Steven Bartlett

Mark Cuban says the United States could get into a debt bubble because hyperscalers are borrowing so much.

The federal deficit keeps rising, so the country has to borrow more, and the hyperscalers are borrowing more than they make. Lenders then compete for that business and rates rise. He says a company with a $40 billion debt can reach a point where it cannot raise money anymore. NVIDIA, he says, is subsidizing half the industry because it has the cash, and Meta is borrowing more than it has in cash flow. Until the spending looks like brilliance, he says, private credit stays uncertain and a lot can go wrong. He cites Ray Dalio, who says the country has already crossed the curve toward a d

Mark Cuban says the real money is made in a bear market, when prices turn and a buyer has cash ready.

He points to Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, who he says would go a couple of years without investing at all, and he has tried to do the same. During COVID he started buying as the market fell, and he says he crushed it. He says AI-related stocks are going to the moon, with a lot of debt behind the move, and the approach now is patience: invest a little for fun, hold cash, and wait. When the run turns, he says, that is when the real magic happens and the real money is made.

Mark Cuban says get-rich-quick schemes spread on social media because each person sees more of whatever they already watch.

His son, who just turned 17, kept showing him dropshipping, shoe drops, and a water blaster for cleaning sidewalks. Mark Cuban says if the schemes were good businesses, the people behind them would be running the businesses, and nobody with an edge in the stock market would be selling that edge. He says Section 230, which protects algorithms, is a big part of holding kids back, because preparation does not earn views on Instagram or TikTok. A 10-second clip, seen enough times, starts to feel true.

Steven Bartlett says the opposite move is a long time horizon: preparat

Mark Cuban sold the Dallas Mavericks for $4.3 billion after buying the team for $285 million.

He bought it right after he made his money. He was a season-ticket holder who thought it would be fun to shoot baskets with Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash, or Michael Finley, not a 25-year business plan. The team had been voted the worst professional sports franchise of the previous decade, and his goal was to turn it into a winner. A loss could take him two days to get over. Later the league talk shifted from making the game better to what the teams were worth, and competing required real estate skill that had nothing to do with basketball. He had not planned to sell. Having kids changed that. Steven B

Mark Cuban's goal is to change healthcare in the country so healthcare is truly a right. He says that means the big companies can no longer dominate the industry.

He goes door to door with chief executives and pushes them hard. If he can get them to do the right thing, save themselves money, and improve the health of their employees and families, he calls that a win and a way to completely change healthcare in the country. Steven Bartlett brings up a rollercoaster relationship with Trump and says he saw Mark Cuban stand next to Trump talking about the initiative. Mark Cuban says anything that makes people healthier and saves them money on healthcare is fine by him. He says criticism does no

Mark Cuban says his kids and his wife supersede everything else. Nothing is more important to him, and they have changed him for the better in a million ways he cannot even describe. One part of his mind stays on business and on competing. The better part of him is his kids and his wife.

He married in 2002, when he was 44, and he has three kids. Steven Bartlett asked whether family and business could have happened at the same time. Mark Cuban says he would not have done both as well as he did the business. When he had Micro Solutions he was on a mission and did not put family in front of business. He regrets that he did not do as many of the little events with his kids as he probably should

Mark Cuban says money changed his life and did not change his life. It covered the things he could buy and removed the stress of where he lived and of paying the bills. It did not make him a better person or a worse person, and it did not change his relationship. Being a celebrity was a lot harder than being rich.

Steven Bartlett asked if that was really true, and Mark Cuban said yes, particularly once social media became more prevalent. Shark Tank blew up and sat at peak ratings at the same time the Mavs had just won a championship, and strangers treated him as a celebrity, saying Shark Tank was a new favorite show. He says being rich does not give you attention. It only changes how you de

Mark Cuban says money cannot change who you are. If you are miserable when you are poor, there is a good chance you are going to be miserable when you are rich. Money cannot change your approach to life. Money cannot change how you feel about yourself. It really will not.

Steven Bartlett asked what acquiring lots of money had taught Mark Cuban about happiness and what life is really about. Mark Cuban says it is nice. He likes being rich a whole lot more than he likes being broke. He takes pride in the fact that he still has the same friends. His high school buddies are still his high school buddies. He is still close to his brothers. He is still close to his rugby teammates. He is still clo

Mark Cuban says something has got to give if interest rates go to 6 percent, 8 percent, or 10 percent. At current interest rates, the country is paying a trillion dollars in interest every year.

