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SPEAKER_04: Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Angel. Today's a really special episode because I became an angel investor about 11 years ago and I made a little bit of a playbook, but I gotta be honest. There were a couple of notes in my playbook that I got from today's guest who was my first angel investor and there were a couple things that I always noted about this individual number one he was available, always available, available when you first met him, read your email, would write you back, would write you back at two in the morning and then always pumped and super positive and then also candid. So three things, available, candid, and super pumped. You probably can guess from just that, it's Mark Cuban. Welcome back to the pod a thousand episodes later.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it's great to have me back. I thought you forgot about me.

SPEAKER_04: Never forget about you, Mark. You and I met back in the dot com era. Yep. And you were angel investing after you sold broadcast dot com. You bought the maps.

SPEAKER_10: Yeah, but wait, the story of what we met is the classic story.

SPEAKER_04: Oof. Well, I had written a story. Because broadcast dot com had gone public, got caught up in a, when I was adjourned, a little bit of a, what would we say, like a bubble?

SPEAKER_16: Yeah, definitely a bubble. It was, it was just like a lot of stuff today.

SPEAKER_13: And it became worth a billion dollars. And I wrote a piece that said, like, this is a billion dollars worth of hot air.

SPEAKER_04: And then I'm at the NASDAQ party, and there's this tall guy in front of me. He turns around, and it's Mark. And he's like, oh, billion dollars worth of hot air. And I was like, but then, in fairness to you, your earnings came out. And I think in that, I don't know if it was the second quarter, whatever. You're doing 25, 50 million dollars.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, not quite, more like 18, and we lost like a million and a half.

SPEAKER_04: Right. So, it actually, by today's standards, 50 times revenue for a high growth company that was basically break even, about to be profitable, would not have been considered too crazy. It would be enthusiastic.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah, I mean, today, it'd be underpriced, you know?

SPEAKER_04: So weird. And then famously, you either collared, maybe shorted, but you basically realized you were in a bubble.

SPEAKER_26: Explain to people what you did when you realized we're in a bubble, because it might be instructive given today's circumstances.

SPEAKER_27: Prior to Audionet turning into broadcast.com, I had bought and sold stocks for a few years and done really, really, really well.

SPEAKER_28: And I had seen, you know, segments of the market explode, the PC industry, the PC software industry, the networking industry, and they all followed the same pattern. Everybody got excited and they went up for a few years until they didn't get excited, until they weren't excited anymore. And they went down and, you know, I had that bee next to my name and I'm like, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. How much do I need? So, right when we sold and the deal closed, I wasn't allowed to transact in my stock. So, I shorted the internet index that had Yahoo, who bought broadcast.com, a 5% or less. And I spent 20 some million dollars, every penny I had, shorting it to buy myself six months and lost almost every penny of it. But the minute I was allowed to, I, you know, sold calls and bought puts that were staggered over multiple years. And, you know, the stock went lower than I ever expected.

SPEAKER_30: And I actually made money off the collar.

SPEAKER_32: Wow, and that is instructive in today's market.

SPEAKER_33: When you look at today's market, the Fed printing money, airdropping money during the pandemic, and then this incredible enthusiasm.

SPEAKER_35: We were actually talking about kids trading stocks on, you know, and getting educated. What's your take on what's happening with Robinhood and the reintroduction? Because let's face it, in the late 90s, we had a massive group of people who were day trading retail investors. They went away after the dotcom bust, and then I think the, the knockout blow was the 2008 crisis, which people did not see coming. Dotcom, we kind of start coming. Those two got rid of retail investors, and here we are, 20 million Robinhood users, or something like that, are back.

SPEAKER_26: What's your take on all this? Is it going to end in tears again, or is it good?

SPEAKER_39: Well, it's different for one particular reason, and that's interest rates.

SPEAKER_28: Back in 99, 2000, it was four or five percent, and you could earn tax-free, you know, something that was reasonable and better than inflation, right? So you were net ahead. In parallel to that, people were just going nuts over internet stocks. It didn't matter where you went, people were talking about it, which is similar to what's going on today on some, some, but not all, you know. But the biggest difference is it's a lot more organized, what happened with GameStop and WallStreetBets, and a lot more centralized, and there's more to it than just the stock, right? There's kind of an ethos. Much more. There's, yeah, there's kind of an ethos of the members of WallStreetBets, right, and what they're trying to do in addition to making money, and their ability to act in, not necessarily unison, but act together. And I think where a lot of it gets miscommunicated, if you were on WallStreetBets early, then you know that there was a lot of in-depth analysis that was going into all of this, right? 100%. So, if I walked, if I was on WallStreetBets today, right, and I wanted to make a case for GameStop, and nobody had ever traded in a nickel, you know, it would be what you were seeing right now. You know, you could say that, you know, they had a billion dollars in e-commerce sales in the past 12 months. It was growing 309%, you know, year over year, and you value their brick and mortar at zero, and if you got, you know, a billion dollars net, is it worth six times sales? You know, given they have $2 billion in debt, is it worth eight times sales? That's not a bad, you know, that's not a bad pitch. Not unreasonable. Yeah, it's not a bad pitch, and that's exactly where it is. And so, you've got reality and perception of what's going on with WallStreetBets, and I think that's part of the problem right now. And so, that's on the stock trading side. In terms of acting in unison, I think, you know, a lot of people compared it to Occupy WallStreet. You want to take down the hedge funds, you want to take down the big banks and everything. I think it's more an extension of what's happened with crypto over the summer. You know, we saw a big explosion of people buying crypto and understanding and an incredible explosion of decentralized finance, which effectively is depowering the traditional banking and finance industry and putting it in a, you know, a different set of governance, a decentralized governance and management. And so, with that attitude of trying to apply that to stocks, I think all that came together, and that's why we saw what happened with GameStop.

SPEAKER_33: It's basically a perfect storm, right?

SPEAKER_35: I mean, you have all these traders, you have this anti-establishment growth, you have social media, and then you have, you know, Robinhood, zero trading, instantly get on the market, and you put all that together. And, yeah, it can become something that, it's a black swan, right? I mean, the hedge funds never imagined that somebody could come over the top of their bet.

SPEAKER_49: Wait, but you know what? It's not that they didn't imagine it.

SPEAKER_28: It's just that, you know, there's been short squeeze and bear raids forever, right? Going back to Piggly Wiggly back in the 20s, right, if you saw that story, you know? And so, you know, that's always been the case. You know, it happened with Bill Ackman versus Carl Icahn with Herbalife. It happened with Volkswagen a few years ago, I guess it's been 10 years ago now, where there was a bear raid there, and the stock was even crazier than GameStop. I mean, it was, there was just no there there. And so, it's not, but to your point, they didn't see, they didn't see it coming from a group of message board, people on Reddit, coming with the attack.

SPEAKER_35: Yeah, so they got blindsided. They knew that they could take on another hedge fund because you kind of know what to expect. They're going to play a certain playbook, but this is a playbook where there's no central authority to go after.

SPEAKER_53: It's not like they can call somebody up on the phone and say, hey, truce or whatever, you know?

SPEAKER_19: Well, yeah, but, you know, it's just, you know, when you get attacked by the minnows, you never think that they can sustain it, right?

