Mark Cuban on AI in politics, running for president (or not), and why he hates the media business

So, Ben, when I was starting out as a journalist at Business Insider, uh, about a little over 10 years ago now, uh, we had these pretty insane traffic goals that we had to meet.

I think I had to get a million page views every month, which is, in retrospect, kind of crazy.

One hack that me and several other journalists, I think, at Business Insider had was when we weren't looking like we were going to meet our quotas anytime soon, you know, we might, uh, take a look at the news of the day and formulate a possible question and send an email off about it to, uh, Mark Cuban.

And, you know, it didn't work every time, but every once in a while, he would get back with enough regularity that we would try it, and it would generate a lot of traffic.

I know we still sometimes do this here at Semafor.

He's been a willing participant multiple years in a row in our what we got wrong list in the media, and you quote Mark Cuban sometimes in your stories as well.

Do you have a relationship with Mark? What are your thoughts on Mark Cuban?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's funny.

I have the same relationship with Mark as lots of other reporters, which is that I send him an email, and one time out of three, he responds in, like, 15 seconds with something quotable.

I mean, he really is this funny...

I don't know.

He's sort of an eternal kind of media figure.

I mean, the other person I really think of as being like this is Donald Trump-

Right.

... who sort of built his profile despite a willingness to weigh in on absolutely everything, although he's also, like, in his way, a media pioneer.

His big score was he created something called broadcast.com, which was, you know, a, a late '90s streaming platform that never really amounted to anything other than a $5.7 billion sale to Yahoo in the last great days of Yahoo.

And then Cuban managed to get...

I think basically get, get himself out of Yahoo before everything totally crashed, and so has been this, you know, ubiquitous wealthy investor since then.

Well, one thing that you kind of talk about is the concept of being...

O- of it being a problem on the media side if you're too early.

Obviously, it wasn't for Mark Cuban 'cause he got paid $5.7 billion.

That's, uh...

Many people would consider that to be pretty successful.

But as a media entity, we're not all tuning into broadcast.com, right? And maybe he was a little bit too early with that idea as a sustainable, long-term media property, though the idea seemingly was close to what we experience today in terms of streaming video.

Yeah.