didn't see a single owner out there with him, so they just let him flap in the breeze. Look, hey, listen, the first rule of holes is stop digging. And he doesn't seem to want to stop. It's a little bit different because I'll give you an analogy. Growing up in Pittsburgh, right you you were talking about the Mets. Well, up until the last two years, everybody would say, why don't

you buy the pirates? Why would you buy the pirates? And I said, because they're not for sale. Well, he'll be right, price still sell it to him. I said, he Look, here's why they're not going to sell. If I told you, I would pay you twenty five million dollars a year to stand right in the middle of the city of Pittsburgh and have every single resident yell at you twenty four hours a day. Would you take that twenty five million dollars a year? Everybody will take that? Sure? Yeah? Okay.

So if I told you I'm gonna pay you forty four million dollars a year to stand in front of the media and take the bullets for all the NFL owners, would you take that job? Yeah? And that's what Roger Goodell's job is. He's taking the bullets. He's the one saying it's my fault, it's my fault, it's my fault. And you know it's working now because they you know, they haven't had any issues. But it's gonna you know, things are gonna be happening. Things will happen, and it'll

be interesting to see how they respond. Fascinating. So now let's talk a little bit about um, the Mets. That's not gonna happenna, happen, not gonna happen. We get you and David Einhorn together retired in a couple of weeks. He wasn't a fan of you, is I know he hated me and I wasn't a fan of his. And and once he's gone, any chance you buy. I don't know, you know, if the Mets came along, I wouldn't buy and by myself, Um, because now I have three young kids. Um,

it's too much fun spending time with them. My engineer, Charlie says, he'll he'll go half with you done on the Mets. Done. There are a lot of people who would love to rest control of the Mets. Absolutely from they really, but it's the same thing that I'm sure they're making money. If they weren't, they would be sellers. They did a phenomenal job renovating. That's, by the way, That's another really nice stadium. Everybody loves Yankee Stadium. But the little secret in New York is City Field is

actually a nicer place, and it's not such a little secret, right. Um, Mets fans are always piste off when the problem is it's a beautiful place, but you gotta go watch the Mats. I grew up a Mets fan all Island and long suffering. Uh, the Knicks, the Mets. It's just really big hope you're suffering continues because they play. So let's talk a little bit about we discussed earlier your investment in Netflix. Let's talk about some of the other more. Um, what's the

right word to use, uh, disputitious, ceremonial. Let's start with short seller all right. I'm a big fan of short sellers. I think they've done a great job rooting out fraud

over the years. One of the first podcast we did was with Jim Chanos, who tells unbelievable stories about, you know, working his way through balance sheets of this kid and Run is a perfect yeah and Run I mean, I mean I I did end Run the smartest guys in the room the movie right, Um, But prior to that, the broadcast dot com days, I remember sitting there with en Ron and them trying to sell me on bandwidth plays, you know, and I'm like, how the hell are you

going to transport band with and you know, how you're going to create an efficient market and delving into them and think it was crazy. But in any events, guys in the room, how you're not as smart as them? See if you were smart as them. I love short sellers. I used to make a killing and selling selling short because you know, you know back in the day when I told you I was running this hedge hedge fund

um because I knew if equipment didn't work. If back then Synoptics put out a router, you know, or a switch. I knew because I had to install those things if it didn't work, and if it was going to sell, because I had to sell them. And so I would short sell, you know, just by nature of understanding the industry better than most people. And that's why I would have all these hedge fund guys, you know, get in touch with me. So I've always been a huge fan.

And then when we got to broadcast dot com and it went public, Um, you know, at that point in time, we had the largest one day jump in for a stock of an I p O in the history of the stock market. So there was a huge short position obvious. Um, everybody's covering well, not even because it was an I p O. Um, yeah, you're not. Even to this day, you're not. So the I p O is the biggest one day. But after that, the day you were allowed

to short, everybody short at every shot. I'm sure they can get And people said, aren't you mad at short sellers are short in your stock? I'm like, are you kidding me? I love short sellers because if my company is going to do well, all they're doing is creating, you know, pin up demand for this is natural floor. The short sellers who actually stopped the collapse by covering,

because they have to cover if you do well. Now, if you're a fraud or your company's horrible, you deserve what you get and your stocks going to zero at some point. Anyways, it doesn't matter what the short sellers do. So I don't know if anyone's ever asked you this question quite this way, but when you sold broadcast dot Com to Yahoo, we you were aware that we were in the midst of a bubble or was it? No, this is just a whole no, no, no, like this is ringing the bell. No. I mean go back and

read the articles from back then. So two things. One one, I didn't sell for cash, right, So it wasn't like, yeah, Yahoo stock you have to remember, was it was on fire, right and there their their market cap was higher than it is today, you know, fifteen years ago, much higher. I mean it was like in a hundreds of billions, right, and so for us to take three d I think it was we got twenty eight million shares of stock at three fifty dollars a share or something, I remember exactly.

So when I when I hedged, and it was called one of the top ten trades of all time by whatever Magazine's a pretty damn good trade. But when I had what was what was the average price around then? I don't remember my hundreds low two hundreds. Actually, when I started to hedge, the price kept on going up, and I had told everybody that I had hedged it, and um, there there's a clip from David Faber on on CNBC where he says, don't you feel stupid now

that you've hedged this? And yeah, who's gone up another hundred dollars. I just made a billion dollars. I said, it's hard to feel really stupid flying out in my G five. Right, But back to why right? So so that, by the way, that's a full an attitude of using money as a measuring stick instead of thinking of money as a tool to be deployed for other purpose. Would you pay for the Mavericks to a five had you not hedged, you would have lost that window. You're not enable.