SPEAKER_28: And you didn't think that there would be so many of them, you know, that they would be overwhelmed.

SPEAKER_56: And that's what really caught them by surprise.

SPEAKER_58: Which in a way is kind of beautiful.

SPEAKER_59: And you actually, I was just thinking before we're going to talk today, because we haven't talked in a while, of how many things you were early on. You were early on shorting stocks, number one. Obviously, we just talked about collaring the Yahoo stock and really being prescient about that.

SPEAKER_60: But you also were writing about naked shorts on your blog. Yeah. I don't know, what, 15 years ago?

SPEAKER_62: 2004, yeah, 2004, 2005.

SPEAKER_63: It was like literally the first year we set up your blog, Blog Maverick.

SPEAKER_64: Yeah, exactly. Right.

SPEAKER_65: It was one of your first articles on these naked shorts. Explain what that is.

SPEAKER_66: Well, first of all, let me just say, I didn't come up with the name Blog Maverick. Jason did, right?

SPEAKER_67: Well, actually, it was Brian Alvey. I got to give Brian credit. Brian did, okay. We were sitting there trying to figure it out. This is a good story, too. Mark invested in Weblogs, Inc.

SPEAKER_04: And then he's like, should I set up a blog? And I was like, kind of a loaded question. Of course, Mark Cuban should have a blog. And we set it up.

SPEAKER_35: You invited us to the All-Star Game. I forgot what city it is. And, you know, we're whatever. We're 30-year-old kids and we love the NBA. And you give us tickets. We show up in the suite.

SPEAKER_69: And we're sitting there alone. And then this guy shows up and he's like, hey. I'm like, hey. Dirk Nowitzki. He's the only one. It's me, Brian, and Dirk Nowitzki in the suite eating hot dogs. It was great. But Brian came up.

SPEAKER_58: We were like, oh, he's kind of a maverick. And we went on to make a blog. So, Maverick blog. And everybody's like, what about Blog Maverick? And I was like, ah, that's great.

SPEAKER_75: And that's the first time I've ever heard that story. That's great.

SPEAKER_35: Yeah, yeah. And the funny part about it was the whole city was sold out. We were broke.

SPEAKER_04: We stayed like an hour out from the arena at the $79 hotel. Like, that was the other thing. Looking back on the stuff I took notes on from you, just what got us here and then being frugal and being focused on revenue.

SPEAKER_35: All those are just such important things for founders to know. Like, treat that capital precious. Make it last. And then what got you where you are right now?

SPEAKER_04: Okay, staying focused, being frugal, and building great product. Okay, rinse, repeat. And sales solves everything, right? I mean, it's just.

SPEAKER_28: Exactly. And I think, you know, not to get away from the topic, but people forget that the more money you raise, the less of the company you own. And the less of the company you own, the less chance you have of really getting rich if that's your goal, right? Right. You know, I only have a B next to my name because I was able to keep 33% of the company. And when you look at some of these companies who have raised more than they have in sales, when you're in that, I'm selling as much as I can and just growing sales and I'm having to raise money over and over and over again. You know, you've seen, I've seen many a founder that went from 80% to five, three, four, 5% or less.

SPEAKER_78: Crazy.

SPEAKER_80: Yeah. And you had a partner, Todd, right? So you, it wasn't like you were a solo founder. You were at 33.

SPEAKER_82: You were co-founders and you still had 33 is incredible.

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SPEAKER_58: But you were writing about those naked shorts. Yeah. Is naked shorting, because I didn't hear that term come up this time, that's when you short when you don't actually have the stock.

SPEAKER_39: No, naked short was an invented term.

SPEAKER_28: And basically, you know, when you short something, you have to borrow it. And naked shorting means you never borrowed the stock. You just pretended you own it and sold it in the hopes of buying it back before you have to deliver it. Okay? So to short, you sell a stock, right? You borrow it and sell it. But if you don't borrow it, that's considered shorting naked. Now, market makers are allowed to short naked. Regular people, hedge funds, whatever, are not. A lot of people like to say that happens a lot. It does not. Right? And so when I was writing about it, you know, there were a couple people. Patrick Byrne, who was one of the people behind the January 6th thing. Remember back then, he was talking about Sith Lords. He was just, you know, he's unique. But in any event, he tried to make a big deal of it as a reason why his stock wasn't doing well. And I tried to make the point that shorts are your friend. If you run a public company, shorts are your friend. If you really believe in what you're doing and you think the business is a great business, anytime someone shorts your stock, they're going to have to buy it back at some point if business is good. Or there might be a bear raid like we saw with GameStop. And so the whole concept that he was proposing was that, no, people aren't borrowing it. They're just selling a short and that's driving the stock down. And I just tried to make the point that that's not the case. And that at some point, they're going to have to buy back that stock they sold to return it to the people they borrow it from. And, you know, it was a whole lot of nothing.

SPEAKER_89: Tesla would be the canonical example of this. Like, they kept trying to short it. They kept trying to short it. And the product got better.

SPEAKER_90: And the product got better. And he delivered more cars. And they weren't perfect. And then he made them perfect.

SPEAKER_91: And now it keeps on making them better. I just ordered my plaid, right? Oh, you ordered the plaid?

SPEAKER_28: Yeah, I ordered the plaid. Not the plaid ultra or whatever it is. I don't want to wait until the end of the year. But, you know, which is why I never understand why Elon doesn't like the shorts.

SPEAKER_93: I would think Elon would be tweeting, short my stock, short my stock, short my stock.

SPEAKER_35: He was antagonizing them a bit with the short shorts.

SPEAKER_65: But I think the issue with social media combined, like the anonymous social media mobs combined with shorting, they were basically sending drones over like a parking lot with like old cars and being like, look, they're putting cars in parking lots.

SPEAKER_95: And they're pretending those are sold cars. It's like, no, that's not what that is. Come on.

SPEAKER_28: You know, that's not to say shorts can't be underhanded and lie, right? Right. Um, but at the end of the day, if they borrow that stock, and they sell it, and Tesla keeps on doing as well, Tesla's not an $860 stock, if it's not shorts covering a lot of those shares. A hundred percent, yes.

SPEAKER_35: I mean, the, the run up was, um, in a major way, all those shorts covering, I think everybody agrees on that. I think probably Elon would agree on that. It was just a classic short squeeze. And then it maintained that.

SPEAKER_58: And the proper thing to do when that occurs, is to raise money, correct? For your company?

SPEAKER_28: Not necessarily. Again, the more money you raise, the less of the company you own, right?

SPEAKER_87: But it would be at a massively attractive valuation. Yeah.

SPEAKER_19: So no. Okay. So your point, right? If, if the stock is way up there and you think it's overvalued, sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_28: You want to do a secondary, right? Because then you, you can bring in the money and you minimize your dilution. Um, but yeah, there, there, there's definitely an opportunity there. Or like we saw with, um, AMC, right?

SPEAKER_19: Where there are bondholders that were convertible. And when the stock went up, they converted their stock, converted their debt to stock and just crushed it.

SPEAKER_35: You got obsessed with the movie business a bit. You got the movie bug. Todd got the movie bug. Yeah. You bought landmark theaters. I think you flipped that. Yeah. What did you learn in the movie business? Is it, is it like that adage? Like how do you be, how do you make a hundred million and movies start with a billion? Is that true?

