Mark Cuban on AI in politics, running for president (or not), and why he hates the media business

21:28And then we put it online, and again, we crashed the internet. And then when they came out with the actual audio. It was just all these things. As people got bandwidth, they realized that anything was accessible. And all of a sudden, they wanted everything. Well, we need to take a short break, but we'll be right back with more from Mark Cuban right after this.

21:59Your old Shark Tank colleague, Kevin O 'Leary, has actually become this time around, he was, he supported Trump, I think last time around as well, but this time around, he's become much, much more vocal. He's on CNN many evenings of the week defending Trump. I mean, what do you make of that? Have you talked to Kevin? Yeah, I talk to him. I give him shit all the time. Yeah. What do you think of his CNN appearances? Do you think, do you think he's doing an okay job defending Trump? You got to understand Kevin. Kevin wants to stay relevant. I love Kevin. As a friend, he's a great friend. He's not dumb.

22:31He's smart. And he knows that when he disagrees with people, that's when he gets the most visibility. And so, you know, you talk about, you know, visibility and awareness, and that's what Kevin's all about. He wants to stay in the mind's eye of everybody, and he wants to be that guy that's contrarian, that's just like, you know, we try to tell the Democrats to go on Fox News, on Rogan and everything. Kevin's the corollary to that, and he understands that, unlike the Democrats, other than Pete and some others, he understands that that's a good strategy to create visibility.

23:05Ben Smith:And you are perpetually mentioned as somebody who might run for president in 2028. One of our most recent guests was talking you up, Scott Galloway, in fact. How are you going to approach that decision? I'm not going to do it. You know, I've said the only way I would do it is if Trump tried to run for a third term. But because then that's just changing everything, right? And that's a true threat. But on that, I'm not going to put my family through that. You know, my kids are 15, 18, and 21. And the amount of grief and abuse that just comes with doing that, when I'm 95 and taking 105 and taking my last breaths, right?

23:43I don't want to say, well, gee, I ran for president, maybe won, maybe didn't. I want to know that, you know, that's why I quit Shark Tank. That's one of the reasons I sold the Mavs. You know, this is prime time for them too. And, you know, I don't want to take anything away from their ability to be who they want to be. Even though we're three years away now, obviously there's a lot of candidates who are out there who are already visiting South Carolina, who are, you know, talked about there's a dozen or more. Who do you like out there so far? Who do you think is doing a good job? Scott Galloway would be great.

24:14Jon Stewart would be great. James Tallarifko, I think, I forget his name. He's the - Yeah, Texas lawmaker. Yeah, from Texas. I love him. I mean, he's still got to figure his way. He's young, and if 35 or 30, whatever age he is, and he's still got to learn a lot of the nuanced elements, not of politics, but of implementation of programs and, you know, what works in business and doesn't work. But I love the fact that he's a hardcore Christian that doesn't put up with hypocrisy. And that is what is driving, I think, our country in the wrong direction, is so much hypocrisy. You know, say one thing, do another thing, you know, don't matter what you just said, doesn't matter what you believe.

24:58And I think he stands on principles. I think Scott's like that. I think Jon Stewart's like that. But in terms of traditional politicians that we've seen, meh.

25:07Ben Smith:It sounds like you think basically like a media guy makes a pretty good candidate. Well, if you gave me—like when I was campaigning with Kamala, her biggest problem was her campaign would not let her sell. She's not a bad salesperson when you talk to her one-on-one, and she's smart, and she's driven. But they did everything as if it was all driven by a consultant, which it was. and you can't be that way in a world with Donald Trump. Donald Trump changed all the rules. The Democratic Party is dead. The Republican Party is dead. It's the Trump family business on the Republican side. It's nobody's business on the Democratic side.

25:43They don't know what to do. But what Donald Trump does better than anybody is sell. I'm going to end all wars day one. I believe you. I'm going to cut prices day one. Your grocery prices, I believe you. That's why the guy in New York, I think, is doing so well. Yeah, Zoran. Zoran, he can't do any of that shit, but he doesn't care. He's saying it anyways. He's learned from Trump. He's Trumpian in every single way. You want lower grocery prices? I'll open the grocery store. Do you think that this field in 2028 on the Democratic side is going to be stronger than the fields in 2016 and 2020, kind of because the Democrats have, at this point, have learned that, okay, something we've been fundamentally doing hasn't been working because we've lost two out of these three times to Trump.

