My guy Mark Cuban.
All right. All right. Here we go. How you doing, brother?
Who brought the vodka? It's like exactly.
My lord. 25 years we've been doing this.
25 years I've been waiting for my Knicks to win a championship.
And you played a significant role.
No, the Spurs played a significant role. They should have kicked your ass.
And why didn't they? Why didn't they?
I think it was coaching lack of experience, you know, because you're up by 29, right? You're up in the fourth quarter of every game. Wemby throws it into the back of some guy, misses two free throws. De'Aaron Fox goes the wrong way.
Yeah. And you would be talking about firing Mike Brown. I mean, it was a we were concerned when he got hired and getting rid of Tibs. Oh my god. Tibs.
But JB was the real deal, right? My Indiana boy OG, right? Yeah. He you know, he saved you guys. So, yeah.
Uh and you had Jaylen Brunson. Yep. Um he left and that was kind of destiny. His family wanted to come.
That's what he wanted. I mean, I could show you a text where his agent, you know, text me, says he wants his own team.
He wants his own team, right? Yeah. He was ready to go before.
And I I texted or emailed you and I said, 'What's the story of the This is what we're going to base the franchise on.' You said, 'He's really good. He's the real deal.'
You know what I love? He's a great guy. That's the best part about JB. He's just really a good human.
I was there uh for the fifth game, six rows behind the bench.
And man, I I just cried. I just cried. It's been so many years. And you got your chip, too, with Dirk.
Yep. It's so amazing how sports plays such a role in so many people's lives. Yeah.
Especially now look at the World Cup. Incredible. I mean, it's just like sports has just changed everything. And you know, like I've been to four World Cup games in Dallas and I hate soccer football, right?
I hate it. But just the whole scene, the vibe, the energy, you can't beat it. It's like going to a Knicks game, going to a Mavs game, same thing.
Yeah. And the NBA, is it is it peaked? Did it sounds like...
It's hard to say. I mean, you know, for fans, no, because I mean, it just grows on social media, you know. I I went um I was walking in Paris and there was a basketball store, you know, and had Wemby jerseys and Gobert jerseys and everything. And so, I mean, it's just growing globally.
Yeah. Is Wemby the real deal?
Yeah. He's got he he got humbled though.
Yeah. Which is good for him. It's like Dirk in 2006 got humbled and came back better. Wemby will come back bigger, stronger, better.
Yeah. It's amazing how he went from this like incredibly I don't know there was a there was a magic about him to no he's a villain and he turned into a villain because it was New York and it was 50 some years right and just the circumstances and you know San Antonio thought they had in the bag everybody it's like I went to Indiana University right and if anybody here follows college football in the states like we were the ultimate underdog we had not had you know we had not won 10 games we had we beat more top 10 teams last year than we did in 100 plus years of the program. And so that that just changes people's attitude.
You've were very much involved in rule changes and we we're going to get on AI next, but it's just great to talk to you about this since we're both such super fans of the NBA. seems like the rule changes, the apron and um you know how punitive it is has created a lot more parity uh in the league and nobody knows who's going to win like...
Well because you have to break up your team, right? Because at some point OKC will have to break up their team. That's why they collect all the draft assets because you can't have three max players. No. And if one of them turns out to be hurt or not what you expected, then you're in deep [__] right? And so the second apron is just a complete game changer. And you have to be so much better at putting together a team than you were before. And you have to get lucky. Like the Spurs have Wemby on a rookie contract, you know, um the the OKC has got, you know, Chet on a rookie contract. He's not on a rookie contract any longer. So they have to be even more careful. And so it it really changes the strategy behind building a roster.
So we we're going to see back to backs or any more...
No, I maybe back to backs, but not uh what do they call when you have three? The three repeated three. Yeah. No more three-peats. There can be back to backs like you know um if Jaylen Jalen Williams um J-Dub hadn't gotten hurt for OKC. I think they would have beat um San Antonio and I think they would have beat the Nets.