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, very true. I learned how bad I was at it. Um, you know, and going back, you know, when we first got into it.

SPEAKER_28: So the first movie I greenlit, there was a guy who sends me an email saying he's got all this video footage from blockbuster. I mean, I'm sorry, from Enron. And, um, I'm like, do you own it all and have the rights? Yeah. And he goes, I want to do a documentary. I email him right back. I'm like, you know, um, what's the budget for the documentary? He goes $770,000 and I'm like, let's do it. Right.

SPEAKER_66: So it's a guy named Alex Gibney and the documentary turns in Enron, the smartest guys in the room.

SPEAKER_19: It's, you know, and we do it day on day. Top 10 documentary of all time. It's, I mean, it was easily, it was great. Right. And so we do it doing, we do it day and day too, cause we owned, um, HD net, which is

SPEAKER_28: a TV network, first all high definition TV network. And this was 2005 when it came out and we had landmark theaters and we had, um, Magnolia for DVD and online distribution. And so we were the first out there doing day and day, which now is a big deal. Right. And so it just crushed it, crushed it. And I get nominated for Academy award. I'm thinking, I get wind, but I'm thinking this shit's easy, right? The next movie Todd brings in.

SPEAKER_58: This is 2005. Just so people know exactly how far ahead you are day and date in 2005. The major studios are struggling with day and date in 2021. They still can't figure it out. It's like, maybe this is the year they figured out and it caused, it was because

David Friedberg: of a global pandemic that they finally conceded, maybe there was a way to make money, letting people watch this shit at home.

SPEAKER_28: And, and really, I mean, even like we would pay the, the theaters that, that showed the movie, we would pay them part of the DVD, um, receipts. Right. So they got part of the offline type stuff and they were thrilled to death. They made more money that way. Um, and it worked until we decided we weren't good at moves. But second movie, Todd brings it in and it's starring George Clooney and it's black and white and it's about, um, from the, the time during the fifties. Um, and it's called good night and good luck.

SPEAKER_19: Amazing.

SPEAKER_109: And it gets nominated for six Academy awards. So my, but my first two movies I'm nominated for seven Academy awards. I'm thinking.

SPEAKER_107: And that's a Grant Heslaw production.

SPEAKER_111: Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_109: And I know those boys from, uh, the LA poker scene.

SPEAKER_19: Exactly. Exactly. And I'm thinking this shit's easy, right? I've got the formula down. I'm going to be good at this. You haven't heard of a motherfucking movie we've done since then. Right. And so, and so we did okay. Right.

SPEAKER_28: And Todd got really good at it, but we, we decided it was more work than it was worth. Cause he kept on getting harder and harder and harder as digital and streaming, obviously became more prevalent. And so we sold, we sold all but Magnolia pictures.

SPEAKER_58: Hmm. Yeah. And the, the theaters is really interesting. I don't know what you thought of this movie pass that came out for like 15 minutes. Yep. This was such a good idea.

SPEAKER_90: Wasn't it to do an Amazon prime for theaters, the movie industry, if they spotified themselves, what would it look like?

SPEAKER_19: I mean, it looked kind of like movie pass now, but see, I think what's going to have to happen.

SPEAKER_28: You're going to see the number of movie screens cut by at least a half. Wow. You know, and maybe just a third, but most likely a half. And then I think you're going to see some of the movie studios, um, and some of the bigger media companies buy those reduced size theater chains, and then they can vertically integrate. And once you're vertically integrated, then you can have Disney plus, let's just say they're the buyer, right? And for an extra $10 a month or $20 a month, you get to go to all the movies at all the Disney screens. And if you want to watch them on Disney plus, great, right? You want to watch them at a theater? Great. We don't care. You know, cause the underlying principle always has been one bits or bits. They don't care what they are, right? They want to go where you can send them, how you can send them. And two consumers want their content, how they want it, where they want it, when they want it, right? At a price they can, that they appreciate. And you need to be vertically integrated because the movie industry can't ever get out of its

SPEAKER_93: own way. They want things to always stay the same. And it's much like the music industry has been for so long.

SPEAKER_123: Yeah. They get dragged kicking and screaming because things are about to collapse or they've got

SPEAKER_58: some calamity. And it's really because they don't have founder authority. They're all hired guns, right? Like they have a four year stand, six year stand. They're just trying to make it to the set.

SPEAKER_39: And it's run by shareholders somewhere, right? And that, and that's one of the big problems for public companies right now.

SPEAKER_28: To your point, there's a big difference between a higher CEO who's trying to make as much money as they can and financial engineering and getting that stock price up, right? Saying it's all about the shareholders when it's about, you know, getting that FU money versus somebody who creates a company, has a vision, you know, has been running it and has that authority and responsibility to go out and do what they think is right to make their customers happy. That's always a problem. And when you see it, particularly now in this day and age of artificial intelligence, where, you know, the companies, my, my investing theme is always who are the best companies in the world at using AI. And if you look at that, the fangs that plus Microsoft and a few companies, their market caps and their business, right? Their actual profitability is skyrocketing and they're great at AI and they get all that

SPEAKER_127: benefit and everybody else doesn't even know the game that they're playing.

SPEAKER_33: It really is a simple game in a way.

SPEAKER_35: If you think about Amazon and AI, it's like, this is what you bought. Here's what we predict you'll buy next Netflix. Here is what you watched. Here's what we think you're going to like next.

SPEAKER_58: And it isn't just presenting you the existing inventory. What people don't realize is they're making inventory based on behavior.

SPEAKER_59: Like Netflix knows what, how many minutes you got into this? I don't know. Uh, who's the comedian, Andy? Um, who's the comedian who does like the huge deal with them?

SPEAKER_130: The SNL guy.

SPEAKER_118: Oh, Sandberg. Sandberg. Sandberg. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they just keep pumping out his movies.

SPEAKER_28: It's even more than that. Like if I looked at your Netflix and I looked at the, the pictures that were the thumbnails for the movie, the same movie would be different based off of all the different movies. That's crazy. When you think about it, it's unbelievable. And so, but AI is really expensive and it's really hard to do. And so, you know, it's difficult. And in terms of angels and investing, you guys are getting a lot of companies where people say, we really know AI and we got this down. When in reality, it's one person who maybe worked on it and they have no idea how to implement it. And most small companies have no ability to implement it because it's expensive. I can't tell you how many times I've watched people try to put something together and they get through their AWS credits. And then all of a sudden, bam, they're spending a million dollars a month on AWS and can't figure out how to make a business out of it.

SPEAKER_60: Yeah, it's definitely when you look at an early stage startup, they'll say, Oh, we're using AI or we got machine learning. And you're like, I just always ask who in the company does that? And then sometimes there's nobody.

SPEAKER_141: I'm like, nobody. So this is your key piece. You're seven people. There's nobody in charge of AI here.

SPEAKER_142: You like your developers figuring it out, right?

SPEAKER_28: Right. And which, you know, they're just BSing, right? They're just using buzzwords. Straight up. I've actually told many companies that I've looked at, don't use AI. Because the minute you try, you're going down a rabbit hole that you can't ever get out and you're too small for that. You can't afford it. You know, I'd rather have somebody, you know, sitting with a spreadsheet, trying to, you know, use some of the basic machine learning capabilities that Google Sheets has, or Microsoft Excel has, than you trying to pretend that you're going to be great at AI because you're not going to be able to afford it.