It was funny back then the stock price of Yahoo would go up thirty dollars in a day, and I was like, I just paid for the Mavericks in one But I just paid for my plane. But you asked, what was I thinking. You know, I've been in this business a long time, and so in the eighties I saw the PC stocks go straight up, straight down. Then I saw the stock software stocks go straight up, straight down. Then I saw the local area networking stocks go straight

up and straight down. These Hey there's a pattern there. Yeah, Why did I think that it would be any different this time? Because there was always a hot technology area and this was Internet software and that was just a matter of time. But it's just a matter of time for Internet to get with And your job isn't top tick the market on your exit. Your job is to say, if I can lock in a billion dollars, I could do a lot. Look to this day, I stay headed. So I use a devolt all hedge type thing that

Credit Squeeze put together for me. That as so I've actually made money as the market went down. Took it off after I got to a certain level, and you know, hopefully the market will keep on going up and then and if it goes up much higher, I'll put it back on again. So you're always running with insurance. I'm always running the hedge because the market never makes sense

until after the fact. Everybody's got perfect vision, you know exactly, so you know, it used to be okay, interest rates are going up, the market will go down something, right, you know, oil does this, the market will do that. And there were all these correlations that everybody understood. Now the market has gotten so complex that nobody really understands. It's almost like I've had my biggest trades up until recently in currencies, because currencies are more transparent than stocks,

the very liquid, the liquids, amounts, trade, trade everything. But even more importantly, you've got the central banks telling you exactly what they're going to do, right, there's not and you know exactly Now they get heavy right with everybody, and then you've got you know, when everybody comes out. Now, in hindsight, it's easy to see. And one of the reasons I put on the hedge because I thought this could happen. I just didn't know when, because everything now

was so interrelated. Once. When when people start piling into the same trades that everybody's doing, right, whether it's currencies on one hand, it's a a note, treasuries on another hand, then you've got all the momentum stops to grow pros and Netflix is you know, um, who else just has blown up? Right, all these stocks, everybody dumps in and with margin at one or whatever it is. Yeah, and you're thinking, well, the dividends higher, so I can go

into Apple. But that all works until something in the whole series takes you down and it delivers everything right, because then a hedge fund gets delevered. Then when one hedge fund gets levered, the stock goes down. Someone else wants to meet the benchmark. Then the day trader gets

pulled out. And even though that's a smaller percentage than people, the hedge funds want to freak out because they're gonna lose all their upside for the year, and so they're getting called in, right, and they're getting called in because of their margins because they were levered up. And so now there's this cascade until you get to the bottom and you never know really what that is, and then people with that start creeping back in to buy again.

So you mentioned complexity in the markets. Let's talk a little bit about high frequency trading. I know you're a big fan, you're an algorithmic trading. You have a whole roll of servers set So here's my complaint about h f T. And I'm curious because I found doing a little research on you over the past few weeks. I found you and I are pretty sympatico about a lot of a lot of things. We disagree about a handful

of things, but we'll get to those. So my problem with h f T is simply, this trading is a zero sum game. And if someone's jumping in in front of Grandma's mutual funds trading whatever the h f T s are making, that's coming right out of Grandma's retirement in terms of transaction costs. Absolutely, it's just it's black and white. There's no and I agree with that and that,

but that's less of an issue to me. Um. What's more of an issue is there's no such thing as bug free software, So you think this is adding instability and danger freezes. We've seen the flash clearly, the flash crash, and we saw what effectively looked like a bond flash right like in an hour, not even in about ten minutes. The ten year went from two three to one nine. Back up that that doesn't make a whole lot. We used to say that that was a fat finger, but

that was purely computers are computer computer. So did you ever see the movie UM, what War not Star Wars not um? Where do you want to play a game of thermonuclear war with Matthew? Four games? Right? And it was like you wanted. It was like two machines talking to each other in a simulation, right, But then the simulation turned real and then they had to go back door and say, hey, Joshua, you want to play a game of chess? Right? High frequency trading is no different.

It's an ongoing um interaction between algorithms from competing sources. No one is giving any thing up to anybody else and saying I'll share the pie. They're all trying to be smarter. Literally, if you wanted to destabilize, now they've with when they put on the what you call it the not the thresholds on circuit breakers in that's that that made it more protective. But still, if you want

to destabilize, you start with currencies. And you know, let's just say I'm a I'm a nation, um an enemy nation, right, and I just give one company five billion dollars, another company five billion, another five billion. Let's just let them

trade normally for eighteen months. Let's say, so everybody's trust that there's just normal, and then all of a sudden, I just started hitting one thing that I know is going to impact and correlate to another because I've looked at the day and here's the corre And then when that gets hit, I started hitting that one. And then when that gets hit, I start selling that right, not even necessarily but individual stocks, but currencies or whatever else, treasuries,

everything else where there's not circuit breakers. You know. One of the most interesting examples of how high frequence trading algorithms manifest themselves. People have used examples of some odd book for sale on Amazon, and there'll be two algorithms offering to sell it, and they'll get into a war game situation where the price of this nonsensical book that nobody cares about, nobody wants to buy. Suddenly it's two

thousand dollars for sale used on Amazon. Because somehow these algoris got into a loop with each other and they just keep raising the price on each other, and suddenly a book nobody's buying, nobody cares about his three thousand dollars. It's it's insane. You're in favor of a tobin tax, a transactional tax. So let's call it this way. If if your quote isn't gonna exist for more than a second,

you pay a penny or so. And what that does is that gets rid of the spoofing, that gets rid of all this or even nonsensical stuff that has nothing what's toever to do with. Look, there's there's a battle between people who think they provide a quick city and people who like that because they're traders. And then there's investors. This market is no longer a platform for investing. We don't talk about investors anymore. They're there, they're the puppets

right there. Yeah, they're the stock puppets that sit out there, the muppets that just get taken advantage of. Or maybe they put their money in their four oh one k and they hope that that those big guys don't. The reality is this, this is a platform for hackers. Who's got the best technology, who's got the best software, to try to make money. We are long gone from the days where you said, you know what, I like Netflix,

you know I like Apple. I could buy this and put it away for a few worry about where the schlubs, the people who do that are the slubs. So let me give you the two counter arguments, which these aren't coming from me. I'm quoting other people. But there's something there that I find kind of interesting. First sitting in

your seat a few weeks ago was Jack Brennan. He's the chairman of Vanguard, little shop running three trillion dollars, and he said, we love anything that reduces our costs of execute shin and we're buyers and holders, were long term investors, and there's a big advantage for us to be able to go out and you use these algorithms to find the best price for Vantage Sniper, like Vanguard is.

