Opinion | Mark Cuban Has Some Things to Say

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Ugh. What are you doing, vaping? What are you doing?

Oh, no, I’m not vaping. It’s just the Lumen thing that’s supposed to help you learn if you’re burning carbs or fat.

Oh, you’re kidding me. Really?

Yeah.

You just can’t look at your plate and say, don’t eat that bagel, Mark?

Well, no, but I work out. I wanted to know if I’m burning fat or carbs so I can adjust my diet.

Oh my god, Mark. Well, hey, Sway listeners. I’m here with billionaire investor, Shark Tank star, and Dallas Mavericks owner, as well as weird user of gadgets, Mark Cuban. We’ve known each other forever, since the early days of the internet, when he was about a millionaire, I think I met you, perhaps even less.

Yeah.

Anyway, Mark, there’s so much to talk about. Let’s start with GameStop. So the stock grew 1,700% in January, egged on by Reddit’s WallStreetBets. They’ve been on a mission to squeeze hedge funds and short-sellers on actual Wall Street. You’ve been rallying for the little guy in this, which is ironic because you’re not really a little guy. But you have been sort of one of these people that’s talked about people taking control of their own investments, et cetera, for a long time.

Yeah, so one of the things I have the benefit of is, I started trading stocks in my 20s, and I knew what it was like. And then I’ve also had the benefit of seeing things happen all the years. And I’ll give you one perfect example — Herbalife. There was a battle between Carl Icahn and a hedgie named Bill Ackman. And Carl Icahn said, I don’t care about the company. You’re short. I’m just going to blow you away. And they would get on TV and argue about it back and forth. This is the same thing. The only difference is people presume that if Carl Icahn does it, it’s OK, right? It’s just the Wall Street titans going at it. But in this new digital age, the collective of Wall Street Bets has more influence and power than any Carl Icahn or Mark Cuban or a hedge fund at all because how quickly they can move and the collective value.

If they’re moving in the same direction, that is.

Right, of course.

If they’re moving as a group — hold, essentially. That’s their idea of sort of like an attack.

Yeah, and that’s the analogy I use to crypto, right? Because there’s the term, HODL — Hold On for Dear Life — which is a fundamental tenet of Bitcoin, right? That it’s going to go up. It’s severely undervalued, and everybody just needs to hold on. That’s not to say people don’t trade in and out. They do. But if everybody holds, then the price is going to go up.

All right, but let’s talk about the actual underlying value of the asset they’re trading. I mean, obviously you can say the same thing about Bitcoin or anything else. Does it matter?

No.

Or what’s happening here? Because I think a lot of people look at GameStop and think, oh, that business was going to go out of business anyway.

Yeah, I mean, it really doesn’t matter. Is Tesla worth what Tesla’s worth?

I can be certain GameStop will not be Tesla. OK, I’m going to go with that one. I feel like I’m good.

Well, here’s what I would tell you, right? So when you actually go in and dig in, this guy, Ryan Cohen, who had Chewy.com, put in a lot of his own cash. So he’s either really stupid, or he knows something that other investors have picked up on, which is not unusual.

It’s an e-commerce bet right now.

Maybe the two go hand in hand that he picked up on something. Maybe it was just a stop clock, you know? They picked up on the short squeeze. He picked up on an opportunity. He invested his own real money. GameStop’s in Dallas, so I followed him and want him to do well. But sometimes there’s a lot more to the story than is obvious. And I think, yes, it could be worth it.

OK, so the underlying thing doesn’t matter. It’s this idea of the power of Main Street versus Wall Street. Do you think that’s a real narrative?

Yeah, it is and it isn’t, right? So small investors have always been able to move markets. But now speed and information and grouping of investors is much more compact and dense. And that consolidated power is just that. It makes them more powerful than the traditional because there’s so many rules and regulations that hedge funds have to follow. Big investors — if I wanted to take a big position or anybody else wanted to take a big position, we can do it, but there’s more power in the collective. If I buy 15% of a company, I have to report it. Then I’m not able to sell at certain times, right? So if I’m more than a 5% owner, I can only sell at this point or that point. But if you’ve got two million people who collectively own 10% or 5%, you don’t have any of those limitations. And so, effectively, they can be far more powerful if they stay together. I mean, it’s always been tried by big brokerage firms. When Merrill Lynch or Schwab or Fidelity does a call or puts out a note, saying, this is our price target on this stock, it’s not like they don’t expect it to go up or their customers to buy. It’s just — it’s very top down. This is very bottom up.