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SPEAKER_33: How is AI starting to hit the NBA?

SPEAKER_58: We invested in a company called Oracle, O-R-R-E-C-O dot com.

SPEAKER_148: Yeah, I know Ryan and those guys.

SPEAKER_58: Yeah, and I guess they were doing some, you guys were public about it,

SPEAKER_35: but they were doing biomarkers for athletes and reducing the number of injuries and everything.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah. So, I mean, data is critical to AI, right? And you've got to have the right data and you've got to know how you're using it. And Oracle is one great example of, you know, kind of biohacking, you know, who we are, right? Because any value, any injury reduction we can get is a significant value for us. But it's a long-term process. You know, one of the issues with AI, you don't know if it works until it's too late. You know, you have data and you're trying to make it work. And, you know, but Oracle is doing a great job, right? Because they're allowing us to build a database of information

SPEAKER_93: that will allow us to continue to get smarter. Worst case, it's benchmarks, right? We can see trends.

SPEAKER_28: Best case, it's predictive at some level, right? With, you know, some small confidence rate, but at least that confidence rate is going to continue to grow. And so that's one element for AI in sports.

SPEAKER_93: The other is really computer vision, where we went from just taking data and trying to analyze it and, you know, moneyball things to, okay, what about pose estimation? What about taking any video anywhere looking for differences between this and that? You know, when a guy shoots this versus the guy shoots that way, being able to use computer vision to read what's happening on the court. Those are all the things that we're really pushing towards now. That's that's not easy. It's expensive and it's going to take a long time.

SPEAKER_155: But again, you know, just having that little edge is everything.

SPEAKER_33: Yeah, that edge got you your ring, right? Like when you guys analyzed how to defend LeBron and that favorite famous series and the Mavericks just dominated.

SPEAKER_28: I would say we dominated, but we ended up okay. But yeah, I mean, we've won. See, it used to be that there was an inefficient market. We would have a statistical edge, right? We would we would be able to go other opposing coaches into playing their worst lineups because we knew how they responded to things. And it really benefited us for 10 years. But then, you know, teams get smarter. And now it's a much more efficient market when it comes to analytics and AI. And we're all trying to find edges, but it's getting harder and harder. And we're looking for that, you know, to me, pose estimation, computer vision,

SPEAKER_93: and some other things are are kind of the leapfrogs that we're looking for.

SPEAKER_26: This is super fascinating, because what you're saying is at that time,

SPEAKER_67: not everybody bought into the data. And you had a little bit of an edge, because depending on what chess opening, i.e. the starting lineup, you knew you could force their hand.

SPEAKER_160: It's the Queen's Gambit for sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_161: It's hilarious. And you look at that team, Tyson Chandler, Jason Kidd, Dirk Nowitzki. I mean, that was a great series. I don't know. How many games did that go? Six.

SPEAKER_13: Six games. Wow. Yeah. And it really was the defense on LeBron, right? Like, you guys figured something out.

SPEAKER_18: It was a lot of things.

SPEAKER_28: It was the fact that we were able to mix things up a lot, right? We changed our starting lineup. We went to a zone. Nobody played zone back then, and so we knew, you know, a lot of, like you said, it's a chess match. If you haven't seen something, you haven't practiced against it. And if you haven't practiced against it, you're not going to know what to do against it. And that gave us a big edge. Yeah.

SPEAKER_164: You get some turnovers or something like that.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah.

SPEAKER_165: Every little bit. That's fascinating.

SPEAKER_59: What has changed in league since, you know, obviously data is one of those, but the players are in tremendous shape right now. Like they have optimized. Yep. What have been the big changes you've seen?

SPEAKER_167: When did you buy the team? Was that 2001? 2000. 2000.

SPEAKER_104: So now it's 20 years. You're wow. You've owned a team for 20 years, bro. It's unbelievable.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah. Don't remind me how old I am. But what's changed. We're getting old. Yeah. Everybody, everybody can shoot three points now, three pointers now. Everybody. It used to be, if you shot 35%, you were decent. If you shot 40, you are one of the best. Now there's 20, 30, 40, 50 guys in the league that can shoot 40% or better. And it's not unusual. And, you know, teams play for more three point shots. You know, for us to shoot 43s in a game is nothing. You know, the year we won, I think we shot 17 or 20 and we were one of the highest three point shooting teams. And so that that's been the biggest change.

SPEAKER_127: And, but in order to get open, you've got to be in shape because we're always moving and spacing and all that.

SPEAKER_171: Yeah. There's something definitely about conditioning. That's really different now.

SPEAKER_28: Oh, yeah. I mean, cause it's a science. We don't, we used to have strength and conditioning coaches. Now we have performance managers, right?

SPEAKER_174: Or performance directors. It's just completely different.

SPEAKER_04: What was the difference? I've never.

SPEAKER_19: The difference is, you know, it was old school. Like we grew up where you lifted, right? And you did the basics and you stretched and, you know, you, you went and ran on a track.

SPEAKER_28: Now, I mean, we measure everything. Guys, you know, do their specified workouts that are individualized and then they get on these force plates and we measure their vertical. We measure their quickness. We measure all these different things. You know, we measure their speed during a game to look for fatigue or variations. All this information, like the Oracle stuff supports a lot of it, um, goes in and, and we look at it, you know, and we want to know not only are you in shape, but can we get you in better shape to protect you? But we also don't want you in too good a shape, right?

SPEAKER_56: Because we don't want you to wear down.

SPEAKER_26: Yeah. That is critical is the number of minutes people play. We've actually figured out now, I guess, in the league when people hit too many minutes.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah.

SPEAKER_28: I mean, used to be, we had guys that played 41, 42, 43 minutes a game out of 48. Wow. Now 34, 35 is a lot and 38 is crazy.

SPEAKER_177: Right. It's so interesting. I was talking to, uh, Bogut and, uh, Haralobob who works for you about the minute thing.

SPEAKER_67: And I was like, I was talking about my Knicks and RJ, our new coach Tibbs is, uh,

SPEAKER_60: playing RJ and Randall, like 40 minutes, 38 minutes, whatever. They're, they're like in the two of the top three.

SPEAKER_76: This could lead to burnout, I guess.

SPEAKER_28: I don't know necessarily burnout, but you know, yeah, this year in particular, we're trying to play as many games, 72 games in a compressed time frame. And like, that's, we've been one of our challenges. We've played already 25 games and we went two months, still haven't had more than one day off in between games. And so we won't have our first two games stretch, uh, or two days stretch off for another week.

SPEAKER_93: That's since the beginning of the season, which is crazy.

SPEAKER_183: So let's talk about wagering in the NBA that they, there was a time period where that was

SPEAKER_36: considered for Bowdoin, like never even mentioned Vegas, never even mentioned the fact that people are placing wagers.

SPEAKER_35: And then something tipped and it was like, okay, people are, and you, you were again in the Vanguard on this, you were like, people are wagering. Are we going to just address it or not? And it's, it's a revenue stream and people are adults.