If interest rates keep going up, if what the country has to borrow keeps going up, and if hyperscalers keep competing to get access to the money, something gets crowded out. Mark Cuban says he does not know which part breaks because he is not enough of a financial expert, and he still says something is going to give. Steven Bartlett asks whether Mark Cuban is playing defense just in case. Mark Cuban says yes. He has money in more than one country, and he has not invested nearly as much. He calls the

Mark Cuban says AI is not smart because it is only book smart. Book smart means a person who can read a book, remember what is in it, and get A's on tests by memorizing everything. Smart means aggregating information and inputs, knowing where to look for the inputs, taking them, and identifying the problem you are trying to solve. AI does not do that.

He says you have to be in real time. During the conversation he did not know which questions Steven Bartlett would ask, and AI is missing all of that. There is no way to feed AI everything humans have access to. If he is a doctor and Steven Bartlett is there, access to every research report and article speeds the visit up. Then Steven Bartlett

Mark Cuban uses an AI agent for Cost Plus Drugs while he tries to break the healthcare industry. He thinks the big conglomerates are the real problem. Every time they get sued, the agent tells him. Every time there is a bid they are bidding on, the agent tells him too. He uses the agent to write an email under the Open Records Act so he can get copies of the contracts.

He says he could never have imagined doing the work unless he hired somebody. Hiring meant taking the time to hire them, train them, and manage them, so it never got done. Now it gets done. He has hired other people to do different work at a completely different level, and the whole set of tasks takes less of his time.

He te

Mark Cuban says AI is not smart. It only knows how to use statistics to predict the next word. It is predictive, not deterministic. If someone asks four different AIs the same question, the answers come back different. If a question to the same AI is changed only a little, in a way that should not change the meaning, it still gives a different answer every time. Cuban says that does not work in the real world.

A model from Anthropic, Google Gemini, or ChatGPT from OpenAI is out of date the moment it is released. The brilliance of the conversation is not incorporated in any model anywhere. AI does not know the consequences of its actions and has no inherent ethics. It cannot yet take video a

Mark Cuban thinks we are in a bubble, though not the same as the internet bubble back in 2000 and 2001. He says what is different now is that everything is a meme stock.

Bitcoin is a meme stock, he says, and so are Micron, Google, and Apple. Mark Cuban uses that label because of how stocks move on just a little bit of news. A company might miss earnings by a penny or only beat by a penny, and the stock will be down 18 percent. He says the intrinsic value of the company has not changed 18 percent.

Buyers and sellers move in and move out very quickly based on anticipated information, as opposed to the net present value of the future cash flows.

Mark Cuban says AI dwarfs everything else in aggregate. He has been in the tech business a long time, and AI is so much bigger. Asking it to teach him everything about Steven Bartlett makes him a lot more productive, and he says it can make anybody more productive. Done right, artificial intelligence is a democratizer of information. A person has access to every library, every book, and every speech everywhere. If someone is interested, there is nothing they cannot learn.

Steven Bartlett says people around the world ask him whether the technology is the real deal, and business owners ask how they should respond. At 34, he sees almost no precedent for such a disruptive technology. Creative d

Mark Cuban learned to sell at 12 by buying garbage bags for $3 and selling them door to door for $6. His dad's buddies were at the house when Cuban asked for a new pair of basketball shoes. His dad looked at his feet, said the shoes worked, and told him that a job would let him buy whatever he wanted. Cuban said he was 12. One of the buddies, who Cuban says had to have been drunk, offered boxes of garbage bags at $3 to resell at $6.

Cuban walked the neighborhood, introduced himself as the neighbor Mark, and asked if people used garbage bags. He calls it an easy sell, and says it probably catapulted him more than anything, because someone who can go door to door and sell can do anything. Ste

Volodymyr Zelenskyy starred as a school teacher who becomes president in Servant of the People, and Steven Bartlett says Zelenskyy then became president.

Steven Bartlett says that between the ages of 34 and 37, Zelenskyy appeared in feature films and played that teacher in the satirical series. Zelenskyy says the character is a teacher of history, and he definitely did not expect to become president. The idea was about 10 to 12 years old: a person from the people, with no political background, becomes president. Zelenskyy says that is how it turned out.