There's nothing wrong with that. It helps you, right, but it's still all you're doing is saying, you know what, the market is such a mess. I'm picking up yeah, right, So the grocery store truck crashes on the street and I'm picking up the eggs, you know, at a discount, you know, And so I don't I don't blame him for doing it, because that's his job. That's what I'm supposed to do. But all he's doing is trying to make a sales pitch for Vanguard, which is cool because

they're the low cost. And I tell people, if you're gonna buy SPX index by a Vanguard, they're great, They're great. But at the same time, if you want to be an investor and we want people to invest in the market, and we want people to look, we want to start building an IPO and we want to start building an I p O market, there's you want companies to come out. The whole idea of the original cont of a market is to create capital for companies to grow, and that

is economy that's good for everybody. Does that concept is so far gone right, So in terms of a Tobin tax, what is it that's going to make people have to keep their their stocks there? So you have Yeah, so you can't just turn it quickly. You have to invest in the real company. Now that's you know, your reputation is, hey, here's a guy who's a libertarian, readsign ran every five years,

blah blah. But some of the stuff you talk about is decidedly I'm going my own path, and I believe that sometimes that's the right I guess I guess it is because so that's exactly right. So I was impressed with the Tobin tax because I wasn't expected. It's a perfectly valid the problem, right, The whole key is this has got to be a market of investors to create capital for companies to grow. We're so far past and that's what it's. That's what the original design of markets are.

It's a place where cap and entrepreneurs can meet and we build them far away from that. How many times do you see capital being invested in companies that needed to grow over the last month. You know, if Wall Street was actually doing that, shows like Shark Tank, there wouldn't be a need for them. Well possibly, that's okay, I'm fine with that, right, but but that just shows you Baba didn't need capital. They didn't need twenty billion dollars. Right.

You know, there's a couple on the margin million dollar i p o s, But there's how many there that? I read um recently that the number of i p o s from ninet so now that raised under fifty million dollars has dropped. Isn't that true? Though? The entire middle merchant merchant banking market done has disappeared because all the companies that were mid sized companies, they've emerged. Question, Okay, so what's happened right, So this is one of the

things that's killing the economy too. So I started company and back when it used to be, hey, hopefully we can go ublic. I get some liquidity. And this also contributes to income equality, like Janet Yellen was talking about. So back in the day, there were going to be two D four hundred companies a year. Who has they as they grew their companies go public could be you know, UM on the small OTC whatever and raised ten million dollars twenty million dollars. That gave them capital to have

a chance to grow. Now that capital was gone. So they go out there and they get VC angel money. And then if they're but that's okay because you would give up an equity and I p O two. But if you don't hit those initial initial milestones right you've got, you're gonna have a hard time getting a Series A. But let's just say for the sake of example, you've gotten to a Series A, right, and so you've shown some success and that's why people have given you a

Series A round of investing. Right, So you're growing um startup company, you've been around two years. Just got what happens next? In the past, if you know, you did fifty million in sales, seventy five million sales. We're going

to be profitable, marginally profitable. You go raised million dollars in an I p O. Now, if you have that type of future, you get bought by the company you want to compete with, which inherently means there's less competition, which inherently means instead of that company growing to be a competitor with Google, or just using as an example where Netflix, that company's bought, they're absorbed their pretty pretty early. Fewer jobs, right, less competition, right, less less investment in

up and coming in companies. You know how hard it is for an average investor to invest in up and coming companies that are public, that have any liquidity. It's impossible. And so because of all that, the economy hasn't grown nearly as quickly because there aren't back You know, we we were doing our best to be profitable, but we knew that we could if we showed any kind of chance public Right, all right, So I'm gonna be benevolent dictator and I'm gonna point you, SEC chair what does

Mark Cuban SEC chairman do? How do you change the rules to benefit the investors really really easy that it is a hangar. But first of all, the SEC destroyed the I P. O business because they people don't want to go public today at all because of all the administrivia right, all the accounting, and they have to do that now because the SEC was so asleep at the wheel. Congress felt like they had to create a thousand new rules right in order to be able to protect companies

because the SEC can't protect them. The SEC still can't protect them. They couldn't then and they can't now now. What's the problem. The first problem is the SEC is not about protecting investors. They could, They don't give a ship, right, because all they care about is how many how many cases are they going to bring so that more lawyers have experience so that they can go out and get jobs in the in the private sector. Right, these are

all pretty straightforward. Inside of trading cases, there are not there. Some of them are so rediculous. But the point is, we know a couple that are totally mine aside, right, it's been a year. It was a year ago this week actually done right tossed out you have vindicated in but it wasn't even a toss up. It was. It was ridiculous. But okay, so let's go back to the SEC.

You have no idea what insider trading is. Nobody does there If you if you trading on material non public information, no, not necessarily no. So you're saying that that black let law definition, that's that's not so. If you saw a guy get hit by a bus and you realize that was the CEO, that's material non public information hit by a bus. Because there's only six people who saw it, right, it was on public doesn't matter. It's if I'm going

through the garbage can and I find sheets from a merger. Hey, this is garbage, this is in publican I'm cleaning up the law. Actually, there's been some ambiguous cases. I'll give you another example of the SEC in their stupidity. Guy was going to work at a at a railroad company, right go up driving the parking lot, and he saw all these limos and guys in suits getting out day after day, week after week a couple of weeks. Figures, maybe there's an acquisition going on. I'm gonna buy calls.