SPEAKER_58: They should be able to make a bet. Right. And now I turn on my NBA league pass. I pay for the extra with no, uh, commercial.

SPEAKER_59: So I can see like the inside cams. It's a, I mean, NBA league pass, by the way, that has gotten so much better now.

SPEAKER_188: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, it was janky five years ago. Yep.

SPEAKER_80: It was a little bit. I literally emailed Adam Silver and I was like, dude, this is broken. Yeah.

SPEAKER_191: I mean, look, I watch it every night. Right. So I know exactly what you're saying.

SPEAKER_35: Yeah. And I mean, you're, you were the king of streaming before it was even called streaming. And I tell you credit to Adam Silver because I, I, I hit him up on, um,

SPEAKER_59: I hit him up on the, uh, Facebook and his office then comped my account for two years.

SPEAKER_194: And they're like, cause they gave him like a detailed list of feedback. I was like, this is broken.

SPEAKER_58: This is broken. It doesn't auto renew. You have my credit card. Why don't you have a checkbox? It says auto renew every year. Cause then I forget that you, and then I can't get this game. I mean, he, he's a great leader. Is he not?

SPEAKER_28: He really good. He's really, really, really good. And going back to gambling, it was Adam's foresight where it was like, you know what? We got to get ahead of this. All the data says people are gambling. They're in to fantasy sports and they're gambling. They're spending money there. Um, and when they do that, they watch more games. They consume more NBA, you know, we're crazy if we don't do it. And the old school guys, you know, that were there when I came in, you know, and had been there 20 years when I bought my team are now gone. Right. And now we have a lot more data driven owners who to them is just a no brainer. And so we'll see. I mean, now you're seeing more states, um, adopt gambling sports betting in particular. Hopefully, um, Texas will be one of those shortly.

SPEAKER_33: Yeah. I mean, if you, if you look around the world when you're, I'm sure you've been to Australia and obviously you go to Europe, you could just walk into a bar and there's a book there.

SPEAKER_200: Yeah. Especially in Europe. Yeah. Just gamble anywhere.

SPEAKER_35: Anywhere. I mean, it's just like, okay, what's the big deal? We're all adults here. Like, and that was the weird thing about the NBA when you joined was there was all this

David Friedberg: gambling going on. You had people, I don't want to mention any names, but MJ and Barkley are known to want to place a wager on a golf game. Oh, yeah. And pretending that they're not playing blackjack till five in the morning. And we're all in Vegas watching them play till five in the morning.

SPEAKER_28: You know, it wasn't so much. It was hypocrisy. It was just public perception. Right. And you know, now that it's all changed 180 degrees.

SPEAKER_204: The new year is here. Thank the Lord. It's February.

SPEAKER_67: We're getting to work. Everybody is grinding and your business is growing. I know your business is growing. You're listening to this week in startups. You're getting these incredible culture tips and growth tips. And at launch, things are going bananas. The podcasts are growing. And what does that mean? It means I knew any video editors. I need a community manager because nobody's managing the slack. It's chaos over there. We need a social media editor. We need an archivist. I mean, we need people. So where am I going to find my candidates?

SPEAKER_59: What am I going to do? I'm going to go to LinkedIn jobs. Of course, that's what I'm going to do. And LinkedIn is global. They're national. They're international. And they have over 722 million members worldwide. What that means is it's easier than ever for you to find great people because LinkedIn knows everybody's job description. They know the size of the company they work at. They know their soft skills. They know their hard skills. LinkedIn jobs is going to put your job in front of the right people. It's never been easier if you're using LinkedIn jobs to find the right person and to find them quickly. And that's what you're looking for. Just use LinkedIn jobs.

SPEAKER_67: And when you're ready to do that, you're going to get a free job listing. That's because LinkedIn jobs has been a huge supporter of this week and startups and my podcast angel. Go to linkedin.com a n g e l and you will get to post a free job. There are terms and conditions that apply because they're letting you post for free. So thanks again, LinkedIn jobs.

SPEAKER_26: We found so many great people on your platform. We love the product. We love the service. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode.

SPEAKER_36: How is your relationship with the league gone? You were a little bit of a bad boy. You ran onto the court once. That's a big no, no.

David Friedberg: Can you control your emotion at the game now? No, hell no.

SPEAKER_19: You get mental still. No, that's just, yeah. Mental during those two hours, right? 20, you know, 22 hours of the day.

SPEAKER_28: I'm chill, right? You've been around me, you know, there's moments, but you know, I'm not going to go nuts yelling at people in a meeting. Or that's the way I am at a game is not how I am in business and, um, or my personal life. And so, yeah, just for whatever reason during a game, you know, I guess maybe it's the frustration because I have no control of the outcome and I'm so vested, but yes, but now they're used to me. It used to be, you had all these owners trying to keep me from doing these things. Now they're just like, and other owners are coming in and they're sitting by the court and they're sitting by the bench, right? They're, they're very vocal, they're very visible. You know, they're not acting like the old school ones. When I first came in, we're telling me to shut up and get the hell out.

SPEAKER_58: Right. It's, it's definitely changed and passion is part of the game. You used to always say like we're selling sore throats. Exactly right. Are they being too stringent with the fans? Where's the line for a fan crossing line?

SPEAKER_35: Obviously, if you say something very personal, like about a player, that's not cool. Obviously you should get kicked out. But if you're drawing with a player and they draw back and it's kind of fun, we've all seen that now people are getting kicked out a little bit. Where's the line in your mind?

SPEAKER_30: Yeah, it's not so much.

SPEAKER_28: You know, if you're having fun and the player's smiling, you're good, right? If the player's reacting negatively, you're not good. Pump the brakes. You know, you gotta let the guy do their job. It's like, if you walk into a Dairy Queen, if you give someone shit behind the counter, you're getting kicked out of the Dairy Queen. Right.

SPEAKER_19: You say, hey, you having a great day, you know, or you know, you walk up to somebody say, what's that on your shirt? Like you might your kid do this. No one's going to care, right?

SPEAKER_28: No one's going to care. It's when you prevent them from doing your job or get into them personally.

SPEAKER_217: That's the line. So you can have a little bit of fun, but don't make it personal.

SPEAKER_218: Yeah, of course. Yeah.

SPEAKER_90: Yeah. I mean, when I used to, when we used to go to the Knicks games, it was pretty crazy. We were sitting there one time and Derek, we were, everybody was giving Derek Coleman

SPEAKER_95: a hard time and then somebody was like, bro, you got to take it easy on the donuts. Derek Coleman just lost his mind.

SPEAKER_202: It was a pretty great movie. That's like the NBA is about. It's like the craziness and the, the intensity. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_139: I mean, I remember one time, like before I bought the Mavs, you could buy tickets for 10 bucks. Didn't matter where they were and just walked down to the court, right? No one cares because it was empty.

SPEAKER_19: Get the upgrade. Yeah. And so, um, one time we were playing the Celtics and chief, the, um, Robert Parrish was playing super skinny, right? And, um, and I was right by, um, the baseline there by the basket. I'm like, Robert Parrish, you're getting fat.

SPEAKER_200: And he just started cracking up, right? And I'm like, yeah, I made him say, you know, Yeah.