26:32I think it's the wrong question. Sorry, right? The question is, what drives people to vote? What makes people select who they're going to vote for? Algorithms. And what's going to change in addition to algorithms? ChatGPT, perplexity, Gemini, All these things are going to only increase in capability and ability and impact. We're using search engines less. And with all the abilities that, you know, AI video can do, who knows what our usage patterns are going to be on social media. It could be that we start to hate social media because it's all the guerrilla, you know, memes that are out there and all the video stuff that are hysterical but dominate the social part.

27:19And, you know, who knows what that does to algorithms. And maybe we want more face-to-face communications. Maybe we need somebody, and I think this is the case, we need more face-to-face communications. But both parties, whichever party wants to win, has got to be an expert in AI. Not just in how you use it from a media perspective and a marketing and a sales perspective to get voters to get out and vote, but also how you implement it to improve the economics of the country, to reduce the stress of, you know, all of our citizens, because that's what AI can do. And Donald Trump has a hard time spelling it.

27:57You know, there's some people around him that are okay with it. But just like Zoran, somebody's going to be out there and going to say, I'm going to use AI to drop the price of butter to seven cents, and I'm going to cut the cost of bananas to 15 cents because of AI. And here's how I'm going to demonstrate. We're going to, you know, improve the supply chains and all that. And it'll go right over everybody's head, but they'll hear bananas are going down, right? Price of gas is going down. The price of energy is going down because of AI. And if you look it up in ChatGPT, you know, we'll see what it says.

28:33And I think that's the final piece that'll determine an election. How are you using AI in your businesses? All day, every day, just trying to learn everything I can. There's gonna be two types of companies, those who are great at AI and everybody and every other company, right? There's not, I've been in tech business, like we've been talking, my entire adult life. And I've seen everything and the impact it's had. And in every single one of those cases, I've been able to be successful, you know, starting the first streaming company, starting the first high def company, et cetera, because you could see a path where the technology was going.

29:11You know, when I started HDNet, it was like the high def, you know, plasma TVs were$20 ,000. And people like, ain't nobody paying$20 ,000. But it was easy to see that they were going to go down in price performance. With AI, it's not so predictive. But what I will predict is every single voter for presidential and probably the lower races, starting in 2026, right, in presidential 2028, is going to ask ChatGPT, who should I vote for and why? Or this is what I heard and this is what I've said. Or they're going to ask perplexity or they're going to ask, you know, Gemini.

29:48Ben Smith:So there's going to be a real fight for control of those results, isn't there? Yes. And you can and you can't control them, right? You know, like cost plus drugs, I use it like, I'm like, what's our price for this particular drug? because, you know, it's faster for me to ask ChatGPT than to go to costplusdrugs.com. And the answers are 99 % of the time they're correct. And so it's going to change everything. Well, we already see that happening too in PR. I mean, there was an article, I think it was in New York Magazine that was published. You know, I've heard this a little bit in my reporting as well.

30:23One of the evolving fields in communication is not the fight over SEO, right? Like that used to be incredibly important. Yeah, AEO. Yeah, right. Or GEO, right? You know, whatever it is. But it is really interesting that a lot of how people are going to define the images of these of companies and of people is going to be fought not about like just fighting over lines in a Wikipedia page. Well, I'll tell you the bigger question, the bigger problem, right, is advertising. Now, and I'm not talking, you know, an ad that goes, you know, you see your list of chats and there's an ad, you know, buy my pineapple juice type thing, right?

30:57I'm saying you've got a 12-year-old kid asking questions that are very personal. and if it's listening and saying, oh, okay, you need, you know, for your acne, you need to buy this cream at this pharmacy, you know, or having problems, you know, not getting along with your parents. Let me recommend this psychologist and just ask your parents for your credit card. That's terrifying. Yeah. Terrifying because we are going to open up and there's no way to avoid this. We are going to open up. You've opened up to it and asked questions you would not want anybody to know that you asked. I have, you have, whether it's about health, whatever it may be, every single human being is going to do that.

31:40There are 350 million daily users for ChatGPT. And so how we deal with advertising is everything. Because go back to what I said about the algorithms and how much impact that they had. Like, their eating cats and dogs was brilliant. Nobody's eating cats and dogs, but, you know, it just was there everywhere you turn. Brat Summer should have been, but they dropped the ball.

32:06Ben Smith:So what is advertising? I mean, I think you've talked about banning advertising or at least freezing it for now in these AI products. What do you think is, like, what is the ad product wind up being? The ad product, look, if you list it just like a search engine listing, you know, Blue Link in the chat, great, have at it. right? Even if you customize it, you know, but there's, you know, there's got to be age limits. You can't be, you know, have a minor kid and then they're asking questions about their girlfriends or their parents or, you know, depression and you're coming up because you know everything about them.