So could it be the great equalizer? This is something people have been hoping for. And it can be seen in good ways and bad ways.

That’s the whole fundamental concept behind Bitcoin and decentralized and DeFi, right? That you don’t want centralized power, that you don’t want big companies making decisions for you, and that you want individual investors to have impact. And that’s the problem. You don’t really own anything when you buy a share of stock anymore. And if you don’t really own anything, then it’s just a store value where you hope somebody else buys it. And if we recognize that it’s going to be different this time, then you really have to start questioning regulation and where it comes from.

All right, well, let’s get to that. So what is the role of the SEC? You recently tweeted the reason Wall Street has such an advantage over the little guys? The SEC.

Yeah, I mean, the thing with the SEC — I’ll use insider trading as an example. There is no law against insider trading, right? There’s just a series of precedents. And the SEC — and I’ve said this many times over the years that I’ve been battling them, which now was 14 years since I started interacting with them. They had every opportunity to publish bright line rules. This is what you can do. This is what you can’t do. If you aren’t sure, just go to this webpage, and we just list them all out. But they don’t do that. They encourage complications, which is basically a Lifetime Employment Act for their SEC lawyers and the lawyers who do securities litigation. And that’s just wrong. I went through a process one time, and I put it on a YouTube video that’s out there, where I called the SEC just to ask a question. I said who I was. This is Mark Cuban, and I just want to get a question answered. Can I do this or this? And you can talk to this person and this person. And finally, they sent me to a page on SEC.gov that required me to send to them eight copies of the question, and they didn’t know when they would get back to me. You can’t have a government agency that’s supposedly for the people that’s supposedly supportive of small investors, that the only way, really, to interact with them is via a lawyer. That just doesn’t work. And so everything is stacked in the favor of the SEC and against the small investor. And that’s wrong. And the SEC knows it.

What about in instances of fraud or if something happened here? Don’t they have a role to play there if there was — that people got into these stock rooms and started — like, big hedge fund traders and were anonymous and put out false information and tried to manipulate the stocks. Isn’t there a role in that for the SEC?

Oh, sure. Yeah, look, if there’s fraud, if there’s a pump and dump that’s instigated by a hedge fund or somebody, nail them, right? But the hedge funds, well, they can afford to fight it. And so, yeah, I don’t have a problem with the SEC, or preferably, maybe it’s Consumer Finance Protection Board or whatever. Maybe they go after them and investigate again. Because the SEC is kind of useless.

Useless — you’d want to get rid of it completely?

Useless. I think, you know what? If you got rid of the SEC and reconfigured it as something designed for today’s trading environment and the people who were doing the redesign weren’t from hedge funds and weren’t from Wall Street, weren’t from the exchanges, it would be far better off. But the fix is really simple.

Where did they come from? Is it going to be you and Elon Musk deciding this?

Yeah, right. We could do a lot better job. I mean, but look, the fix is really simple, and it should come from Congress. You hear Elizabeth Warren complaining about all these things. Well, Elizabeth — you know, Senator Warren — all you have to do is ask for bright line rules. That is it. Because small investors are not going to understand legal precedent.

Do you think they’re going to take action against day traders and GME stock or going after folks at Wall Street Bets for market manipulation or anybody else?

No, there’s nothing there that I can see that’s market manipulation. And even then, I think that’s going to be pretty straightforward.

All right, but with this, you said this day trading boom reminds you of the dot-com boom. Do you still hold that view? Because you and I were around for, remember, e-trade. Everyone was in their basement. And your own stock benefited from it, broadcast.com.

Oh, of course. Yeah, of course. What reminds me of it is how people talk about it. What was interesting to me and the corollary to me, I could get in a cab back then, and the cab driver, not knowing who I was or anything, would just ask me what stocks I was buying, right?

Yeah, I remember.