SPEAKER_202: I mean, it's one of the great things about the NBA is that they have courtside seats. We can get that close to the fans.

SPEAKER_28: I mean, it's plus the guys don't have helmets and you're, you know, you're right there. You can talk to them.

SPEAKER_93: You hear them talking, you see the speed and the athleticism that that's what makes it so different.

SPEAKER_90: Should they add that four point play? You would favor that craziness. Like I go back and forth.

SPEAKER_30: Yeah, me too. I, you know, on one hand, it'd be really cool and it can make a difference in the game.

SPEAKER_19: But on the other hand, there's guys who can make it. And there's guys who think they can make it that can't. Right.

SPEAKER_28: So you're going to see a lot of guys just jacking up some bad shots to get that, you know? And, and I, I just, right now I'd say no, but I, I'm not going to, you know, say I wouldn't change my mind ever.

SPEAKER_33: What about this three point line? Do you think, I mean, that's obviously become the change in the game.

SPEAKER_217: Can a center heavy team win again? Or is that style of basketball over?

SPEAKER_28: No, I think you can still win because you want somebody who can set a good pick to get somebody open and that can roll and finish because you want a reason for somebody to have to guard the basket rather than being outside. It really depends on whether or not you have a lot of shot creators who can create off the dribble or whether or not you want that roll, man, you know, set a high screen and roll and then roll and throw it up over the top, which means the guys from the corners have to suck in or you have an easy, um, um, lob.

SPEAKER_123: But you will never see like the Shaquille O'Neal, Hakeem Olajuwon, Patrick Ewing days again.

SPEAKER_112: Oh yeah, we will. It's just be, those guys will be able to shoot threes. That'll be the difference.

SPEAKER_90: Yeah. Can you imagine Shaq, Shaquille O'Neal, Hakeem? All right. One more MBA question. Then I want to talk about, uh, the work you're doing backing

SPEAKER_125: other angel investors. Two years ago, I'm at some tech conference, my alerts go off and I literally feel like I got punched in the stomach by you. You took the, the, you took Porzingis from the next, the unicorn, the one piece of hope we had.

SPEAKER_59: Yeah. Now this is a controversial move. He's, uh, you know, he's a developing player, some injuries here, but I mean, when he's on. Like last night. Yeah. Oh man. I mean, so this was a big bet for you guys. Was there consensus that you should make this bad?

SPEAKER_28: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Because you don't get many swings at it. You know, you're going to miss some, we didn't think we'd, we'd miss with KP, even though we knew the risk of injury was there. Yeah. Um, he's, he's, you know, he works hard. He knows how to play and he's the unicorn, right? Yeah. And, and, you know, he's always open. You just got to throw it up in the air. And so he's still getting his legs back. I mean, people don't realize how hard it is sometimes, particularly with no practice time, but, um, you know, but last night, six blocks, 27 and 13,

SPEAKER_177: you know, I mean, he has some ridiculous stat lines sometimes and the percentages that he hits

SPEAKER_161: from three and then he hits inside. What about Luca? I mean, this is, I mean, talk about another unicorn. It's almost like you have these two unicorns. If you hold onto them and add, you know, just some talent around them. I think we're getting there really well, right? Yeah, we're getting there.

SPEAKER_28: Right. And Luca is incredible. Great kid. Great heart. Um, loves the game, loves to get better. You know, every year for our top players, I said, what are you adding to your game for when you come back? And Dirk always would say something and do it right. Jason Terry, Jason kid, always the same way. I said to Luca first year, what are you doing? He goes, my left hand wasn't very good. Right. I couldn't finish around the basket with my left. Boom. Now he's great. Top of my finisher around the basket this year. He wanted to add a mid range, not like pump fake, pull up mid range. It's not a good shot, but when you're driving to the basket all the time and they stack it, you know, in the paint and block the paint, you want to counter where you can come back and just take a step back and be just right outside the paint that mid range and shooting like 60%. They're just incredible. You know, free throws the same thing. I mean, up to 80 plus percent over the past, you know, I don't know how many games. And so, you know, he just, when he focuses on it, he can do it. Now it's three point shot is focused and he'll get better at that. And once that three

SPEAKER_33: pointer is hitting 35, 36%, watch out. All right, let's, let's talk about diversity in tech. You and I've been in the tech industry for a long time, like the PCR or the 90s. I think you started even

SPEAKER_35: in the 80s with, what was your first one? Micro? Micro solutions. Yeah. Micro solutions. People don't

SPEAKER_125: know you had a consulting business a couple million dollars a year, right? Well, we, uh, we, um,

SPEAKER_19: got up to 30 million in sales. We did systems integration. At one time, we were the

SPEAKER_28: largest IBM token ring integrator, you know, large. So funny. Yeah. People don't even know

SPEAKER_58: what we're talking about. For people who don't know, token ring was like, when you bought an computer, it didn't have ethernet built in, it didn't have wifi. You had to put a card in. Yep.

SPEAKER_60: And it cost $800 to put a card in. It cost $2,000 to run a token ring cable, which was a thick, fat cable. Yep. I plugged into the back eventually was replaced by coaxial cable,

SPEAKER_26: RG58, which eventually became phone lines. Yep.

SPEAKER_67: I was a novel network engineer at that time period. You were? Yeah, I was a novel network.

SPEAKER_28: Micro solutions was the third novel authorized novel networking systems integrator. Holy cow.

SPEAKER_07: We're talking directly to Ray Norda.

SPEAKER_65: Like literally, I was installing networks. That's how I started my career in the late 80s. I was at law

SPEAKER_60: firms going to school at night and I was under the desks crimping cables and putting in cards and then putting maybe we had to put the jumper cables. Yes, pin cables to set the IP address. We sold

SPEAKER_245: arc net, we sold s net, we sold token ring, we sold. And we, you know, I taught myself to write

SPEAKER_28: software because writing software for multi user really didn't exist back then. Right. And so that's where we where we made most of our money. Um, so yeah, doing all that stuff. We were the largest Banyan vine systems integrator Microsoft networks that we had a ton of law firms because of Banyan vines with the name service and all that shit. Yeah, going way back. Yeah, I mean, people would

SPEAKER_36: rack their own servers and they did document management. And this was like a huge business

SPEAKER_33: before any of the stuff was in the cloud. So the tech industry then largely white, large email, a little bit of diversity, but let's face it was pretty, pretty bleak. You know, we benefited from

SPEAKER_58: that. And then you start to see the hey, listen, America is about opportunity opportunities about

SPEAKER_36: startups. We're not seeing the diversity and you decided you would not only invest in founders of color and women founder, female founders, women founders thing is the better term, but you also

SPEAKER_33: decided to back Arlen Hamilton, who is a force of nature. She's been on the pod a couple times

SPEAKER_260: friend of the pod. Tell me about how that relationship started and why you did that.

SPEAKER_28: I think it's really awesome. By the way, we spoke together at South by Southwest a few years ago. And, you know, she talked about the lack of capital available to particularly women of color and particularly women of color, LGBTQ. And I was like, I'll back you. And so I gave her a million dollars. And, you know, we got to know each other. And then I gave her another $5 million. And every now and then I'll side invest, you know. But, you know, she is a force to nature. She's good. And we don't agree. It's funny, we disagree on a lot of things, right? You know, because, you know, but I'm like, this is your baby. You know, here's my, here's my opinion. Here's what I think it's up to you to say yes or no. And she's got full authority. And, you know, she's done a

SPEAKER_45: really, really, really good job. And she's got a really bright future ahead of her.