32:40Ben Smith:This is going to be hyper-personalized, right? This is going to be a new kind of advertising. Hyper-personalized. Yeah. It'll be just like, you know, the Facebook in 2016, Brad Parsco did the thing with Britannic. I forget their name. Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica, yeah, where they just micro-targeted everything so badly that they had to get rid of it, right? But it won the election. In my mind, it won the election for them. And so you can hyper-target down to the personal level. I mean, literally, algorithms right now, your YouTube feed is different than mine. Your TikTok feed or Instagram feed is unique to you, unique to me.

33:16But you get the point, right? With generative AI, by 2026, you see the speed of improvement these things are going through? Oh, my God. And so the candidate that just uses it to lie their ass off because nobody understands it, uses it to get, like you said, GEO, right, to get to their benefit, what kind of limits are there? We've got to figure those things out and nobody is capable of doing it. Republicans are impotent because they're terrified of Trump. Democrats are impotent because they're terrified of, you know, everything. And so, you know, nobody does anything. And that's why people are looking for somebody outside the political realm, like me or Scott Galloway, Jon Stewart, whoever it may be, because we're actually doing something.

34:04We're not saying we can't do it until we're elected. We need to get the House majority. No. It's like if you are anti-billionaire and you want to get billionaire taxes passed, great. More power to you. But you got to wait. If you want to come to me or anybody else that's wealthy, Scott Galloway, whoever, and say, let's put together this program, that's how you do shit. That's how you get trusted. That's how people say they actually do things instead of just, you know, play politician. Well, Mark, while you're here, we want to ask you about basketball as well. We want to ask you about professional sports.

34:39You know, I was seeing, as I was preparing for this interview, I was reading a stat that one third of NBA teams have changed owners since 2019. You're a part of that statistic. You sold the Mavs, I think, in 2024. The Lakers sold earlier this year. The Boston Celtics sold as well. Why is now the time to sell an NBA team? Why is everybody doing it? You know, everyone has their own reason, but part of it's age. You know, it takes a lot of energy and, you know, are you going to pass it down to your kids? For me, I want them to go in their own direction. And you know how hateful sports are. Look what happened with Nico and all that and the whole fire Nico stuff.

35:16You know, there were lesser versions of that. It was always get Luca help, right? Or do this or do that. You know, trade Dirk, you guys suck. You'll never win. And then we win a championship. That, you know, in this social media day and age, just like running for president. I want my kids to go on their own path and figure things out. And it's politics and sports are the two areas where it's, you know, you can't just say, hey, just take over the company and do your thing. It's just a different beast. And then, you know, you have to deal with the state issues and all that kind of stuff. And I think that plays a big part of it as well.

35:52Ben Smith:When you owned the Mavs, you know, you're obviously outspoken about pretty much everything. Did you feel you had to bite your tongue specifically about China when you owned the Mavs? A little bit, but not that much. Like, you know, people would always try to play gotcha with you. And then I would just ask them what phone they use, you know, and it's pretty straightforward. And there's a ton of hypocrisy. But and again, that goes goes to the heart of everything. Right. You know, the hypocrisy and the whole gotcha thing. That's just part of media then and now. But yeah, there was a certain point because I don't want to step in it.

36:26There was no there was no upside. side and, you know, there's, I'll deal with domestic politics. You don't see me talk about global politics at all.

36:34Ben Smith:Finally, you know, we talked at the top about how, um, how open you are, how willing you are to talk to everybody, every journalist respond to every email. Not everyone trusts me. You, you know, when I talk back to you, 99 % of people I say no to. Well, thank you. But I guess I wonder, you're on the, you're on the open side of this stuff. I wonder anything, any of those you really regret? um i mean there were times i would get fined by the nba um but i knew that was coming there were times like during the um the presidential races where i said what was on my mind about you know donald trump or you know about progressives for that matter or about taxes knowing that i would get shit online and that would kind of destroy my ability to use twitter or x for you know at least a week, but nothing that was just like, you know, overwhelmingly bad.

37:25Well, we should ask, you know, you tweet a lot, you post on X, you've gone back and forth with Elon Musk. I mean, Elon has kind of stepped out of the spotlight a little bit recently, which seems to have been kind of a smart move. Have you talked to him recently? I mean, what's been your read on the kind of last nine months or year of Musk in which we've been on this kind of roller coaster? I mean, I talked to Elon twice in my life, and that was 10 years ago. And so we really don't have a relationship at all. But in terms of what he's done, you know, he's had to make some choices, you know. And there's been books written about, you know, anybody who works with Donald Trump has been burned, you know.