Everywhere you went, people were talking stocks. And now, it’s the same type of thing. My 11-year-old son watches TikTok and gets his information. And I set up a Robinhood account for him, no margin. And he traded in and out of AMC and made a few bucks. And it’s similar because people are using online platforms just to talk about these stocks continuously.

Right, but how different was it from the sort of e-trade boom? Because that didn’t end well for a lot of people.

Yeah, I mean, and you’re going to have the same issues here.

Yeah.

But then maybe you didn’t have as much information available to you. Everybody had to go to the same sources. Now, everybody has everything available to them online. And I think part of the difference is between what people expect and their perception of some of the WSB traders is they’re not giving them enough credit for being smart. They just assume they’re going to lose their money. There’s plenty of professional investors. Just ask Melvin Capital. And so I don’t think you can talk down these day traders.

Yeah, you can’t. What do you think of these forums? I just interviewed Steve Huffman from it. He’s the one who really did clean up Reddit. Here, he’s sort of backing them 100%, saying, these people know what they’re talking about. They’re no dumber or smarter than Wall Street people. In fact, they’re often smarter. Some are idiots, not many. How do you look at these boards and how important they are?

The same way, right? You get a bell curve of intelligence or your trading acumen. You’re going to have some people that are really smart and know how to use the information. You’re going to have some people who are desperate that get caught up in it, hoping that it’ll go nothing but straight up and will pay off whatever their bills are.

Those people are used to this stock market that always goes up, just like back then.

Yeah, I mean, everybody’s a genius in a bull market until they’re not.

But back in the day, in the dot-com boom, you sold broadcast.com and what? Which I described as a terrible $5.7 billion buy for Yahoo. I thought it was great for you.

I think it was the best — it was a great buy for them. What they did with it was — because remember, they bought it in stock. They didn’t give me cash.

They didn’t give you cash, but I remember I used to always — when I saw Jerry Yang, who was the founder and CEO, I’d say, oh, Mark Cuban’s six times richer than you now because he got out. It would always work for him. But you took over a billion dollars in Yahoo stock, and you hedged it. So what’s your sense of how frothy the market is now?

So I don’t know how frothy it is because interest rates are still under 1%. And even back then, I went back and looked. Interest rates were 4% to 5%. And so you had to want to make more than 4% to 5% guaranteed or think you were going to in order to get into the internet boom. And so, when I collared you know, sold calls, bought puts, because how much money did I need? That was just wealth preservation.

The Fed right now has a 0.25 interest rate. That’s what they have. The government has no choice but to pump money into the economy with more stimulus. Does that keep the market booming?

Yeah, I mean, it’s not even the pandemic. I mean, where else are you going to put your money? And because of that, you’re seeing collectibles, whether it’s Bitcoin or NFTs or trading cards, just instead of blow up, go up, in their prices. But in this generation, they’re so used to everything being digital that it’s not difficult for them to say, look, everything I might value my entire life has been digital and more valuable to me than analog things. Why can’t Bitcoin be more valuable?

OK, so the GameStop squeeze has fostered some common ground for AOC and your very own senator. I know he’s your favorite — Ted Cruz. This is Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Bros meets the Tea Party, all ganging up on Wall Street. There’s been a lot of different people on the same side here.

I don’t think it means anything. I mean, I think politicians virtue signal as much as they possibly can towards potential voters. The things I told you about the SEC, you haven’t seen anybody propose anything yet. And I don’t expect that you really will. They’ll investigate, and there’ll be a lot of people that get up there and talk for their five or eight minutes. And that’ll be it. I think the biggest issue is going to be, what do we try to learn from the monetary policy that we have in place right now or whether we go back to the old dogmas, Democratic dogmas, right? Which is top down government. The Republicans want business to trickle down to the little guy, and the Democrats want big government to trickle down to the little guy. Neither one works. And what we’re seeing right now is, we’re spending a boatload of money, but interest rates are so low that actually, our interest rate payments have gone down. And so it’s cheaper to do these programs than it’s ever been. And in a true business context —

Stimulus programs, you mean.

In a business context, you’d ask yourself, look, if I can borrow money at under 1%, can I get a greater than 1% return investing in the American people?

Right, this is government stimulus. Why not? Why not, you’re saying.

