The Exchanges

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

A So I sold three quarters of them, not the whole thing. I still own 27.7%, um, for a couple of reasons. One, when I first bought in in 2000, I, I was the tech guy in the NBA. I was the media guy, you know, broadcast.com just sold it. Um, HD net just created the very first ever high definition television network. I had every edge in every angle. Now fast forward, 24 years later, um, in order to sustain growth, to be able to compete with the new collective bargaining agreement, you have to have other sources of revenue. And so you see other teams and all sports for that matter, You know, talking about casinos, talking about creating, doing real estate. That's just not me. I wasn't going to put up two billion dollars to, you know, to get an education on building. So that was one, that's part one. Part two is my kids are now 1518, and 21. And over the next 10 years, that's a lot of pressure on them to have to take over the team or deal with The trust, you know, God forbid something happens to me, deal with the trust fund issues, and so by selling three quarters of it, I took all that pressure off of them, because you, you guys see the hate. I mean, Jason could tell you all day long about Jimmy Dolan, you know.

AI assessment note: “I sold three quarters of them, not the whole thing, for a couple of reasons.”

Q Can we do Biden? What are the things that Biden and Harris did well that have helped the country? And what are the things that they could have done better did not do well?

A So I'll start with the negatives first. So just so you know that there's a lot of them. One, the way they handled the border was horrific. There's no way to, you know, to say it any differently. Now, I understand why they took the approach they did. Literally, if, if I were in a central, a Central American company country, and my family was at risk of getting shotgun because there's a drug war, I'm doing everything I can, and I reckon, I recognize, you know, that if I just set foot on American soil, I have a chance for asylum, and I get that. And I get why Biden and his administration might say, Just for humanitarian reasons, we're going to increase the number of people that we allow to do that. I understand why he would do it, but at the same time, he opened the door too wide, and he made it so that there were too many people that came through, and that created cascading problems. Now, to his credit, down back in June, I think it was, he signed, he signed an executive order, which he now has made permanent, or as permanent as you can as president, that changed, um, that there's no longer The option to just set foot on American soil and be eligible for a hearing for asylum. You can't do that any longer. And to her credit, she worked with the head of the Mexican government, and they have taken steps to reduce the flow of people to the border. And so now the number of encounters …

AI assessment note: “So I'll start with the negatives first. One, the way they handled the border”

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

A I don't, I don't think she's hiding. There's two elements there, right? One, I think she understands the assignment, which is to win the election, and the best way to reach the most number of people and get them to change their mind is not the one percent of people who are high information voters. It's all the people who are showing up at rallies and screaming and yelling. Those are the people who, people whose mind she has changed so far, and that's how she's caught up and who she wants to change, and that's where she's putting her focus. And two, and this is brutally honest, um, She has too long a wind-up in answering every single question, and that makes interviews difficult. She wants to inspire everybody with everything that she answers and tries to get people all excited about what she's going to do, and so she takes too long to get to that. If you cut out the wind-ups, her answers aren't so bad. Her answers are absolutely legit, but that wind-up makes it seem like the whole word salad thing.

AI assessment note: “I don't, I don't think she's hiding. There's two elements there, right?”

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

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

AI assessment note: “I think the spending was bad. I think, um, that we overspent”

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

A So here's the way I look at Kamala, right? She is open-minded. She's smart. She does the work. She digs in and learns. She's ethical. She's honest. She cares. Um, she wants to bring the country to the middle. She knows that when she was far left, that might have been great for the state of California, but it doesn't solve the problems of the United States of America, of America today, and that's why you've seen her go to the middle, and that is truly, I know David, you might not believe this, it is truly honest, and through and through her, when she gave, gives speeches now, she says, I'll take ideas from independence, I'll take them from Republicans. I don't care. We have a lot of problems to solve in this country. I, I would be shocked if, if she wins, she talks to Elon Musk, if Elon would talk to her. She doesn't care where the ideas come from.

AI assessment note: “So here's the way I look at Kamala, right? She is open-minded.”

Q What's the pushback? But Mark, I mean, what is the pushback you get? Because that's, that's none count kids counter to the trend, right? So is it just infinite growth or how does the industry respond when you create that price differential?

A So it's the innovators dilemma. They can't just give up all of this margin. They, so most of the business of pharmacy benefit managers, not most, so a big chunk of the businesses Comes from corporate, um, from corporations, right, and self-insured companies, and they go to them, and they put together the thing called the formulary, which is all the drugs, right, that's available to them, and they say, we're going to price this so that we get rebates, and we'll pass on the rebates we get from the manufacturers to you. Now, they say they're going to pass on a hundred percent of that rebate. They don't. They create all these subsidiaries and everything that skim 10% or whatever off the top, But they know that they can continue working with these companies because the core competency of a CEO is not to know their health care costs. And literally for any CEOs that are out there, audit your PBM contract. Audit it right now. I promise you that that PBM is going to tell you you don't need to audit. And then you can say, we want to add cost plus drugs to our pharmacy supply contract. And they're going to say, no, you're not allowed to do it. Because they know our prices are so much lower that is disrupting their industry.

