Bari, Thanks for being so quick on getting this transcribed. This kind of responsiveness is just not surprising coming from you, but is still appreciated.
This was a disappointing interview for me. No questions about the dangers of wokeness, CRT in the schools, or his decision not to play the national anthem at Mavericks games. His answer about China was pretty lame and Barry could have pushed him more on it, like, for example, asking him if he would have used his "that's domestic politics" excuse to not speak out about apartheid in South Africa if he had owned the Mavs in the 1980's and the NBA had had big investments there. This was a softball interview not very different from other mainstream interviews. I still love you Bari, but let's not pretend that you asked him tough insightful questions - you didn't.
Interesting guy. Though, pardon me for being a little pedantic, but the typo of "segway" for "segué" is kind of funny considering that the Segway personal transportation device was named for the word "segué", as a pun on something that moves you from one conversational place to another.
I don't really buy Mark's argument about NFT's. What makes an original Picasso valuable is both the judgment that it is important art (which is a cultural rather than commercial phenomenon) and also the fact that there is only one original and there's no way to make another. You can photograph a Picasso and sell prints, but a print is not the painting, just a photograph of a painting. They are fundamentally different types of things even though they look similar. Whereas with NFT's, it's only the NFT itself that is unique. There is a digital file (an image, an audio file, a movie, whatever) that the NFT is associated with, but that digital file can easily be copied any number of times and every copy is exactly the same as the original. The very concept of "the original" has no real meaning in this situation. The NFT seems like nothing more than an attempt to designate its current owner as the owner of "the original" of some digital file, but the whole idea is nonsense. And since all the other copies are exactly the same as the NFT copy, why should anyone care about owning the NFT? Wanting to own a painting rather than a print makes sense, but it's absurd to argue that an NFT means that your copy of a file is somehow better or more desirable than all the others.
Think about how the art market would change if we had a machine that could create absolutely perfect atom-for-atom copies of original artwork, utterly indistinguishable from "the original". Ownership of the original would no longer matter; you couldn't even prove that your copy was the original! You'd need something like an NFT to designate any one copy as "the original", but it would be an arbitrary distinction because there would be no way to prove that it really was the original, and anyway the non-NFT copies would be just as good as the NFT copy, so who in their right mind would care? You can argue that it's basically just an investment, but that relies on the hope that the foolishness of caring about a distinction without a difference will continue indefinitely.
Interesting. However, he totally dodged the question on the NBA and China and he’s one of the ones that could change things. If not him who. No one I guess.
“I find that the people that have nothing to lose, young people, poor people are most courageous about saying what they really think and that the more fuck you money a person gets, the more they're captured by that money and that the people who tend to be the most double thinking, saying the truth in private and saying something different in public. The people who are most scared to say what they think out loud are the people in the C Suite, they're the people with the most power. I'm wondering if you've noticed that paradox.”
Well done, thank you! Interviews are an art and you covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time. I wish his comments around China were stronger. The day I listened to this was the day I heard about the Hong Kong Apple Daily closing and arrests on 6/24. It's unreal how much China is intertwined with US consumers. Of course they can get away with such atrocities.
Well done, Bari, as is all of your work. On a less serious issue, When you talk to Mark Cuban next would you please ask him to buy the Pirates and turn them back to a major league team? Thanks.
China and education are everyone’s Rohrschach blot and an excuse to do whatever they want. All the more reason we need a clear direction on it. His answer about soft power not working for China more or less contradicts his answer about the NBA. If bringing them into the WTO didn’t work, why will continuing to interface with them that way? Breaking the teachers unions so kids can learn how to do simple matrix multiplications in boot camps isn’t going to stop China. The USSR always had good mathematicians. That’s not why they lost.
In the long run, I’m sure the tech giants will weaken, but in the long run we’re all dead.
Bari, Thanks for being so quick on getting this transcribed. This kind of responsiveness is just not surprising coming from you, but is still appreciated.
This was a disappointing interview for me. No questions about the dangers of wokeness, CRT in the schools, or his decision not to play the national anthem at Mavericks games. His answer about China was pretty lame and Barry could have pushed him more on it, like, for example, asking him if he would have used his "that's domestic politics" excuse to not speak out about apartheid in South Africa if he had owned the Mavs in the 1980's and the NBA had had big investments there. This was a softball interview not very different from other mainstream interviews. I still love you Bari, but let's not pretend that you asked him tough insightful questions - you didn't.