I was worried about them versus the Knicks. I knew we could beat the Spurs but I was concerned about...
Did not know you could beat the knew we would beat them. Come on.
We beat them two out of three of the games of the year. We spanked them. I knew it would be like a I I said Knicks in six. It was Knicks in six.
You guys barely beat the Hawks and then...
Oh, come on now. We We We were tweaking the offense and we just had to get KAT to buy in as points.
Let's talk. Um, but it is so great to be a champion. God, it was Where's your ring? They didn't give you...
They didn't yet. No, I'm going to get it at the ring ceremony.
You know. I always was like, man, I got to follow Cubes and get, you know, a piece of...
You'd always tell me you wanted to buy a team.
I always wanted to get like a, you know, a piece of the Knicks. And now it's like my net worth doing great.
The value of the team disconnected from reality. I mean, my only chance is to call like Elon and be like...
Part about um the valuations is it's not driven by attendance. It's not driven by wins or losses. It's driven by subscriptions to streaming services. And it's going to be interesting to see because it used to be we looked at ratings, TV ratings, and people said the NBA was underperforming versus everybody else. Now the Knicks play obviously there's some pent up um demand there. But what really matters is the number of subscribers Peacock gets, ESPN gets. It's the ratings sales, but it's more subscribers.
I mean, I literally had to subscribe to like I think one or two more services.
Well, that's the whole point, right? And did you keep them is the question?
Yeah, I'll keep them. Sure. I mean, but there will there be churn? If there's churn, who knows what happens with valuations. If there's not, valuations keep on going.
You and I live through a couple of bubbles. We've seen this movie before.
Um and and this wave seems very different than do waves. So, let's talk about that. Are you concerned about a bubble? We're seeing bubbly like behavior. People...
It's not It's not the traditional dot bubble, right? Because back then there were shitty ass companies going public getting crazy valuations and people are buying them and the stock would go up, you know, 50% 100% with companies that had no revenue, no traffic, no nothing. And you'd go get a cab back then and people would be talking about them. Yeah. And you don't you don't see that at all today. So it's not a bubble that's going to impact most people in the room, right? Or most people um across the US, but it could just destroy a lot of VCs and a lot of funds and a lot of PE, right? because they're going all in. Yeah. You know, because like it used to be the product managers for brokerages had to outperform the numbers, right, for, you know, the SPX or whatever. But now you got to outperform to keep the money coming in. You got to outperform the the fund next door and they're all in Anthropic and getting their outcomes and SpaceX and celebrating. But if [__] hits the fan...
Yeah. It really is like I've only done venture for just over 10 years and it is wild to watch so many people who deployed at the wrong time just out of business. They just invested at the peak and entry price matters and you and I have been in a bunch of deals together and we used to get to investing companies at 5 million 10 million as angel investors and then all of a sudden the request was 40 50 60 and the product's not launched and you're like how does this work?
Yeah. And you know, and what's happening now is the market leaders, Google, etc., Meta, they're borrowing hundreds of million billions of dollars.
Yeah, that's interesting.
And there's already a private credit problem right now, right? So you you you just layer on private credit like um Al Capital getting all the um refunds and then you you know, you have these huge companies that have cash flow, but there's, you know, they're they're spending all their cap cap um cash flow on capex and then they're borrowing on top of that. That's bonds, right? That's planning for perfection and that's going to be hard. And we're building these data centers and you know, if there's a price performance curve on AI that minimizes the power requirements, there's going to be a lot of data centers that are going to be turned into pickleball courts.
Interesting. Because they just can't get the power turned on.
No, not just the power. Just everybody thinks that, okay, there's going to be so much more utilization and there will be, right? It'll just scale like everybody expects. But there's going to be breakthroughs in technological breakthroughs as well. Just like we saw fiber back in the day. It was all about putting in fiber. Then it went from one gigabyte fiber to 10 to 100 gigabyte. And then there wasn't a fiber problem anymore. And there wasn't a bandwidth problem anymore.