Had no inside information whatsoever, which is in the public area. They brought inside a trading case against him. Because he works for the railroad. Did he win, Yeah, he won, but it cost him a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of embarrassment. To the point I'll give you if you go on Google and google mark Cuban sec video. Right. So I did this. I had a meeting with the CEO of a company public company, and we discussed everything but numbers, right, because he was

interested in one of my companies. And so a month went by and we didn't discuss anything more. We never discussed any public never discussed his numbers at all, only discussed my company. And so I was like, I like this company. I wonder if I can buy stock? And I never ended up buying it. But I called the SEC, I said, SEC, I'm I told just what. I left a message. I was talking to them about selling them my company. Right, can I buy stock? So here's what

They never disclosed anything about their numbers, nothing. Here's all my paperwork. But we never got to them. So I and I told him that, right, and so they called me back. I left us on a measures mark Cubans, so they knew exactly who it was. This is on my video. This is the video A little phone video, right, and they said you need to go to this page right, This will tell you to get you a response. So

I go to the page on the website. It's a mother page from nineteen eighty saying you have to send your question in seven parts and mail it to us, and don't expect an answer anytime soon. That's how the SEC works. They have no interest in protecting UM investors. They have no interest in making the market a better place to trade and making it safer to trade. They have not And where they did, you do to change So here's the problem. So how you change it? You

create bright line rules. She talked Mary jo no ambiguity, just this is allowed black and white, boom right. And then where there's things that happened that you aren't sure, then you can litigate those. But if you did that, you'd reduced the amount of litigation and nobody would have a job in the SEC. Inside or trading group would be smaller. Because look, they talked about bright Um. The

broken window policy that she wanted to create. Mary Mary White said, we want this to be a broken window policy. Mayor Julie. See like back in the days of the Bronx, when you saw a broken windows you fix it because broken windows encouraged crime, exactly right, So they wanted to do the same thing with the SEC. She literally talked about it when she took the job right around the same time. I was going to trial for missus a

year ago. A year year ago, Mary White. But the problem is if I walk up to a cop in Brooklyn and say, Mr policeman, if I throw a brick through this window, is that against the law. Of course, he's gonna tell you. If I go up Mary White or anybody at the SEC, if I see someone get hit by a bus and I want to know if I can trade on it, is that against the law or not. There's no place you can get an answer. Corporate council can say to you, corporate, if he's hit

you could you could do it? Corporate council every of course. Okay, do you know any walk down the street in New York City and I walk up to somebody who we want to be an investor in the city. It's about still. You know, in most places people don't necessarily have counsel. It's ridiculous that you the response to that question is called corporate counsel. Okay, it's ridiculous and want to say why that's the answer, right, because all right, it's it's

because I don't really know. I have an idea of what is and isn't You think there should be, right, and you can reduce that amount of great with some black and white answers. It would be so easy and so fast. So what about the I P O market? What can they do to fix the I P O market? To to start a research? It's a part of the problem is it's already too late for that, right, is it? That's it? They were done the market. They never to come back. No, it's not. Hopefully that's not the case.

But they freaked it up so bad, right because they are You know, at your companies and your businesses and your jobs, you have goals and when you set those goals, you you evaluate whether you reach those goals. Right, And it's very easy to set. If you can quantify it, you can measure it, you can manage it. Right. So Mary White, the chairman of the SEC says, we want to improve capital markets, we want to make them safe. Right, So how do they measure that? Do they do research

to say, how do you measure that? I I do here I'll give you take a step back. Every time I give a speech related to the subject, I always ask the same questions. How many people have um? What was that? Um? How many people have not invested? How many people? How many people trust the stock market? No? Do you trust to here? Sorry? By the way, that's that number is gonna be much lower today than That's why I said, you trust the market more today than

you did. Absolutely most of the average answer is well, also, keep in mind, they live through the dot com bus, they live through the housing crisis, the crisis, that's exactly. Then high frequency trading, all those right, Bernie made off. Don't forget Bernie made off all these things. Right, Bernie made off. They've had quite a few black eyes. Try,

But how do they measure their success? They don't do researches, fiction rate on inside of trading case, no, not even convention the number, yeah, and how much money they've they've taken back, which has no relevance to whether people trust the market. Then I say to people, Okay, is anybody here invest invested internationally in other countries? Have you sure? Okay? How many countries do you think? Well, we use Vanguard to do emerging markets in Europe and Asian things like that.

So we're not out picking individual stocks. You trust those markets, right, Um, I don't trust Russia. I know that's how many of those have you ever? And I know that's one of the cheapest markets in the world. Have you ever investigated the insider trading laws in any of those markets? No? Do you think Vanguard has probably know they haven't. You don't think they? Hell no, because there's never there's hardly

ever cases brought in any of them. Why is that because there's no relevance to to confidence in the markets relative to insider trading. There's a lot of arguments that insider trading should be legal because if I've read because the it sends you a message that is better information for the market than them not telling you that they sold the stop for three months or whatever it is. Right, So the fact that people no one, and I asked that question, is anybody not invested in a foreign market?

Now here? Let me do Ali baba biggest I p o ever ever? Right? If what is the guy's named? She the head of the of China, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, goes to Jack, Ma, Jack, how you do in this quarter, and Jack says, this is my numbers. Exactly what do you think he's gonna have You think he's gonna say, no, its insider trading. I'm not gonna tell you. Hell no, He's gonna tell him whatever he wants to hear. Right, do you think the SEC?

And here's the company in China, it's a freaking communist country, that's the largest I p O in the history of the stock market, And there's no freaking way that the SEC can enforce any level of insider trading laws related to what happens. Isn't that true for any a d of the trades here? Really? Pretty much? So whatever we're buying Snofi that's in in Europe, anything like that, point

is that insider trading law. It's not only that, but it's really not relevant in investor confidence and they don't care. So what has to be done to fix investor maintenance?