Steven Bartlett says Zelenskyy registered Servant of the People as a real political party in Ukraine. Zelenskyy says it was not calculated

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says diesel prices do not depend on the volume Russia sells. He gives a 100% answer: they do not.

President Trump can bring Putin to the negotiating table very easily, Zelenskyy says, if President Trump adopts the same rhetoric about Putin that he already uses about Zelenskyy. Strong sanctions are already on the desk. Congress voted for them, and Zelenskyy says President Trump can use them. Zelenskyy says he honestly does not know why President Trump has not, and he can only guess at a special relationship or economic deals. Steven Bartlett says the midterms are coming and President Trump might worry about energy prices in America more than about Ukraine. Americans expor

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he does not think Putin will risk nuclear weapons. He is sure Putin would then have no allies left, including America and China, because a nuclear attack is far too dangerous even for nuclear powers.

Steven Bartlett asked if Zelenskyy is concerned about escalation to nuclear weapons. Zelenskyy says the thought crosses everyone's mind after what has already been done. If one country uses a nuclear weapon once, he says, it might be used a second and a third time in a conflict on another continent, such as the Middle East.

Zelenskyy says Putin and the system around him will hold onto each other until the end of his days. Only when his life ends will he leave the Kreml

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russian troops packed parade uniforms because they planned to capture Kiev in three days and stage a pseudo victory on Independence Square. The soldiers were literally marching to a parade.

Steven Bartlett says state media accidentally released a pre-scheduled victory declaration on day three. Putin never publicly uttered the phrase three days, while top Russian state media figures openly bragged that the conquest would take only a few days. Zelenskyy says they underestimated that Ukraine is not Russia. Putin still looks at Ukraine as part of Russia: march in with an army of hundreds of thousands of men, slam a fist on the table, the president runs, people hide, and

Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Joe Biden he needed ammunition, not a ride. Biden was the first leader to offer to evacuate Zelenskyy and his family after Kiev was surrounded.

Day after day, Zelenskyy said, they pushed back harder. Russian forces cut off food, cut off water, and cut everything off completely. Their mission was to make people run, and to make Zelenskyy run. People came to him and said Kiev was cut off and surrounded, and the Russians were suggesting he hand over his powers so Kiev would surrender. He sent them out of his office. Leaders called with offers to evacuate him before the roads out of Kiev were blocked. Steven Bartlett asked who called and whether they offered to evacuate

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says it does not matter who the president is as long as Putin is there. Steven Bartlett asked whether Trump is right that the invasion never would have begun if Trump had been president, a claim Trump has made probably a hundred times. Zelenskyy says nobody knows the answer. He calls three things facts: the invasion happened during Biden's presidency, it did not happen under Trump, and Putin chose the moment for a full occupation.

Zelenskyy says Trump had a special relationship with Putin and still does. Zelenskyy says maybe it is possible that friendly terms with Putin could have prevented a full-scale invasion, and he leaves that only as a maybe. What he states for sur

Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked President Biden to impose sanctions on Russia before any invasion. President Biden said sanctions would come only if Russia invaded, after the fact, not beforehand. Zelenskyy believes that wait was a mistake.

Zelenskyy asked the Americans for a clear signal. If they believed it was war, he wanted weapons urgently, everything they could give. Nobody would give anything. He then asked for sanctions, something everybody in Europe already knew about. He asked President Biden to impose sanctions on Russia now, preemptively. If Biden knew there could be an invasion, Zelenskyy wanted the sanctions first, so Russia would not go in if the decision to invade was real. Presid

Russia accuses Ukraine of supposedly having Nazis because Putin said Ukraine has fascism and he is liberating Ukraine from fascists. Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the accusation is absurd and completely wild. Fascism does not exist in Ukraine. Ukrainians fought the fascists and were the ones liberating.

Zelenskyy's grandfather, his father's dad, went through World War II from start to finish. He came from a family of several brothers, and the Nazis killed all of them. Zelenskyy has very few relatives on his father's side and his mother's side, because many relatives were killed by the fascists. During World War II, Ukraine was occupied 100 percent, completely. Belarus was occupied too. Nazi Germ

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the war really began with the occupation of Crimea in 2014. Ukraine regained independence in 1991, and in 2014 people could not believe an occupation of that kind was happening.