Yeah, I mean, I think you can get a greater return than 1% by investing in the United States and in our people. And that will, in turn, build up the economy. And that, in turn, will grow the economy at a faster rate. But my concern is that based off the socialist side of the Democratic party, if you will, that they are so dogmatic about increased taxes, no matter what. Look, if you want to tax me personally, just a Mark Cuban tax —

This wealth tax, this is the 1%. Now I just proposed the idea of a one-time for this COVID crisis, that people have made enormous amounts of money in the COVID crisis, not through innovation, not through — listen. Amazon is not this much billion dollars better for Jeff Bezos. Tesla is not this much better. Any of these tech companies have benefited because of a one-time event. I proposed at one-time wealth tax.

Yeah, if you have a transaction. If you don’t have a transaction, then you’re going to force people to sell the stock, right? Because just ask yourself, what percentage of your net worth is liquid? Right?

Not much. Yeah.

Yeah. And I’ll just tell you, when Elizabeth Warren came out with her wealth tax, I got a hold of their economist, and I asked them if they did a dynamic model, which means after this tax happens, what happens to the economy? Because people change behaviors — you know, having to sell all your stocks and what that does to the market, having to sell a home, whatever it may be. Because if every year, you’re paying just 2%, that’s a number that’s not liquid. And so you have to create liquidity. And again, I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a wealth tax ever, but it’s got to be — I’ve always been a fan, and I’ve said this years ago, that there should be a windfall profits tax. When I sold Broadcast and I started liquidating it and turning that stock into true cash, I paid my long-term, or in that case, short-term capital gains. But if you would hit me with another 20% because it was greater than $250 million in one swing or in one year, I would have been, sure. I didn’t even know what my tax rates were at the time, and I didn’t care.

Right, so these are one-time gains or not — but these run-ups —

Yeah, they’re windfall profits. Yeah.

And what about the run-ups in stock of, say, someone like Jeff Bezos, who, like I think his —

Yeah, but what are you going to do there, right? Because it could go right back down.

So you don’t worry about the run-up. He has to sell it when he sells it. So, therefore?

Therefore, I think it’s just wait. Wait a year. Wait two years before you do anything with taxes because maybe modern monetary theory works, right? Maybe by borrowing money at less than 0% or less than 1% and investing in the American people through stimulus programs and even transitional job programs to get people jobs who need them, then we grow the economy enough to pay back that note. And you don’t have to raise anybody’s taxes.

This is a little like universal basic income. It’s kind of a giant universal basic income test.

More like modern monetary theory, but yeah, there are certainly constructs of the UBI in there. But it’s just not ongoing.

Not ongoing, right, OK.

It’s just one or two times.

So one of the things, when I said if you were running things, you said you would push vaccine development and vaccine distribution. You are waiting in line for yours, correct?

Yeah, I actually have an appointment. I have heart arrhythmia. I’ve got heart ailments. Yeah, I’ve got some general heart issues that puts me closer to the top.

But what do you think about vaccine tourism, rich people paying for the vaccine?

Look, I get it. I’d rather put up with the grief than not have it.

It’s not a good look.

I just think we’ve got to fix the problem. I mean, I think there shouldn’t be a shortage of vaccines.

So it’s government. So speaking of that, we also talked about you contemplated running for government in 2020. You had polls done. Is it in the cards for 2024?

No, no chance.

This is the biggest question from Twitter, Mark. Some people are like, tell him not to run. And other people are like, tell him to run.

Not going to happen. My only interest was because of Trump.

Because of Trump. Explain that.

I just — because I’m just not a fan of his. I just don’t think he’s very smart. I don’t think he knew what he was doing, and I don’t think he cared to govern. And I think if he won, he won’t be able to run again, but I considered it simply because I just thought for those people who are looking for a businessperson, I could take votes away from him or potentially beat him. Now in hindsight, I don’t think I could beat him, given the number of voters that came out. I would have been wrong. But at the same time, that’s why I considered it.

What about 2024? He still could run if he beats this impeachment thing.

Yeah, I don’t see that happening. And I think he’ll be so tied up in lawsuits and issues that I don’t think that happens.

Should he be impeached or not?

Yes.

And convicted?

Yes.

And kept out of running for office again?

Yes.

Do you think he will?