SPEAKER_33: Yeah, she's definitely built a brand. And that really does help.

SPEAKER_67: And you were a huge beneficiary of that, which is back in the day, there were only a dozen angel investors, you were one of them. This is pre I'm talking pre, you know, shark tank and like, the public notability of being an angel investor. But that really does help like you get emails from

SPEAKER_60: people, you see a product. And then you think, fuck it, I'll put 100k into this up with 250 into

SPEAKER_26: this, it seems reasonable that that is your strategy. What is your strategy when you get that email?

SPEAKER_28: Read it, ask myself, you know, is this something that I think needs to be done? Then try to find it, then via email, more often than not, ask the entrepreneur a bunch of questions. So like, right now, I'm having two exchanges that are all geared towards the blockchain. One is a company that is using distributed systems, the blockchain to put stock trading on it, and enable they've been doing cryptocurrency trading, and they've been doing some futures trading, but now they want to extend that to stocks and trying to figure out if they can get where we need to go and scale without being in a Robin Hood like situation where there's not enough capital, right? And there's there's other issues. That's interesting doing another one called mintable. I've been really active with NFT non fungible tokens and tokenizing digital goods. And it's been incredible and mintable.com. They make it really easy to mint NFTs. And kind of their one key differentiation is that they already have their they, they allow you rather than having to mint a contract on the blockchain yourself, which can be expensive. They do you can do it on theirs, and they they support this royalty extension for a theory and blockchain. So when I go on there and mint and on an NFT for any digital good, what really caught my attention was, I get to keep royalties for every future sale. Wow, see, this is brilliant. Yeah, to me, that's the game changer,

SPEAKER_58: the world changed. See, this is the thing I was you and you probably had the same thing we watch all these ICOs. You see all these like scammy failed entrepreneurs grifters, writing white papers with spelling errors in them, they make no sense bunch of buzzwords. And really, if you look at crypto store value money transfer, these are legit, but and smart contracts seem very legit to me that could be a game changer. But this one, I saw crypto kitties, and everybody's like, Oh, that's the one to make fun

SPEAKER_60: of. And I was like, No, that's the one to watch. Because people love digital assets, they love collecting. And if you're collecting, I don't know, rookie cards now, the NBA can make 1000 rookie cards that are, you know, videos or whatever with a personalized message in them, sell it for, I don't know 100 bucks now, but the NBA or wherever the original owners is, I'll sell it to you. But when you

SPEAKER_177: sell it to the next person, I want 10 bucks or 10%, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, it's crazy. It's crazy. And so,

SPEAKER_28: to me, you know, once the block, once people got a feel for the blockchain, particularly on Ethereum, and the smart contracts really became open sourced and understandable, and the app started getting written so that they could be used by consumers, that took a step forward. And at that point, people realized Bitcoin is not a currency, right? It's a store of value. Ethereum is not really a currency, even though you can buy things on the blockchain, you know, these collectibles in particular. But with smart contracts, you can decentralize authority, so that people and it's trusted by everybody. Now, we're starting to see well, and so you saw the smart contracts. And then this past summer, you really started to see decentralized finance or defy take off. And that just changed the whole game. And that enabled that got people involved in, you know, putting money in wallets, figuring out wallets, you know, yield farming. And then from there, it was like collectibles. Right? You know, now I have my wallet, I have money in my wallet, I can go to rarible.com, I can go to OpenSea, I can go to minimal, I can go to nifty gallery, I can go to super rare,

SPEAKER_19: I can go wherever. And, you know, top shots, all these things that I'm into, I can collect.

SPEAKER_161: It's so brilliant, this non fungible token, I never actually heard that term. But it's a token

SPEAKER_58: that can't change. And each one is unique. So it's not like a Bitcoin, they're all the same. This is not fungible. I was just thinking as we're riffing, imagine you're at a game, and Porzingis hits, you know, a three pointer five feet behind the line. And then the Maverick

SPEAKER_161: say or the NBA says, who wants to own that? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So effectively, any you you're

SPEAKER_19: able to monetize anything that's digital, period and a story, a tweet, a tweet, yeah, I made 900 bucks, someone wanted someone on took my tweet and put it on the blockchain, I authenticated it

SPEAKER_27: as my tweet, and they paid me 900 bucks. Really? Because I thought it would be a collectible.

SPEAKER_109: I'm like, were you trolling Trump? No, no, this is just one just recently. And so right, you can't

SPEAKER_28: get Charles Trump anymore. He lost his account. But it's crazy. So I went on there. And I took a gif that I had from me walking into the arena to go work out. And I just went on on Rarible, minted 20 copies of it. And I said, I'm gonna sell them for 25 bucks. I don't know if anybody's going to buy it, right? So I set it up. So I got 10% of every future resale. They sold out in minutes. And the next thing you know, they're flipping and flipping because there's some really intense collectors who, you know, thought that, okay, I'd be a collectible. And the next thing I know, two of them are selling for the equivalent in Ethereum of 45k each, and I'm getting my 10%. Then I decide, okay, let me and I'm trying to come up with different ideas, right? So I did a couple other things, same type of effect. And I'm making money off of it, which is great, which is great, but just, you know, a side benefit. So I said, Okay, I'm gonna go cameo on it. So I said, Okay, I put, I read, I minted these just 10 videos, and each one had a serial number. And I said, if you buy this, I will unlock for you because I'm mintable, you can do an unlock, I will unlock for you a email address, and you send me the message you want, and I'll send you a customized video. And I sold it for $2,500 a piece, right? But I asked for 25% of the resale, not knowing exactly what's what's going to happen. Within 22 minutes, the total market value of that was enormous. And I

SPEAKER_18: made $90,000 in 22 minutes. And I'm doing these great videos for people, you know, that are in the crypto space, and they're using them, but I don't care.

SPEAKER_59: I'm gonna wet my beak on this one. Is this mintable? You got you got, maybe I need to get a founder intro here for Jacob.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah, I'm still talking to him over there. But mintable, you know,

SPEAKER_28: they're still working things through, they were a little bit too technical, and I'm trying to make them a little bit more user friendly. But Rarible, you've got to learn this stuff. Because what like I said to the NBA, everything we touch, everything, pictures, videos, music can be digitized. And there's no reason why we can't digitize everything. Now, the challenge is that there are only x number of collectors, digital collectors in the marketplace

SPEAKER_127: right now, maybe 100,000 at the most. And we have to work to get that number up significantly.

SPEAKER_33: You put that NBA NBA league pass, this is what's going to happen. Three years will be on NBA league

SPEAKER_60: pass, you'll have the highlights from the game. Each of those highlights will be purchasable in an auction. You know, within 24 hours after the game, you decide you want this

SPEAKER_18: easier than that, Jason, our tickets will be digitized. They'll be on the blockchain, you'll have your choice of three different types of tickets when you buy it for that seat, right?