Quite the opposite. We had dark fiber that people bought. Yeah. Pennies on the dollar.
And just sitting there, right? And how is it not going to be the case that we don't get the same price performance improvements on the AI side and on the data center side?
Yeah. And then with all the hate going against the data centers, I think that could be, you know, protecting them. And I mean, spending committing tens of billions of dollars for 10 20 years going out.
I mean, nobody can predict that. Well, I mean, you you you used the word pricing to perfection, I think, earlier in the conversation, and that's really what's happening. I mean, you have to have a thesis that we're going to put a hundred, you know, OpenAI, uh, hundred billion dollars to work and that's going to come back not just in revenue, but it has to come back in earnings, margin dollars. Yeah. Yeah. It has to be profitable.
Yes. And you just don't know, you know. Now and I'll tell you the other in terms the corollary for um bubbles right in this particular bubble because it's so driven by private capital there should be a lot more companies going public not at the SpaceX level for not OpenAI not Anthropic but the hundred million dollar um IPO because if AI does what AI knows we all we we all know what it'll do in terms of disruption then you want to have um some sort of um currency that allows you to buy all those companies like you guys were talking about buying different legal companies. Yeah. Right. Well, if you don't have that currency, the stock is currency. You're going to have to go out and raise money to do it. And if anything happens, and that money is not cheap, that money is really, really expensive. versus if you go out and you do a $100 million IPO or a $50 million IPO and you can do a secondary or whatever as many times as you need if you're performing. But the minute that company that you're competing with that is a legacy business can't keep up or there's some other um company that has domain expertise that you need or data that you need like you guys were talking about.
You want to be in a position to buy the...
Nobody forward thinking. Yeah. No one is forward thinking like that at all. And I'm like trying to tell my um my portfolio companies, go public, [__] Go public. They just don't think that's the right thing to do.
Well, and M&A is, you know, not to make this political, but you know, when you're an entrepreneur, you have to play the game on the field. M&A was off the table. Lina Khan had a certain perspective which was we have to be like precogs in Minority Report. We have to predict who's going to be a monopoly in the future and stop them. Now, it's like okay. consideration with to compete with China and everything else that's going on globally. Yeah.
Right. Four years of no acquisitions. I mean the people I talked to who are in corporate development were like we we've been told to stand down.
Because it's not where we are right but even so right it's you know with mergers and acquisitions at that scale fine but if AI does what we know it will do the companies that are disruptive don't have to be enormous companies. No, these are...
But you don't want to have to always raise cash to go out there. Such a good insight like the...
Right because like back in the day back with with broadcast.com we bought like five companies just with stock and then there was always a bigger fish to come along which we were happy to you know because yeah the famous collar uh if you were a clawed employee if you're at Anthropic you're at OpenAI is it uh time to start thinking about the collar and try to think about yeah comparing the position.
You know I collared my stock because how rich do I need to be right.
You know and if you if you're able to change your life. If I work for any SpaceX, any of them, whatever, I'd be like, you know, somebody put together a collar for me. Yeah. You know, because I just need to be protected. Save part for my upside, but just cover my downside.
Yeah. Um, when you did it, you had to like um actually orchestrate that, right? It didn't exist as a product.
No, it didn't. So, I had to actually create an index of internet stocks. I had Goldman Sachs create an index of internet stocks that I thought sucked and then I shorted that index because we and we had to follow all the laws and I just had to have that short in place until I was able to do a real collar in the market on my Yahoo stock. Yeah. And I lost tens of millions of dollars on that short. Yeah. But I made up for it.
Yeah. I mean the one of the great trades of all time. uh what do you think the the this wave of capabilities in AI I'm sure you play with it because you've always been a tinkerer so maybe what are you tinkering with and what do you think um is going to be the most world changing you know in the next 5 10 years for entrepreneurs for society where do you look at it and go hey this is truly work backwards okay so AI is a lot harder to implement than anybody expected For sure, right? You know, you can do an agent pretty straightforward, right? Yeah. You can prompt away, you know, we cheated on tests, we, you know, cheated at work, you know, did projects, improved our productivity 100x, right? All easy peasy. And we just assumed, you know, at the enterprise it'd be just as easy.