Yes.

Oh.

Yeah, I think he will. [MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ll be back in a minute. If you like this interview and want to hear others, hit Subscribe. You’ll be able to catch up on Sway episodes you may have missed, like my conversation with WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar. And you’ll get new ones delivered directly to you. More with Mark Cuban after the break.

So let’s get into sports. I want to talk to you about another topic entirely. March 2020, it was announced the NBA season would be suspended. Your reaction went viral. You were sitting at a Mavericks game, looking at your phone. You looked stunned.

What was going through your head?

What the fuck? [LAUGHS]

OK, good. All right, good, good, good. Then?

And because when I walked down on the court, I thought to myself, you know what? There may be nobody in the stands. And it was packed. And I thought, OK, the wisdom of the crowd, they know better than I do. When you have 19,000 people there, they know something. And then in the middle of the third quarter, that’s when we got the word. Because at that point in time, we really didn’t know who to trust. We weren’t getting good information from anybody.

Also, there wasn’t good information. Let’s be — there wasn’t —

Yeah, there wasn’t good information, correct.

Right.

And as a result, we were just kind of going by feel. And once we found out, then it was like, OK, this is real. You don’t just suspend the NBA season for shits and giggles. And then, I kind of game played it out. What if this, then what if that?

Right.

And so, at that point in time, it was, OK, it’s on. I have to think about protecting my family. I have to think about protecting employees, taking care of them. And really, I thought, OK. And I remember telling people, this is six months.

Right.

Because we’re the United States of America.

Yeah, we’re going to figure it out.

That’s how long it takes us to figure out something like this. And obviously, I was wrong.

So tell me about being in the bubble, in the NBA bubble. You were there?

No, I couldn’t go. We had a death in the family. And that was one issue. And then we had a Shark Tank bubble, so I got to go to a Shark Tank bubble.

Shark Tank bubble. OK, you were in the Shark Tank bubble, but well, how do you think the NBA bubble worked?

We had 22 teams and 35 people, I think, per team, plus people from the NBA and other organizations that were supportive. And to have zero cases, that’s incredible.

Yeah, what do you think worked?

The fact that everybody took it seriously, the fact that the NBA was serious about enforcing the rules. I mean, it was great.

I mean, obviously, this will end soon, at some point, relatively soon, for the next season.

Hopefully.

You think your best estimate for when people will be back in the stadiums for the next NBA season?

Well, the cases are going down. So in Dallas, we’re probably going to have fans in the seats, probably 1,000 or 1,500 as a test, either at the end of this week or next.

Wow.

And then, we’re going to do a test. We’re working with the local hospitals and the arena where those people who have been certified as two vaccines plus 14 will be able to come to a game for free. So we can test scaling it, and then if that works, we’ll go to the city and state and ask if we can get some exemptions from the capacity limits that we have.

If people are vaccinated.

For those people who are vaccinated. And I don’t want to make it a free for all where people come in and try to prove they’re vaccinated. So we’re just going to do it working with healthcare providers and first responders that we have relationships with their employers.

So that the firemen and policemen and hospital workers —

Yeah, and the nurses and the doctors can come and have a night out. And they can feel the energy. And we’ll find out if everything works according to Hoyle, right? And if we can also set an example that, OK, here’s how you can deal with volumes of people beyond what we had before, that’ll be a good thing as well.

And then old, sick people like you and me, right? We can go because we’ll have vaccines.

Yeah, I’m still going to be double bonded, right?

Yeah, me, too. Me, too. But until then, the business is in live streaming sports. NFL streaming rights are being negotiated as Disney’s ESPN loses its rights to Monday Night Football at the end of the season. One report says the NFL expects to make more than $100 billion in the next 10 years. You and I have talked about this since broadcast.com back in those days.

It’s interesting that our ratings are up on linear platforms.

So, broadcast.

Yep, broadcast. Yeah, and that’s a good thing. Now, the numbers aren’t enormous like the NFL. Ours are much smaller. But they’re still up. And so, I think sports has a significant role to play, but we’re in the middle of that innovator’s dilemma. How much do we hold on to traditional linear broadcasting in broadcast? Because they need us because they want to retain particularly their older subscribers. But on the flipside, we want to be able to get to direct to consumer at some point and take advantage of all the new technologies and the bandwidth availability and try all the new things that we know we can do. And that’s going to be the decision process that we go through over the next year.