You make it very bright line, right, you? You you be honest about what impacts the market, not just what creates jobs for lawyers, because obviously people don't care about insider trading because we tell people to diversify, which is silly on its own face, and a lot of respects with people to understand don't understand what they're investing in. And diverse racation means to go into all these different markets which have no insider trading laws whatsoever. It's really

an interesting way to think about it. And some of our biggest I haven't heard it, And some of our biggest pos are a communist freaking countries where it is impossible. What are you going to go to the head of the Chinese Communist Party and say, look, sir, we need to subpoena you so you can come in and you know, we can take a transcript. I'm kiding. I love China's

GDP always to the cent. They know that right there, well back in the battle days when jack Well said g capital, they could pull a penny out anytime they wanted to get the point though, right, So, if you're really trying to be effective and accomplishing something, so the SEC has basically got to get out of trying to manage and trying to do it inside your training law enforcement bright line, go back to Congress and say you've got to make it bright line. Here's what's allowed, here's

what's not, Here's what we're gonna let you do. And here's what we're not gonna let you do. So everybody knows, nobody has a clue. How long do you think it's gonna take for the public? You know, I used the nineteen twenty nine example. You had the market crash in twenty nine, The market didn't get back to break even until nineteen fifty four, twenty five years later. It was like a whole generation, right, So it took like a generation of people to grow up who didn't the older

out look, and here comes the next general. Here we are. It's fourteen years later and we're still not back to the two thousand. So the SEC, and part of that is the SEC. I don't care what they say because we've had to go through Sarbanes Oxley and what was the last one that they haven't even god Frank right,

which have created so much regulation. They had. The SEC going back to two thousand and eight had this thing, I forget exactly what's called, but he used XML, right, which is a scripting type language you can pull data there.

Now with big data, there's so many ways that if you had every single company um file everything that they did in every share, that was body the whole thing, right, and look for outliers, and so there's a lot of ways that they can improve it rather than having the CEO have to sign their life away for everything they did. And that only happens because the SEC is full of

morons when it comes inside. So you really think the SEC has damaged, really damaged this country, the the economy, the i P just because they are so delusional about what's a wow that is? That is really And you tell me what my argument didn't make sense? Um, there was nothing in it. It didn't make sense. You you mentioned China. I wanted to bring something up you had said that I thought was fascinating, and you hinted at

it in an earlier discussion. You said, do you think China is gonna come walking over flying like they did at Pearl Harbor? Which I thought was a joke, You know it was. It wasn't parts the animal has Did we roll over when the Germans attacks? It was No, They're gonna attack us through cyber terrorists, right. No, That's that's why I said our pearl harbor, the Chinese are gonna be our pearl harbor for cyber security. So so here's what I understand that you look at the US

electrical grid. It's absolutely wide open, unhardened. Anyone who wants to send us into a non electrical period, it's not that difficult. It's getting better, it's getting a lot better. But your point is well taken. The only saving graces Russia and China. This is even worse, right, So that's that's the one. Number two. There isn't a major company in the United States that hasn't had their entire computer

network rifle through by the Chinese Army. It's not just the Chinese army, but it's also the so you know, the Russia, the Soviets, the Russians, all these kids that are sitting on computers that may not even have electricity to full day. That's their way to to just use

their intelligence and what they've learned. Look, the beauty of technology is that there's something new every day, and there's a person who created that's something new, and there's everybody else, and everybody else starts at the exact same time to learn it, right, So nobody has an advantage. The smartest guy in Russia, the smartest guy in China, the smartest guy in the US, other than the person who are

people who created it. Everybody else is tied in their knowledge, and so it's just a question of effort to learn how to crack those systems and learn how to use them. And so people with all this time, and you know, in Latvia and all these you know, Eastern European countries, right, that's all they do all day because the rewards are there. And in China, you know, the military they're doing the same thing. US and Israel are basically the defense forces

for that. That's really astonishing. And now when you think about that, what does it mean if all this intellectual property, all this R and D energy, all this work that's been spent by all of corporate America is being pilfered by I'm not so worried about that because I'm not worried about the I P being pilfered. I'm worried about it being destabilized in one way or the other. That goes back to high frequency trading and the anybody has any ability to do that. Every everything digital is a

platform for hackers. It's just a question of the value proposition to them. Right. So if putin is going to put you up an easy cheat, easy street, you know, wherever you happen to be and move you to Moscow in your entire family. If you're able to crack X, Y or Z, why wouldn't you do it? Right? If you're in the best opportunity, if you were live. That's that's the new get rid, that's the new gold rush, right,

the new I PO gold rush. I p O market is sitting in Russia from a technology perspective, sitting in Russia, some Eastern European country or China and just learning how to crack, learning how to hack, becoming a hacker for your country. It's patriotic to them, right. And the same things happened in in Asia, and the same things happening in the Middle East, right, Because the greatest return in your time to hit, you know, the Mark Cuban type I p O type scenario is to crack somebody and

hack somebody and do it for your country. So what about in the United States? The n s a hacking everybody else in the world. Different issue, um, But they're obviously privacy concerns, probably concerns, and I've started companies around it. But you can't argue with you. We need somebody they're protecting us. We need somebody being pro you know, playing off row active. Yeah, someone's gotta play offense for us and usual has backdoors into all these other tools and technologies.

Or is that just a classic I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. All right, he's basically uh at an undisclosed location. On able comments on that, Um, You've said some really fascinating things politically, I want to talk about some of these we I mentioned a lot of the things you said really surprised me. Um. I wrote a column a year ago about how McDonald's and Walmart's are welfare queens that instead of paying a decent

minimum wage, they pay these low levels. So you you actually said, and I think it was too um what's her name? Cups on Um. I thought that was a really interesting interview. You said, as far as the food service industry and retails concerned, I'm I'm for the minimum wage being increased to twelve dollars. Why are taxpayers subsidizing low wage employees? Now, again, that's really not the sort of thing one would expect to hear from you. It makes sense when when you think about what to expect

from me, I'll tell you exactly how it's perfectly rational. No, what I do? I say, what's the problem, how to fix it? How do you solve it? That's all I care about, right, And that's what we've lost in politics today. For sure. People don't People don't want to fix problems. They want to have their dogma incorporated everywhere. Right. And so look, I would love it so that the government

wouldn't have to do anything brilliant. If that's not it's not gonna happen because we look, if you're five hundred pounds, if you're a hundred pounds overweight, you gotta lose the first pound before you can lose. You can't just stop eating and say that's a solution. I think it's a hundred pounds. I'm not, but right to um. And so that's the way the party's approach things. Right, here's how you lose a hundred pounds immediately. It doesn't work that way.