AI assessment note: “they're going to say, no, you're not allowed to do it.”

Q Can we get, Can we get into this? Cause I, you obviously have like a love hate relationship with Trump going back 20 something years. So let's just go through the, the, um, the timeline here.

A I'm just very curious about this. If he was running for president and we all got together and, you know, just shot the like we are now, he's a blast. He's fun to talk to, you know, he's got charisma, he's got personality. He's easy to like. I mean, you know, he's used to schmoozing. He's a, he's one of the world's best schmoozers. And so he's easy to get along with. It's not personal, but that doesn't mean like you guys with each other. It doesn't mean you can't, you know, as different things happen over time, you can't go back and forth. And you know, he did the same thing. So the whole history of it was back, um, right when, um, we went public at broadcast.com. No, right after we announced the sale in 2000, um, was it 2000? Yeah. After we announced the sale, And January, he threw a Super Bowl party at Mar-a-Lago, and one of my buddies, um, Who, um, knew him invited me, and I was like, cool, I'll go. Mar-a-Lago, I hadn't seen it. Donald Trump, maybe I'll meet him. And so, you know, you guys have seen Mar-a-Lago in a beautiful pool, beautiful view. There's a brand up there, and he had like a bunch of, um, Hooters and, um, what's the suntan lotion that always had girls, whatever.

AI assessment note: “the whole history of it was back, um, right when, um, we went public”

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

A Yeah, exactly right. And there's contracts. And so that means the United States of America is violating all these contracts with small businesses and medium sized businesses. Um, and maybe Elon put Doge in the treasury, who knows? And that's how we make it all up. But, but you can't just crap and slash and burn to your point, Dave. I mean, it just won't work. And so, what you can do, though, is introduce technology. We have yet to have a president that fully understands technology. I'm not here to tell you that Kamala Harris is a geek. She's not. But she understands the impact, and she has a lot of people who truly are geeks around her, and she truly believes that implementing technology is a way to improve efficiency. But the whole idea is, you can't take the libertarian approach. That's ideologic. You have to take a problem-solving approach. How do you look at any specific problem we're trying to solve? How can you apply technology to that? I think you will get that from the Harris administration, as opposed to Donald just talking about the AI and how much energy it consumes.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, exactly right. And there's contracts.”

Q ago? Why then did you, uh, support Biden throughout your entire last three and a half years? Why don't they ask her these questions? If you were part of the Biden administration, why do you volunteer to be the border czar if you disagree with Joe Biden about these policies? When exactly did you change your mind? Those are the questions that she should be answering. Why won't she answer?

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

AI assessment note: “means what she's doing is working”

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

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

AI assessment note: “we don't know who the winners are going to be to host those models”

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

A I think the way he dealt with The zeitgeist isn't the right word. Just the vibe of the country was really, really, really bad. I think the hate that he conveyed, I think the fact that what he tweeted negatively, you know, so companies didn't know what was coming next. You know, he tweeted negatively about me. He can read it negatively about other people. I thought that was a real bad thing when the BLM, um, protests happened and turned into riots. When they went into Minnesota, he was like, when the looting, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Who the says that as a president? And so we had more people die during riots during his term than Biden by a long shot, and I think he misrepresented where he stood in terms of being anti-war. If you go back to 2019, um, and look at the war in Yemen, Um, there were hundreds, at least a 100,000 people plus died, and there was a bipartisan resolution to say, we're not selling any more to the Saudis. We're not selling any more weapons to the Saudis, and a bipartisan resolution, including Mark Meadows, and Rand Paul, and others said, you know, passed it, and it went to his desk, and he said, we're still going to sell these, um, munitions, and this, um, these weapons to Saudi Arabia, even though these people continue to die. So when we talk about, it's, you know, It's not all that much different than Ukraine, and in some respects, on…

AI assessment note: “I think the hate that he conveyed, I think the fact that what he tweeted”

Q Do you think Democrats lied about Biden's condition?

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

AI assessment note: “I don't think The decline is nearly what you're saying it is”

Q Let me just see. What do you think of, like, this, uh, universal basic income, cataclysm?

A I think it's, I think it's the exact opposite. Okay, explain. So, I think that In order to train a model, you need access to information, and the internet ain't what it used to be in terms of being a source of information, and so IP is becoming more valuable. You're not, I think everybody but this time expected, um, all the foundational models to have all this healthcare information, but if I'm Mayo Clinic, I'm not giving Microsoft or Google or OpenAI my IP because that's what brands me, and so there's going to be a lot of money available there, and I think, Um, that there, that has got to be a way to, there's got to be a way to figure that out, right? First, how does IP work and how is it distributed? And then how are we using it just in general? We really don't know how we're going to implement it or use it, or what the interface is going to be, and all that will be figured out by some kid somewhere.

AI assessment note: “I think it's the exact opposite.”