So how does that go through? Because I remember I interviewed you and Ted Leonsis when you first bought your teams. And you both were talking about this. Some of it was stuff in the stadium, which I think didn’t work quite as well. But now you’re talking more about AR and VR kind of stuff and lots of angles and things like that.

So first of all, bandwidth is readily available right now. There are no bandwidth constraints, except the challenges of just scaling to large numbers in the 10s or 20s of million simultaneously. So with bandwidth not being a significant cost, there’s no limit to the number of streams that we can have. And there’s no limit to what we can do in those streams. Every phone right now, whether it’s Samsung, Apple, whatever it is, all now has custom chips built in that allow you to do AR. And the TVs are starting to get more and more of those. So we can implement any number of different things. Now traditionally, when you talk about this traditionally, you talk about stats and overlays and those types of things. But I think it’ll go much further than that.

Right, so this is an overlay. You look at a player, and then —

And you might see their stats or whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what do you think beyond that? Think creatively here. What would that entail?

So what I think we end up with, particularly for our younger viewers, because the Gen Z in particular, maybe going up to 25 years old, they don’t watch linear game broadcasts, period. They consume it more like TikTok. And I think that’s what we get to. So the beauty of TikTok is you don’t have to follow people. It doesn’t care what you like. It pays attention to what you watch and delivers it in that manner. And so, if you like NBA and you’re watching NBA highlights on TikTok, it just gives you a continuous stream of NBA. So my TikTok stream has gone from kids dancing to just basketball highlights, and every now and then, a kid dancing. And the intelligence of that algorithm and the way that it’s presented I think is going to be a big part of what we do going forward. And this is just a guess. I’m not announcing anything. But imagine if you’re a fan of the Dallas Mavericks, and we give you 42 highlights of games that are being played. And those highlights are basically in real time because we have artificial intelligence evaluating the play, the time, the score, to know the importance. And knowing you like three-point shots over dunks, and so we’ll give you one or two or three possessions, then take you to a dance routine from Charli D’Amelio, and then maybe an old highlight, and then back to a relevant game highlight. And we’ll sell that as a complete game package. So it’ll count hopefully in Nielsen’s at that point three, five years from now.

So you’re sort of watching the game.

You are watching the game. You’re just consuming it how you want. And all that matters is how, where, when, and why do you want to consume those bits and whether you’re willing to pay for them.

And how would it be paid for?

We’ll find out. I mean, we don’t have to come to that conclusion in advance. Our customers will tell us.

So I could just have Mark Cuban expressions the whole time?

Exactly. [LAUGHTER]

I know what you’re thinking now. What the fuck? So I want to finish talking about streaming and movies. It’s been a year where streamers have squeezed out theaters completely. Obviously, AMC is now a favorite of the snake eating itself of people on Wall Street Bets. But last fall, Warner Brothers announced a full slate of 2021 would be simultaneously released on HBO Max. I think it’s not going to be just a pandemic reality, but the future. I now am engaged. I bought a new TV, which I haven’t done in a long time. What do you think is going to happen?

Look, this is history repeating itself. I don’t know if you remember back in 2005 and 2006, we released Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, on HDNet Movies and in theaters, plus Landmark theaters, and it worked great. We made more money as a result. And so I think you’re right. It’s here to stay.

So tell me where do you imagine we are now.

I think what ends up happening is Time Warner or AT&T or another, maybe Sony, buys a chain of theaters cheap. And the number of theaters declines by at least a third, if not more. And that allows them to become strong enough businesses, but vertically integrated. That’s what we did back in 2003 when we started the process. We could control the whole value chain. And when you do that, it works.

But you sold Landmark a couple of years ago. And you sold it to real estate mogul and film patron, Charles Cohen. 50 locations, more than 200 screens — it was big. How do you feel about that business right now?

I think if the number of screens contracts 30% or more, it’ll be a great business.

And if the quality gets better. One of the things I was arguing— hollered at people is how theaters are an insult to consumers. They’re expensive, and they’re dirty.