The occupation was slow and did not look much like a war, because Ukraine was not fighting back. Shots were fired when Crimea was occupied, but for a long time Russia would not admit the armed men were its people. They looked like regular people and were called little green men, because nobody could tell what the uniform was. They carried weapons on the peninsula while Ukrainian authorities gave no clear order to defend the land as Crimea was seized gradually. Zelenskyy calls it a creeping o

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he changed like the wind as a boy. There was a time when he really wanted to be a diplomat, and he wanted to be a border guard.

He went to law school and graduated from the law faculty. While studying, he realized he was more interested in media, so he got out and started working in that field. Steven Bartlett says Zelenskyy became interested in comedy at 17, joined a comedy group, and kept at it until about 26, as a comedian before starting a media company. Zelenskyy says he was a script writer and sometimes, as a writer, also did a little acting. He enjoyed it until he was 26, and at 26 he got his own company. At 28 he won Ukraine's Dancing with the Stars. Asked i

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says his kids keep him strong and grounded. He wants them to be proud of him. He told himself he has to set an example for them: be strong and be as brave as possible. He added that maybe he does not have to, but that is what he told himself.

Steven Bartlett asked what Zelenskyy does to take care of himself and what keeps him strong, after Zelenskyy spoke about parents who lost a soldier. The parents knew it could happen. Zelenskyy said knowing and losing are completely different things. He is a human being and is not ashamed of who he is. He is not the strongest man in the world and is not a perfect person, but he tries to set an example. He said not to hide the pain. I

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says a missile hit a playground so fast the siren did not help at all. Children were killed, and adults were killed too. His pain is not even 10% of the parents' pain.

The missile struck in a matter of seconds. A couple who were out walking were killed as they passed by. Homes sit beside the playground, and some parents saw through a window as a child was torn apart. People bring flowers for adults and toys for children after such a tragedy. Zelenskyy went there. He calls the strike terrifying: a missile cut short the life of a child who had seen nothing yet.

Many children among the fallen never lived in peace. Zelenskyy says his generation understands life with no sire

Dana White says boxing was his first love. He knew the sport was broken as it declined, and he knows how to fix it. He is already two years ahead of where he thought he would be, because the people doing it now are bad at it. He says to watch what he does over the next five years.

Dana White explains people live as if days will last forever but people will not. 30 years old seems so old when a person is 18 years old. Young people should avoid wasting time and should take risks instead of sitting home alone thinking about how much more could have been done. Realizing one could have been bigger or could have been better ranks as the worst outcome a person can have.

Dana White never reflects because whatever happened yesterday means nothing today. At 57 Dana White focuses on tomorrow and getting bigger and better instead of looking back. Dana White wants to be better tomorrow than today in every way possible.

Manifestation is real. When you decide who you are, what you want to do, what you are going to accomplish and get up every single day to work toward it, failure is impossible. Many people only create vision boards then fail to press the pedal or step on the gas after programming their GPS.

Gary Brecka gave Dana White 10 years to live, then a 12 week program. Dana White felt better in six weeks, with clarity, his legs, and the sleep apnea gone. Dana White and his wife believe he had less than 10 years to live. Dana White calls Gary Brecka a life changer. Without Gary Brecka, Dana White would not be doing the other work or running at the same level, even though he would still be doing the UFC.

Haters are the best. There is nothing better than haters. Haters will lay out what they think is wrong with your business. Haters keep you on your game. You know what is real and you know what is just bullshit.

To be an entrepreneur is a very unique thing because it is hard enough for a lot of people to get up every day and depend on themselves to take care of themselves. When people become entrepreneurs lots of people depend on them. Lots of people feed their families and the role must be taken very seriously.

Wanting more time to yourself makes starting your own business the wrong choice because there is no such thing as a day off when you run your own business. There are no birthdays, no Christmas, no Thanksgivings. Bad shit will happen every single day that you need to deal with. But when you like what you do, it is fun. The key to becoming a good entrepreneur is to find solutions to problems every day.

Becoming a parent helped Dana White realize the correct way to feel about kids and the proper way to act as a parent. As a result Dana White believes his parents made him a better parent.

Dana White says when you decide who you are, what you want to do, what you are going to accomplish, and you work toward it, it is impossible for you to fail. Dana White believes the formula for success applies to building the UFC and advises entrepreneurs not to be afraid to take the risk.