You've got to solve the problem, and it's got to be contextual and have a chance of So twelve doll a minimum wage for fast food and retail makes sense in your mind, yeah, because people still have to eat, So it's not like it's fungible money. Right, So you're going to eat somewhere, and if it applies to all fast food company, every everybody goes up to anyone, right, And look, it's not like people. They can hire fewer people. They have to have serve their demand. Makes a lot

of sense. Let's talk. Can we talk about your rivalry with Donald Trump? I actually like Donald. It's not really a rivalry. It's just that he's easy to pick on. Well, you once said something to him. The quote that stood out was I could write a check for your whole net worth and I wouldn't even notice it was missing. Yeah, that was true. What sort of argument were you in the middle? Because show the benefactor and he had their Prentice, So he said my show was a knock off, which

it wasn't, but it was still poorly done. It was a whole another set of reasons. So yeah, he's an interesting Donald. I actually like Donald, but he's when it comes to social media skills, he's got none. Right, He's got no social media game whatsoever. So you know, face to face, I love talking to him face to face. You know, just he's a smart guy. He's got you know, he's he's been successful. Um, he's been up, he's been down in he's fought back and I get in tons

of credit. The old, the old New York joke about him was, you know, he made a small fortune in New York, really started with one lost most of it, which is when it comes to social media, not his forte. Oh no, it's just so whatever he says, it's just easy. So you offered him a million dollars to shave his head and any response. Again, unlike Donald, how people think it's this big rivalry. Um, But I like him. He's

a He's definitely a character, to say the least. Coming up next week on Masters in Business, Donald Trump, I don't think that's gonna happen. Um. This was again another quote. I love the comments, I love the concept, says Mark Cuban of Obamacare. Not what one would expect. Um. Now, clearly the United States healthcare system is a mess, and and giving a lot of people healthcare through the emergency room, which was a Reagan era law that was signed, doesn't

make anything. We pay for healthcare one way or the other. Right, people are dropping down it the most expensive way you can possible. Right. And so the insurance companies had their chance to be at and they had their chance to come up with better solutions. They cherry picked the best and they never did right. They picked the best risk and said we're can ignore everybody else. So they we put the health of our country in the free market in their hands and they basically said, rather than doing

the right thing, we're worried about earnings per share. But they made a choice. They made a choice knowing that there was a risk, particularly when Obama came in, that if we didn't provide the right service, we were going to be a risk of being This hasn't really hurt them because now they just got forty million new insurance which they're gonna they'll provide. But it was on a different set of terms. It wasn't on this Well, there's no more decision. You can't just drop somebody because they

got sick. But which was really a horrible thing they used to do. It was ridiculous, Right, what did I read at one of claims are turned back initially, so people who are just to be a pain he has to try to you know, hopefully people will get sick and not follow through, right, which was horrible in this country. Look, we make choices as a country. We we want to have transportation so we have we have roads and those

roads are maintained. We want lights and those we want fine roads that are maintained because right, but air traffic control, there's things that we we collectively agree to write. Health is one of those things. In order for us to be vibrant as a nation, we want to be healthy. Right, And the insurance companies just kicked the ball. They blew. Obamacare comes in and says, you know what, you know, it's not perfect, but the numbers game. Is the numbers

game on a national basis that makes more sense. But the side effects of those we saw recently that just today or yesterday that more people were leaving their jobs and looking for more jobs, switching switching jobs because they don't worry about losing their healthcare. Why because of Obamacare? Is what you're gonna say, your argument about what we

require everybody who drives a car to be insured. How is this anymore difference if we require anybody who could possibly go to the hospital playing car boat, you better have insurance. Right, So if you're mechanical, we're gonna make you do it organic? Why not? Why not are the same thing? It makes perfect because we make choices as a as a nation, right that we want our people to be healthy, we want our kids to be healthy. And when kids are healthier and we support them, you know.

And then from an entrepreneurial perspective, now you can leave your company, know when you can go out and get Obamacare and and have some healthcare. Let's talk about weed. Wait before we get there. One other thing, okay, um, that I that I like to say that people think is controversial. On the libertarian side of me, I would love to see nine government services eliminated, eliminated, but that money.

Just write a check, Just write a check for people, rather than playing the game of them coming in you know, right, writing money, because you know that's at least thirty if not inefficient. If you just took all that money, pay the people who were working in those services and administration half of what they were getting to not work, right, let them go get another job, given their own little you know, buyouts, and just helicopter drop the money onto

all those people. They would end up getting twenty five dollars or more each. They would have to spend that money. They wouldn't save it, because that's the nature of of of where they're at, right, and the economic strata always spends whatever cash they come in, right, right, and so the economy is going to be far better? Is that realistic? Can we really get what we could? Yeah? You could,

but they're not. It's not gonna happen, right, I mean, yeah, maybe if I run for presents someday, which is never going to happen, which means, but it makes too much fun to Again, the last thing I need is people. I mean, who wants that level of scrutiny and who wants I've got graveyards. I don't need, not skeletons. I've got a graveyard. So let's go back to weed, because again libertarian and I have certain leanings in that way. I never understood why marijuana was illegal versus beer or alcohol,

which does far more damage. But when you look at the damage done to people with UM numbers are drunk drunk driving, and you know, if you're driving and you're high, you're going too slow. That's the problem, you know, Okay, So on the way to jack in the body, I agree, I agree, I agree, obviously, um but it's funny. Right, So when you look, I'm neither Republican or Democrat. Don't give a penny on either side, right, but when you'm not true you gave to you gave to Orange Hatch.

Oh that was thirteen years ago, and then you gave to a Democrats. That's right. That was so that those are the only two donations you've made ye fifteen years ago? Right, Um? And they were by the way, you noticed. I could find that out like this, but I can't find out. And what insider trading is, right, right, Remember you took the other side of the right when it came to the corporation around around so anyway, so we decide, right, Um, so we were talking about, um, should drugs be illegal?