Well, it just depends on who you are, right? If you’re 16 years old, none of that matters.

Mm, I don’t know. OK, questions from the Twitter audience, if you don’t mind.

Sure.

These are very quick ones.

No, you know, Kara, I could talk to you all day.

I know. We like talking. Mark and I, we’ve always liked each other. All right — I don’t like them all, Mark. I’ll be honest with you. You know that. I didn’t even get to Facebook versus Apple. But that’s OK, another chat for that. I’m enjoying watching them battle it out. It’s like Goliath —

Yeah, I think Facebook — I’ve changed my mind on Facebook. I think I’m way down on Facebook.

Oh, am I right? Have I been trying to get you there for years?

Yeah, you were right. I was wrong.

It’s going to be Tim Cook that’s going to take him down with this new move with the privacy stuff. It should have been the government, but it’s going to be Tim Cook.

I agree.

It’s going to be interesting.

Oh, let me tell you something that may be a little bit controversial.

OK, go ahead. Go ahead.

We talk about moderation, right?

Right.

And the cost of moderation and the time consumption of moderation and the people of moderation. Free the nipple, and you will cut moderation cost by some significant percent so you could pay attention. So anybody 18 or over, you want to show your nipple? Feel free, right?

Free the nipple, right.

Because all those people —

It doesn’t have to be in context nipple. Just any nipple.

Any — look, as long as it’s not porn, because that’s a porn — you’re going to kick them out because of porn.

OK.

And as long as they’re over age, and they consent.

Yeah.

Right? It’s not revenge porn or anything like that. So you’re going to have some contextual issues that you have to address.

I see.

But —

Otherwise.

— if a woman chooses to show her nipples as part of a picture, it’s her body, her choice.

I think this should have been your presidential campaign. I know, Mark Cuban wants more nipples in 2024. I think — listen.

No, no, don’t say that. Don’t say that. But you get my point, right?

I get your point. I get your point.

Right? We spent so much time and money on content moderation over something that is not consequential when it’s done in the right context, right? Versus these things that we’re seeing just tear our country apart.

Speaking of which, question from Tit — Twitter — Titter. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, Twitter! What?

So I assume from your response that you’re positive about my idea.

No, you just dragged me to the gutter with you. Anyway, why don’t you do anything to get Ted Cruz out of office, Texan?

I’m one person, one vote. I’m not a fan of his, and he knows it. But the duopoly, the incumbent parties, in Texas in particular and some other states, they do everything possible to keep good independent candidates off the ballots. And so we sue when that happens. I just fund this organization called the Center for Competitive Democracy. And that’s all they do, is sue states and sue municipalities when they try to keep off legitimate candidates.

All right, next one. One person, presumably a Mavs fan, says your team had Luka Doncic — sorry. Don —

Doncic. Doncic.

I’m so bad. I’m the only lesbian who doesn’t understand sports. And yet, there are a handful of games out of playoff contention. What did you do wrong as an owner? What are you doing wrong?

I’ll tell you exactly what I did wrong. I let our guys get sick.

Oh.

We’ve had teams that haven’t had any issues with COVID or have only lost a few games. And we lost, of our top eight rotation players, five of them have missed eight or more games. And that’s really hurt us. But our last one comes back tonight, Maxi Kleber, who’s one of the best defenders and shooters in the NBA. So that’ll make a big difference. Stay tuned, Mavs fans. We’re going to be OK.

Someday, Mark, will bring you the championship.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You see?

Oh, yes, what’s that back there?

What’s that back there?

I don’t know.

That’s an NBA championship trophy.

I know. I’m teasing you. Teasing you. I knew what that is. No, I didn’t. I didn’t really at all. Do you think — oh my god, it’s another name — Porzingis trade worked out better for the Knicks, or was it a win-win?

I think it worked— I can’t say for the Knicks, but it worked out great for us.

OK.

KP’s had a few injuries, but he’s coming back strong. And again, fans, I love the fact that, like me, fans get anxious when we’re losing games, and it’s never fun. But sometimes, in a crazy season like this, it’s going to take some time. And I think we’re going to be fine. And KP is going to be great.

All right, OK. We’re out of sports, thank god. How should we teach finance and financial literacy to people in schools? Oh, that’s a nice question.