And it's terrifying. And not terrifying for employees because Dario and everybody saying 50% of white collar people are going to lose their jobs. Here we are two years later and they [clears throat] said within two years and you know employment's still growing, people are hiring. We need more AI literate people, right? So CEOs have no clue what is going on. None whatsoever. And that's not going to change, right? And so you know trying to explain to them that you need to add a hardness to them, you know, all the there's no chance, right? And if you think about it from an AI perspective, if AI we're talking about, you know, AGI and we're talking about taking over the world, if you can't you if you need to have forward deployed engineers, that tells you all you need to know about AI because by definition, you should just be able to ask AI to do what I need you to do and ask and tell me how to implement it, right? Yet here you have Microsoft hiring 6,000 people, right? You have Anthropic, OpenAI, all saying they're going to deploy to these companies, which tells you AI is hard. And then you have um Alex Karp from Palantir freaking out saying how can you give your alpha to these companies when in my opinion he's just saying they're doing what we're doing, right? We're we're all about forward deploy engineers at Palantir and they're doing the same thing. Uh it [clears throat] it again it's a great insight because you can if you're using it as a search engine or you're making your little agent to you know go do your cron job. Okay, fair enough. It's it's going to work. You need to be have a little bit of systems thinking but when you start putting into the enterprise and you know this is mission critical work.
Talk about the little bit of systems thinking because that's the second part and I'm not trying to [__] on AI. I love it. I invest in it. It's going to be amazing. It's the most impactful technology that we've ever seen and may ever see. Right? But try going into cloud or or ChatGPT and saying, 'Okay, I just want you to do this search for Jason Calacanis investments and I want you to do report and I want you to email it to me every week.' Yeah, it can't do it.
And then it says, 'Okay, would you like for me to do an an agent that gives you alerts?' And then you say, 'Sure.' And then you have to know how to program because it either gives you a JSON file or it gives you, you know, code and it comes out slop and then you have to correct, right? You have to reiterate, you know, if you want to say, you know, hey, let me load a picture in and you tell me if I'm hot or not or is this girl hot? What should I say to her? You know, or business versions. Great. Yeah. Right. But AI is not going to, you know, take away 50% of the jobs. There's just so much [__] it can't do that regular people need it to do. Yeah. Right. Now, does that create opportunity? Enormous opportunity. Yes. Right. So, like I'm an investor in Lovable and we were here this morning talking and um Anson was saying that Anton was saying that um they people were using Lovable to create 770,000 applications a week.
Yeah. Right. And that only 30% of their business is in the US and only um 20% is engineers. And what's happening is entrepreneurs to answer your question about where it's going right if you're an entrepreneur like he was saying before there was there's no better time to be an entrepreneur he's he nailed it right because that's where AI is the most impactful no matter where you are in the world they have big utilization in Brazil India right if you're in France US wherever you know like I gave I gave it um a prompt like I said because I wanted to see what it would take I was like Okay, we're going to create an imaginary company that has a button that can record 24-hour video, and then I want it to be able to send it to me every 24 hours, and I want you to create a patent and a business plan and tell me what um licensing or whatever I need. 12 minutes.
Like, just know we've started tons of businesses.
Yeah. Six months to get a prototype, 12 months to launch it.
Yes. And then you have to and then I ask for a bill of materials and the source companies like the basic stuff to be that the blocking and tackling stuff that every company has to do at you know when you're setting it up and early in its life cycle.
Done. And even if it's wrong so what? Because the one thing you and I both know and everybody in the room should know every single [__] business plan ever written in the history of business plans is wrong. Of course. Yeah. It's a it's a thought exercise that at least gives you some sort of direction you're going a guideline and a template for you, right? But it's wrong.