Why do I get the impression that MC would sell the Germans garbage bags?
Government rations are still government rations if you call them UBI.
And calling it UBI when it's only for certain people makes it worse.
Interesting guy. Though, pardon me for being a little pedantic, but the typo of "segway" for "segué" is kind of funny considering that the Segway personal transportation device was named for the word "segué", as a pun on something that moves you from one conversational place to another.
I don't really buy Mark's argument about NFT's. What makes an original Picasso valuable is both the judgment that it is important art (which is a cultural rather than commercial phenomenon) and also the fact that there is only one original and there's no way to make another. You can photograph a Picasso and sell prints, but a print is not the painting, just a photograph of a painting. They are fundamentally different types of things even though they look similar. Whereas with NFT's, it's only the NFT itself that is unique. There is a digital file (an image, an audio file, a movie, whatever) that the NFT is associated with, but that digital file can easily be copied any number of times and every copy is exactly the same as the original. The very concept of "the original" has no real meaning in this situation. The NFT seems like nothing more than an attempt to designate its current owner as the owner of "the original" of some digital file, but the whole idea is nonsense. And since all the other copies are exactly the same as the NFT copy, why should anyone care about owning the NFT? Wanting to own a painting rather than a print makes sense, but it's absurd to argue that an NFT means that your copy of a file is somehow better or more desirable than all the others.
Think about how the art market would change if we had a machine that could create absolutely perfect atom-for-atom copies of original artwork, utterly indistinguishable from "the original". Ownership of the original would no longer matter; you couldn't even prove that your copy was the original! You'd need something like an NFT to designate any one copy as "the original", but it would be an arbitrary distinction because there would be no way to prove that it really was the original, and anyway the non-NFT copies would be just as good as the NFT copy, so who in their right mind would care? You can argue that it's basically just an investment, but that relies on the hope that the foolishness of caring about a distinction without a difference will continue indefinitely.
I just became a paying subscriber because you wrote this out, thanks!
Thank you! I prefer to read (because I read at work and cannot listen for fear of people overhearing, in our new cancel culture society)
Interesting. However, he totally dodged the question on the NBA and China and he’s one of the ones that could change things. If not him who. No one I guess.
Thank you for the transcript!!!
Please keep the cursing to a minimum. It got grating in this interview and it is unprofessional.
Cuban is a grifter. He grifted Yahoo and he just grifted anybody who invested in this garbage. https://www.newsweek.com/mark-cuban-hit-titan-crypto-crash-price-near-zero-1601481
This is brilliant and incisive. Thank you.
“I find that the people that have nothing to lose, young people, poor people are most courageous about saying what they really think and that the more fuck you money a person gets, the more they're captured by that money and that the people who tend to be the most double thinking, saying the truth in private and saying something different in public. The people who are most scared to say what they think out loud are the people in the C Suite, they're the people with the most power. I'm wondering if you've noticed that paradox.”
>"So there are ways to change the healthcare system. There are ways that you can work bottom up. We talked about some of the crypto currencies."
Brilliant! Crypto currencies to give poor people health care!
I guess you just have to be a zillionaire to be smart enough to think of that.
Can we have that wealth tax now please? Thank you.
Well done, thank you! Interviews are an art and you covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time. I wish his comments around China were stronger. The day I listened to this was the day I heard about the Hong Kong Apple Daily closing and arrests on 6/24. It's unreal how much China is intertwined with US consumers. Of course they can get away with such atrocities.
Well done, Bari, as is all of your work. On a less serious issue, When you talk to Mark Cuban next would you please ask him to buy the Pirates and turn them back to a major league team? Thanks.
China and education are everyone’s Rohrschach blot and an excuse to do whatever they want. All the more reason we need a clear direction on it. His answer about soft power not working for China more or less contradicts his answer about the NBA. If bringing them into the WTO didn’t work, why will continuing to interface with them that way? Breaking the teachers unions so kids can learn how to do simple matrix multiplications in boot camps isn’t going to stop China. The USSR always had good mathematicians. That’s not why they lost.
In the long run, I’m sure the tech giants will weaken, but in the long run we’re all dead.