I think we need to teach it. I think it’s been a problem that hasn’t been taught. I think just like kids get Social Security numbers at some point, we need to open up a bank account, a digital bank account with direct deposit for every single citizen in this country. Having to mail checks as part of the stimulus is ridiculous. The fact that there’s no way to support individuals is ridiculous. And so, part of the process in opening up that account could be financial education. We’ll have the school let the kids earn a dollar doing something so that they see how direct deposit works, see what happens to their bank account, look at it online at school, understand passwords. There’s so much that they can learn from doing that. And there’s a lot of organizations really trying to push that forward.

Yep, and it also brings them into it because they can use this on their phones. It can be relatively safe, everything else. All right, for college students with canceled internships due to COVID, any suggestions for what they should do?

Add something to your resume while you’re down. I think it’s easy to get caught up not doing anything, but what I’ve been telling some folks is, you’ve got to find a skill that you can add. Take a free online class in something that you think would benefit you in your job search. Because we start interviewing people again, we’re going to ask if you weren’t doing anything during the pandemic, what did you learn?

So any kind of learning or something like that, some kind of learning. OK, what’s the best first job a person can have? Oh, that’s a good question.

I think being a bartender or sales.

AOC — the AOC way, right?

The AOC way. I mean, my first job in Dallas was working as a bar back and bartender. You get to network. You get to meet people. You get to have a little fun, even if it’s exhausting. If not, anything in sales. When you’re not sure what to do, particularly after you just graduated, the way I looked at it after I left Indiana was, I paid for four years. Now, any job I get, I’m going to get paid to learn. And by being in sales, once you can learn how to sell, you’ll always have a job because there’s always a demand for salespeople.

So selling drinks. So you can either go the AOC method or the Lauren Boebert method. I mean —

Either way.

Sometimes bartenders are not —

No, Lauren Boebert — I’m not —

What do you think of the prevalence of people like this in our Congress?

I mean, they’re a reflection. They’re an avatar. They’re a reflection of the people that voted for them. And they’re not the problem, they’re the symptom. And we’ve got to understand why people chose to vote for them. And I think we can’t just point at them and say, those people. We have to go be there, right? We have to be in those communities, and we have to talk to them. And again, where I will cast blame is Facebook. Roger McNamee had the best point when it came to 230 protections, where he said, you lose your 230 protections any time you programmatically amplify any content whatsoever. And because when it’s, OK, here’s who I follow and I get organic posts from them, that’s one thing because that limits. But when you have algorithmic amplification, and all of a sudden, because you see the demand there, and that sells ads, and that’s going to millions of people, and now those people believe some of this garbage, that’s a problem. And you should not be protected for that at all.

Yeah, Alex Stamos made that point today on a piece about groups. Anyway, last question, it was asked of Elon Musk yesterday in a Clubhouse, an incredibly pressing interview that really got to the heart of it. If you could be a tree, what kind of tree would you be, Mark?

A redwood.

Oh, nice. Why?

I have no idea.

That’s a good choice. It lives thousands of years.

It gets big and strong.

Big and strong, beautiful. I like it a lot. I’d be a Ginkgo.

A Ginkgo? I didn’t even know they were trees.

I have a Ginkgo tattoo, Mark. Ginkgo, it’s the oldest tree in existence. And then it —

Wait, the tattoo is the oldest Gingko tree tattoo in existence?

No, the Ginkgo leaves on my — I’ll show it to you when I see you next. Anyway, Mark, I appreciate you talking. Thank you so much.

You, too, Kara. Always fun. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Sway is a production of New York Times Opinion. It’s produced by Nayeema Raza, Heba Elorbany, Matt Kwong, and Vishaka Darbha; edited by Paula Szuchman; with original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Erick Gomez; and fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Michelle Harris. Special thanks to Shannon Busta, Liriel Higa, and Kathy Tu. If you’re in a podcast app already, you know how to subscribe to a podcast. So subscribe to this one. If you’re listening on The Times website and want to get each new episode of Sway delivered to you with a dozen hot carb-loaded bagels, download a podcast app like Stitcher or Google Podcasts, then search for Sway, and hit Subscribe. We release every Monday and Thursday. Thanks for listening.