38:06And I think he got close to the sun, and what happened happened.

38:10Ben Smith:He thought he was the sun. He thought he was the sun. And, you know, Donald Trump's a unique beast. You know, he's good at what he does, even though he's good at what he does when it comes to everything but governing, in my opinion. But, yeah, Elon, I think—and I've seen this in a lot of people I know that have tried to work with Trump. They think that they could push them in the direction they want him to go, and it just never works. Well, Mark, we really appreciate you coming on the show today. This was totally fascinating. We appreciate you being game for a wide variety of topics, so thank you.

38:43That was a lot of fun. I appreciate it, guys. Thank you, Mark. That really was a lot of fun. Thank you.

39:03Ben Smith:So, Max Cuban will talk with authority and confidence and a kind of salesmanship of just about literally anything. Are you sold? I mean, how could you not be? I think like most of America has been sold over, you know, the last X number of years, right? 30 years that he's been in the in public view. You know, what I took away from our conversation is that what Mark is really interested in at the end of the day, and you see this on his Twitter feed, you see this kind of everywhere he is. And I'm surprised that it's not basketball so much. It really is American politics and the pharmaceutical business that he is in.

39:40Like, those are the things that he's really interested in more than anything else. And, you know, he kind of has some perspective on the media business. Clearly, he was interested in AI and was interested in the kind of tech-adjacent media business. But honestly, I think the thing he's obviously most interested in is politics at this point. That's why I find it to be so fascinating, the idea that he doesn't want to run himself.

40:04Ben Smith:Yeah, I totally agree with you. did not sound to me like a guy who's totally ruled it out, even if he said that, just because, because by the way, I brought the price of your drugs down is an incredible platform on which to run for president, as well as being a really interesting business idea. And he is, I mean, he is just, he's an extraordinarily good salesman. He must've mentioned cost plus drugs like seven times in the course of those conversations. I mean, so impressive. Yeah. I mean, that's why he was on, that's really why he's on the show is he's a marketing guy, you know, in addition to being a very successful investor in several ways.

40:36But I think that in reality, one of his greatest skills, like many people who have come on our show who are great media figures, is marketing.

40:43Ben Smith:Do you share his concern about advertising and AI? I sort of didn't see that coming. It was interested in it. I don't think I've totally processed his concern. What do you think? I mean, I would imagine that there are some companies maybe in his portfolio that are probably chomping at the bit to be able to advertise to people through ChatGPT, through the authority that comes with large language models, right? And it is going to change the advertising business it already, AI already has, right? It's going to change it on the user and sales side. But I mean, I don't know. I don't know what that means for us in the media business, but I certainly think it's interesting.

41:18But it was more interesting that he was really thinking about it through the lens of how is this going to shape people's perspectives of the candidates and which candidate has a plan to win on AI in 2028. That's really interesting. And can any of these candidates kind of trick the, you know, chat GPT or these things? I kind of think that the answer is no, right?

41:39Ben Smith:I know. He did have a slightly kind of cynical view on politics, which was like, the best campaign is going to be the one that says to people, I'm going to use AI to make your bananas 10 cents. Yeah. Do you think that any, I mean, I would be curious to look back and see how much AI influenced and large language models influenced people's perspectives on the last election. I imagine it probably doesn't represent very much and people come to their own conclusions outside of AI. But it is an interesting thing to think about and probably will matter more on a local level or with smaller candidates.

42:13Places where I think with the general election, the large language models are going to have plenty of people who are in charge of making sure that people don't put their thumb on the scale. But I think that for smaller races, right, ones that people are paying less attention to, I think that AI could play a real role in shaping people's opinions in that way.

42:31Ben Smith:Yeah, I think that's right. And honestly, his being so worried about it makes me a little worried. Yeah, that's true. Well, it was really fun to have him on. So thanks for convincing him and nailing him down. We had to move it around a few times. It was not hard to convince. I sent him a note saying, come on our podcast in the subject line? And he was like, sure, CC my assistant. It was an easy booking.

43:17had to say, come on our show. Would we like to have him? I don't really know, Ben. What do you think? I don't know. Maybe on a slow week.

43:23Ben Smith:Maybe on a slow week. Sorry, this is just now insulting. Sorry, Kevin. It would be nice to have you on. If you like the show, please do follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And if you still want more, you can always subscribe to Semaphore's media newsletter, which is out every Sunday night. Send us a tip. Send us an idea for something to write about. Send scoops. Send scoops. Please do.

43:48Thank you.