All the costs for incarceration, right, I'm look like it's ridiculous, first of all, and you were an independent you said you don't care about either side. Yeah, and I space what my train of thought was, because see, that's the problem with weed is short term memory. Right. But then again, on the flip side, I've read that coke kane increases your memory and makes true George Collins joke used to be the problem with getting marijuana legalized as no one

can remember where they left. Then that was that was his famous line. So let's think about how many people are incarcerated due to pot, so you would release all those non violent marijuana questions. I remember what I was gonna say, Conservatives, right, so where the Conservatives are really messed up and the Democrats have their own issue, right, put put the side that it's basically the tea party.

And but conservatives were about conservatives conserving principles, right, Conservatives, but the conservat what they're trying to conserve is not thirty years old principles. There's still eighty year old principles that are so outdated, right, and so conserving the people who are sixty years old that were smoking pot in the sixties, right and the seventies when it was sex struggling, rugs and rock and roll, and you know, everybody was getting high and a lot of it wasn't even illegal.

You know what those are where we should be conserving the principles because the people were in charge now in their sixties, that's the life they were living. What happened to all the people that that you know, we're a little bit older than us, that we're telling us about how they were going to change the world, they all they all went corporate. A lot of those people and I mean it's crazy. They're all doing it. We were kids.

Think about when we were kids, are sex, drugs, rock and rolls, Zeppelin, you know, all this stuff, and we're everybody's going to change the world. Sit in all these principles. A lot of the rise of the conservative movement. Reagan is a perfect example. That era was a push back to the extremes of the sixties and seventies. Exactly. The pendulum swings from one crazy. But they're not conserving what they should be conserving any longer. Right, They lust track

of what a conservative is right now. It's like it was eight ninety years ago that they were trying to conserve when the world has changed. The world just changed radically. So here we are in the most recent Supreme Court said gay marriage is now legal to for about two hundred million Americans, about thirty one states, I think it was, which is pretty amazing that how rapidly that shape can get marriage. You can get it high as a kite and it's all legal. But it's only in a hand now.

The marijuana is only a handful of state become it's essentially non criminalized in most in most places, although it depends on the circumstances. You and I as as white people who are in a decent living, we're not gonna get busted for smoking weed. But if you're an inter city kid, if you're a black kid, your odds of getting arrested for smoking marijuana are much much higher than number something like one out of ten black. Yeah, and

that's clearly not applied even handedly. The So the question is, I think people are really surprised. Remember Biden kinda opened his mouth and forced Obama into this. I don't think two years ago anybody expected, not just completely. It's running right past the Republicans. It's funny watching them sort of trying catch up. You craziness, right, and so you would

think that they would adapt, but they it's reticuling. I would if I would ever run an office, I'd run as a Republican because conservatively, financially you're a fiscal conservative, fiscal conservative in the two thousand and fourteen way, all these things that I talked about, right, Um, But if they would just learn to stay out of social issues where they make no sense whatsoever. But that was the original you know, the original coalition was you go back

to the Reagan Democrats. It was fiscal conservatives. It was the religious right, it was the tax cutters. You put those in when you had three TV stations, four TVs. You can get away with that. Right Now, that's working. I guess listen the immigration you're down in Texas, the immigration rules, the watching the Republicans. You have certain Republicans

pushing this. Oh no, I'm not talking about the the far right guys that there are actually some moderate Republicans who are reasonable on immigration, and they get shouted down by the rest of the party. Yeah, building fences isn't gonna do a whole lot sid They don't want this right, they're gonna eventually. I think the Republicans have hurt themselves with the Hispanic voting. They're gone. It's gone. It'll take a generation. Look, the same thing happened with with um

when Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act. The thing was all right, we just lost Southern whites for a generation. Turned out to be generations. Yeah, and it's I mean with social media everything, communications is much quicker, right, and and the Repulicans Republicans just don't get it. Why is that why you can't get You can't you can't they can't get the tech geeks to do this for them. No, no, no,

they just can't get accepted among themselves. I guess right, you're not gonna get elected because the people who vote in non presidential elections, there's there's so few of them that it's the midterm elections the Republicans can do really well. Unless the Democrats really get out to vote like they did for the presidential election, you're gonna get further and further, right. I don't know. Look, I'm not I'm not a political pundit. Um, I'll defer to Nate Silver and how it all work out.

But um, well, he's just saying. He's saying the Republicans will take the Senate and then that tease up the presidential elections. By the way, Republican Senate isn't the worst thing for Hillary Clinton. I can't think. Oh no, she, if anything, she probably is happy with that. And the only question is who are the Republicans gonna put up against her? I have no idea. That's the unknown. What's um, what's the dude's name? Chris Christie? Just uh what state? Oh? Um,

he Canadian? He had to dual Canadian Ran Paul No, not rand oh I can't believe. I don't play co stuff attention um Ran, Hispanic name, Hispanic name, Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz. Okay, so when I go through Washington and he's mentioned as a big name, right, the one thing I hear about Ted Cruz and I don't know the guy I don't know anything about is that he's a jerk. Everybody eats him and he met him. No, I've never

met him. So this is all second hand. But all I know is that everybody that I've talked to that knows anybody who works from so again second hand, they've all quit or been fired, and the turnover is enormous. And this is the guy that, from what everybody says, is most likely to be the Republican. So you can't you can't build a presidential team. Assuming that's true. I've never heard that before, time in and time out, again

and again and again and again. What's been so fascinating about. Look, I grew up a Jacob Javits Republican and in New York. What that means is Javits is a liberal Northeastern Republican, which meant no overseas adventures. That's how Vietnam affected him. Low taxes, balance budget, but keep the government out of

the bedroom. So back in the day, that's the closest thing you got to a libertarian in the Republican Party that a bit of politics puts me on the far left fringe today when that was considered a right thirty years. It's all so extreme now and so polarized. It just doesn't work. Well. Hopefully they'll figure out some somebody will

figure some way. We need a sacrificial candidate to go up there and just blow everything up to get people paying attention, knowing there's no chance of being elected within their party, but just to get the topics discussed. You know, the closest guy to that was Rand Paul, who used to say stuff that and the rest of the party would just cringe. It was fascinating, but he was so extreme, like gold standard and this and that that. It was just he just played liberit libertarians. So he wasn't He

doesn't He didn't solve problems. He just he was just as much dogma as anybody else. You need someone who's gonna look at everything individually and say here's the problem, here's the solution, here's how we vetted it. If you don't like it kiss my ass because I don't care if I get elected. Ron Pole is the only guy.