SPEAKER_28: One will be just plain old show up. The second will be all the digital highlights, you know, up to three digital highlights. And the third will be something personalized, right? And, you know, it's just crazy. And here's the other crazy part. Are you familiar with stock x and sneakers? Yeah, of course. Yeah, okay. And you know that people don't take delivery of the sneakers, right? They just get stored. Yeah. And so it's like the collectors. Yeah, it was exactly right. And you don't have to deal with the hassle of the shoes. And you just want them to go up in value. And so we'll be doing that type of thing as well, where we'll just have a vault that secure somewhere and you'll be able to get pictures of it. And all these things will, you know, have a blockchain contract associated with them. And

SPEAKER_19: Jason, this, this is the same feeling I had in 1994 and 1995 with the beginning of the internet.

SPEAKER_28: It's crazy. You just knew that back then everything was going to converge to digital and anything that was analog was broken, right? And it was just a matter of time. And what's happening now with these smart contracts on top of different blockchains is the equivalent of mosaic going to Netscape, right? Where now we're in front of it. And it's not easy for consumers to use, but it's a lot easier, a lot easier, right? And everything will get to that point where the wallets aren't difficult, it's all consumer friendly. But this is 1995. And banking, I mean, I don't know if you've done anything with defy. But yeah, but I'm watching it. Yeah. No, you have to, you just have to put some

SPEAKER_127: money in. It's just just to learn, right? Just to learn how different it is. Well, a lot of people

SPEAKER_36: are putting their Bitcoins in and then loaning their Bitcoin out and making like 5% a week or

SPEAKER_28: well, you don't even loan your Bitcoin out per se, right? You you convert it over to like wrap Bitcoin, and you swap it to wrap Bitcoin, and then you deposit it somewhere and in a pool or you stake it, there's a variety of options. And then you earn these crazy yields off of them. Yeah. But that's not even the interesting part. That's cool, right? And that's the way a lot of people who are taking their stimulus checks are just making some money at home. And that's why it's growing so quickly. But what's cool is, like I had a, if you have $10,000 in the bank, and you need to borrow $2,500 because you're going on vacation knowing you're going to get a bonus at the end of the year, right? For, you know, maybe you could put it on your credit card, which, you know, you're going to pay your 19%. Maybe you're lucky enough to pay it off. But there's all kinds of paperwork and charges involved. And if you want to get an actual loan from your bank, it's a hassle. Yeah, for me to go, yeah, for me to get a loan from the bank is a hassle, right? In terms of paperwork and this and that, no matter how much assets I have. Well, you go on and you go on to compound or I use Aave, A-A-V-E. And you just put the money there. And if I want to borrow $2,500, it takes me less than 15 seconds. Wow. And I know exactly what my interest rate is. It's peer-to-peer lending, but it actually works. It actually works. And they do something called over collateralization because of the volatility of pricing with the different crypto assets. You need to have, you know, if you want to borrow $100, you need to have $150 in so that they're protected from the volatility. But the point is the amount of friction involved to do it

SPEAKER_93: versus dealing with banks. And we're only less, we're six months into this whole thing, I guess, in terms of being consumer friendly. It's just crazy, Jason. I mean, it's going to change how all

SPEAKER_111: businesses work. Yeah. All right. Listen, an hour with Mark Cuban. It's been great. Let's do it again quick. You're ever going to sell that team or are you going to die with that team? You're dying with the

SPEAKER_293: team. Yeah. Going to my kids, hopefully. Hopefully. I like that. I like that. God,

SPEAKER_111: I wanted to ask you some questions about my Knicks, but I got to do that off air because I need to get

SPEAKER_295: I mean, is anybody ever going to come play for us again?

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, I think so. I mean, you guys, they're doing it the right way. Now,

SPEAKER_56: Leon Rose is really smart. You guys get right? Yeah, he's legit, right? He's a great hire. And

SPEAKER_58: Tibbs will be a great is a great hire, too. Yeah, he seems he's got he's got some unique characteristics. But he he plays people a lot of minutes. But there's something about the way he manages talent

SPEAKER_60: that all of a sudden Kevin Knox RJ quickly just he's getting the most out of these players. I can't

SPEAKER_27: believe it last year. We sucked. Yeah, he's demanding and he'll tell you exactly what he wants. He doesn't mess around. And if you do it, you're gonna you're gonna be just fine. And the Knicks,

SPEAKER_93: obviously, there's so much better than they were. And they'll keep on getting better.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah, thank the Lord. Maybe there's hope for me to get to a playoff series again. All right, brother. Great to catch up. Stay safe. You get your vaccine yet? Oh, man.

SPEAKER_19: I got one shot. I qualified. Are you 65? I know you were a little old. How old? Yeah, yeah, I am. But I had some heart arrhythmias and AFib and all this other shit that I got to deal with.

SPEAKER_141: Well, I know in Texas, they're like, I think they're up to everybody over 50 or something. I

SPEAKER_139: know I have family in Texas and stuff like that. Yeah, 65 and over unless you have certain ailments. And for better or worse, I have a genetic heart thing that I've always had to deal with. So

SPEAKER_141: anybody with a 30 BMI, which I was like, God, why did I lose this 15 pounds?

SPEAKER_67: Yeah, right? See? Yeah, if you have a 30 BMI in Texas, you get it. I know people who've gotten it with the 30 BMI, like I eat some Haagen-Dazs.

SPEAKER_198: Yeah, so I still got one more to go. But um, yeah, it's a miracle, isn't it? It's great. God damn

SPEAKER_59: miracle. What we did? MRNA, baby. Oh, MRNA. I mean, such a miracle of science that we got this done. It is amazing. 45 million people we did, you know, we did 1.8 million shots on Saturday,

SPEAKER_28: I think, or Sunday. It's amazing. And yeah, so I talked to people who think by the middle of July,

SPEAKER_60: everybody who wanted one will have gotten one. Yeah, I mean, Scott Gottlieb said in the end of March, because of the anti vaxxers, he thinks it's going to be walk up anybody.

SPEAKER_28: I saw that end of March. That'd be great. That'd be great. Like at the Mavs last night, we had our first trial of just bringing in vaccinated healthcare workers and first line responders. Nice. And that got us the testing. And we're going to keep on adding adding how many people came to the arena? Well, we only allowed 1500. And then our next game tomorrow will allow I think 2500. And then we'll keep on scaling it. Because we also, it's great that they're vaccinated that the

SPEAKER_93: people coming are vaccinated, but we got to focus on the people who work there to make sure that we protect them at scale too. So that's what we're working on. I it's it's such a miracle of science.

SPEAKER_33: And I got to say the things I miss most, taking my daughters to the movies, because we love going to the movies every weekend, go into the Warriors games with my friends,

SPEAKER_177: you know, and maybe even hitting up a nice restaurant.

SPEAKER_28: Let me just tell you, come come end of July, maybe even sooner, if Scott Gottlieb is right, come April, when a lot of people have gotten it, and we can start really going out and everything, the snapback, you're talking about the roaring 20s,

SPEAKER_304: YOLO 20s. I'll take that as an invite, Mark. I'll see you. Come on. I'll take it as an invite. Bring it, Jason.

SPEAKER_325: I'll see you down there. All right. Continued success. Thanks, Jason. Love you, brother. Be cool. Same.