So what if the AI is wrong? If the model is wrong, you know, because it's you're going to learn and you're going to iterate, but it's still again all this talk about taking white collar jobs is ridiculous when it can't even do the basic [__] right? And you have to have like you said a programming mindset. Yeah. in order to be able to iterate and figure it out. And like even you would think if AI is advanced as we want to believe AI is right now, all the errors that we get when we ask it to do a project, it would learn from all those errors and even have, hey, I'm Claude. You I see you have a problem with this, right? And it failed on these three attempts. Let me just tell you what 97.6% of the other people who ran into this did, right? And then it would fix it for you. would tell you it doesn't even do that. It just says failed, right? Or it says whatever.
You know, again, AI is amazing. And particularly for programmers, it's game changing. And when you have a narrow data set like code or legal, tax, it's magic and it's just math, right? Basic data, right? But when you want it to do when normal people anywhere in the world want to use it for normal stuff great you start a business great but if you want to start getting advanced it's like figuring out PowerPoint used to be or Excel right you always have to have your Excel expert you know or your PowerPoint in your company.
Yeah or whoever that you knew right or there would be companies built um I invested in like a company that slideshare that all they did was have PowerPoint templates that you could download and redo.
AI is not even that advanced for, you know, once you get to the second level. And so that creates so much opportunity for anybody to walk into a small, medium-sized, even large business and say, 'Hey, I understand AI. I have a basic computer background or better.' And so all these fails that you're running into across your your your company, big or small, I can help you fix them because what AI can do once those issues are fixed is phenomenal.
But even better, if you're thinking as an entrepreneur to start a business, those things will eventually break. Agents get bored, right? and they drift because as the underlying um large language model starts to change the way it was originally programmed doesn't match what the the large language model turned into right you see what I'm saying and so you and you even wrote something about this right where it's taking more people to manage all this stuff.
It is uh I'm trying to get the whole firm to be AI first and even with young people it's like one group embraces it and you know they they solve, you know, I don't know, let's call it five or six really pressing issues. The other group is, you know, not embracing it. And the the difference between those AI first employees and the non-AI first employees, the gap is like, whoa. It's almost like when we got into the industry and somebody knew how to use the office suite and a PC and then somebody else was like on legal pads. It's like that much of a difference. It's so...
People who are AI literate Yeah.
What when do they run into a ceiling? Well, you know, it's what I'm seeing is a lot of tool hopping, which I it's a good question because they started with OpenClaw. They started building it. It got brittle.
Wait, does anybody still use OpenClaw? Who's OpenClaw? Anybody using Hermes agent? Okay, there you go. Who's on Claude Co-work? And then, oh, whoa. And Perplexity Computer, anyone? Okay, interesting. Those are the four that people have been bouncing around on. And what I decided to do is I was just like, hey, token max it. you you can each spend a couple thousand dollars a month. I don't care about that. I just care about the gains. And they all wound up um going from open claw. All the agents started breaking. It's hallucinating. It's like too frustrating. They started using claw co-work. Okay, great. Um but kind of limited. And then they started using Lovable and they built intranets for the venture business that no venture business would spend a half million dollars and 12 months building an intranet. Like you'd just be like I'm going to put it in Notion, Google Sheets, whatever.
And then they just started building more and more software. So I have two or three people who are building software that I would say five years ago we would have spent maybe two or three million dollars a year building this with that outsource company.
You just would not have done it.
Which means we wouldn't have done it right. you would just bought the SaaS application that did it and then we would have tried to like shoehorn it into a SaaS app and customize it. It wouldn't have worked. We would have given up.
But how are you going to manage it now once they get there?
Well, you know, again, to your company, Lovable, which man, congrats on that investment because that company was going to go out of business four times. And I told Anton every time they say you're going out of business, you add a 100 million in revenue. 600 million in revenue and four times, 200 million, 300 million. Oh, yeah. It's going to be absorbed into the frontier model of the world, right? I mean, I've got Lovable. I've got Synthesia.io. I was the first investor in...