And I wasn't a run Pole fans supporter, but I was kind of a fan of his because he's the only guy who would come out and say we can't spend a trillion dollars on these overseas wars that are of choice, and nobody else in the party would say anything. No, they wouldn't. But RAN's problem. You know, they asked me to go Ran Ran or run right Rans a little bit more um center center, but still everything still yeah, but it's all dogma, right. You can't just stick the

libertarian dogma whatever it is, right, conservative dogma, democrat. It's the dogma that kills the dog and and that's the appeal of the guy we were talking about earlier, because he's really he's a technocrat. He just what we need to do to get the job, and that's the appeal. And unfortunately that's a tough guy to get through through. That's why a Bomb has been closer to center than

anybody else. Right, stays out of the bedroom, do your own thing right, you know, begrudgingly came along on gay rights, and it turns out to work. Who would? Who would? I don't think he expected that to be as this less of a problem. It's crazy, But that just says who we are as a nation, you know, and we we go through this fight fight fight or maybe not, maybe not or maybe not. No, forget it, that's old news. I have. I have one last quote. I'm afraid I'm

keeping you here forever. I have one last quote. I want to talk to you. Is there anything else you want to bring up that we haven't gotten? No, I've just you know, more chances to nail the sec un tell Mary White should be fired and thrown on the curb. And well, who are they going to replace it with? They're not gonna me? Yeah? That well again, if I was benevolent dictator. There was a line you said that stayed with me because it's something I really believe in.

And this is what I meant by I'm really sympatico with a lot of things. You talk about, the most important thing you could do with school is learn how to learn. I love that line. It's really true. We don't teach kids how to think, We teach them how to regurgitate. Talk a little bit about what you meant by that the world has changed. Um, when we were growing up, you had to memorize things because if you didn't know them, you had to go find him in the library in a book. Right now we live in

an open book world. You're on your phone, you're you're you know, one click onstantaneous something about anything, anything, right, So you've got to learn how to not only find it, which is easy, but you've got to learn how to consume it, um, understand it and critically think about it and come to a conclusion. And we don't teach that, you know, I try to do it with my kids, you know, I try to. Don't just give me the answer,

tell me why. How important is it to us as a society to raise a generation of people who know how to think about thinking, who know how to It's critical? Right, because if you don't think we're not doing that. The scary part is what you would envision if we didn't teach our kids how to think critically is exactly what we have now, which is which is a system that's not working. Part is an extremism ideological The system is working, the system is well, everybody is getting food and or

many most people, it's still the greatest country in the world. Right, we still the American dream is still alive. And well, it's just we have line items that are ridiculous and so it's not like the big picture we're in good shape that the country has not falling apart. We have risks, right, yeah, depending on where you live, right, um, and so, but those relying items, those are things that you can find

a way to fix if people think critically. The problem is people are discouraged from thinking critically because it's not politically correct. It doesn't get you raised, it doesn't so people shut up, right, and there's no outlets for people to grow with their ideas like there should be. But your to your point, We as a parent, right, and we need to teach your kids to be critical thinkers.

We need to get kids in school earlier. We need to recognize the fact that some parents are not going to be good parents, so we help them as much as we can with preschool. Like I guess the mayor here is trying to do right good. That's smart, right, people hate it in a lot of respects. Well, no one wants to pay a friend and people accused the mayor of New York as running a nanny state. But when you have a city, you have real problems. The

garbage has to be collected. Look, it's not where you start, it's where you end up, right, And you can call it anything you want. And I I used when I was in college, I used to say, look, screw them. If they don't want to do the work, they deserve everything that they get. Until I got to the point where I was paying for them, right, And so now that I'm paying for them, I'd rather have them go to preschool. I'd rather pay for the preschool because it's

gonna cost me less. It's cheaper than unemployment, it's cheaper than than drug rehabilitation is cheap. That's exactly right. So rather than being a fool on my side of it and say, golly, that's just wrong. Right, in a perfect world, it's wrong, But in reality, it is what it is. And how am I going to get to the best point for my kids? How am I going to do the best what I think is for the country, Because not only do you have to learn I learned. I

say it all the time. Other than serving in the military, the most patriotic thing you can do is get stink and rich, right, and pay your taxes because that creates opportunity for everybody else. And we can help send kids to preschool so they can learn. So you've got to look for the solutions and not just the line items that you fight. And with critical, critically thinking kids, I think we'll be we'll get more of that um where kids just read dogma and regurgitate, we'll have less of it. Right.

We want practical solutions, generation that understands how to deal with problems and find solution. I mean, because you've got to think of in this world things happened, so information travels so much more quickly than when we were growing up. There used to be an information arb right where people didn't know something. I could go to a bookstore figured out like that and learn it before anybody else. That information arb is gone because everybody has that information at

their fingertips. It's instantaneous. So because that information ARB has gone, everything happens in real time so much and so kids things are going to be affecting our kids so much more quickly than they did us. It's in social media.

You know there's a rumor, you know the kids said this, The kids said that that you've got to be able to respond and deal with an understand in real time, in real time, and we've got to teach our kids that I'm looking at helping a business school in Dallas, UM just change eaching their curriculum for entrepreneurs completely degrees, rather than doing the kind of Harvard Business School case study.

Being able to walk into any business in any situation and understand exactly what that business needs and how to do it, and critically think and process information more quickly because that's the skill set. Learn how to learn, learn how to process, learn what the impact is going to be, and then be able to make a decision about it. Mark, You're absolutely delight to sit and talk to here for for two full hours. You're listening to Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio