Mark Cuban

John Battelle: So I was, I was doing really deep research on you. We were back at the bar? Yeah. No, I was just reading Wikipedia.

And the one, the one thing really jumped out at me, so I wanted to start with the beginning, one of the first things that you ever did. Apparently, you made $1,000 as a kid, on a chain letter. Yep. That was in college.

So you're that guy I'm that guy. Actually, who actually made money with one of those things. Mark Cuban: Yeah, it was my junior year in college, and I had to figure out a way to pay for school, so they had one of these chain letters going around.

And so I just said, "Okay, well, somebody's making money." So I would go around, and it was a deal where, you gave me $50 and send $50 to the person at the top of the list, took him off, and then put your name at the bottom. And what I did was I helped everybody, all my friends, sell their version, so they got all their money back, and then it.

You know, the power of networking, right? Back then, it just took off, and I spent the next few weeks just going to my mailbox every morning, collecting $50 checks and cashing them, and I paid for my junior year of college. John Battelle: That's quite a story.

It seems like that's been happening to you ever since. But I think there was more work involved, more recently. You're well known for having opinions.

Yep. And so I'm hoping to elicit a number of them from you. As a matter, you have so many hot button issues, I wasn't really sure which one to start with. But I.

We may as well start with, given I think it's been in the air all the the past two days, which is the economy. Mm-hmm. You've written on your, on your site, you've, you've posted a number of opinions about the economy, about bankers, in particular, and about modest proposals for how to fix it.

So what do you think is wrong, and and how do we how do we correct it? Just a simple question like that, right? Solve it for us.

Mark Cuban: Solve it for us. I think the primary problem that we're facing, I think, and everybody's ognizing this, is bipartisanship, right? Everybody is so partisan in their feelings, right?

Everybody is so philosophically driven that no one's addressing issues, and so I think we have to get out of politics and actually have action items. You know, we fail to recognize that at some point things change, and you have to let go of old dogmas and old philosophies and just deal what's in front of you like in business.

And so I. You know, it's just little simple things that we all know are obvious. We get, we get a budget from the, our government leaders. That's a 10-year budget.

Who does 10-year budgets? You know, how are you gonna fix something in 10 years? Even the communist countries have five-year budgets and five-year plans.

You know, and then there's, there's action items. One of the things I wrote was, you know, we have to fix the housing situation. We had a bubble.

It burst. We have significant problems. Values have gone down. And to me, the action item is all these homes that have been foreclosed on that Fannie Mae, et cetera, own, you bulldoze them, right?

You tear them down. You reduce the supply. That increases the, value of what's there.

You create work for people who are most difficult to employ. All they gotta do is, you know, knock things down. You know, that's an action item.

There's just so many things that you can come up to do, but we have to recognize that someone's gotta come in and propose actions. And then I think there's. You know, I've talked to.