#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Mark Cuban, a multi-billionaire businessman, an investor and star of the series Shark Tank, longtime principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and is someone who is unafraid to get into frequent battles on X, most recently over topics of DEI, wokeism, gender, and identity politics with the likes of Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We got Listening for, well, listening to things like research papers, Cloak for protecting your personal information, Notion for taking notes and collaborating on those notes with your team, Eight Sleep for Naps, and Shopify for shopping or creating shops on the internets. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team where I was hiring, or if you just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now on to the full ad reads. Never any ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by listening. An app, a website that allows you to listen to academic papers, listen to a bunch of stuff. I think you can listen to emails, to websites, all of that. I haven't tried that aspect of it. I should, probably, to listen to emails. I wonder how that would work. They have a Chrome extension, but I don't think it's through the Chrome extension. Anyway, the way I use it, and I think the original use case, which I think is awesome, is listening to research papers. And this includes super, super technical papers or more narrative-driven philosophical papers. For example, you can take the touring paper on the touring test. Obviously, the paper title is not the touring test. I think it's called Computing Machinery and Intelligence. And, of course, you can go to super technical papers, and I use it for that as well. I often do the following. I'll print out the paper, because the haptic feedback of a sheet of paper is really powerful for me. So I'll take notes on that with a highlighter on the pen. I will also take notes on a PDF, and I will also listen to it over and over and over. So for me, the process of reading an academic paper is one that requires returning to it over and over and over again, unless I'm doing a quick skim. So for skimming, I can look at the PDF and quickly skim, and then listen to certain parts that I find useful. So sometimes related work is really powerful because it summarizes in a nice way where the field stands. I'll listen to that. sometimes the abstract is good to listen to, sometimes the abstract introduction related work jump into the conclusion. If there's a methods in the paper, you can listen to that. Anyway, I will basically use the listening function while I'm walking over to get some coffee or I'm gonna run and I'll listen to different parts of a paper to get a sense of what that paper contains and the main idea and so on that can build on. Or as I said, to review a thing I've already returned to many, many, many times. And I have a large number of favored papers that I've returned to many times. It's super easy to upload a paper. They have really nice AI voices that pronounce stuff well. And also just at the sentence paragraph level, the kind of narration style they have is really, really nice. And obviously as AI improves, they will keep improving. So jump on board now and enjoy this whole process. I highly recommend it. Normally you would get a two week free trial, but listeners of this very podcast get one month free. So go to listening.com/lex. That's listening.com/lex.
This episode is also brought to you by Cloaked. As I mentioned last time, it's a thing that I always thought and hoped would exist. And now I know it exists and it is awesome. It's a platform that lets you generate a new email and a new phone number every time you sign up for a website. So you can hide your actual email and your actual phone number from the world. I think of it as a kind of privacy layer that protects you from the wild, wild west of the internet where many, many services and companies desperately want your data. And the in, the contact, the way to contact you. So Cloaked allows you to take the power back to give you some control of this relationship to where your email remains a private email address. But this aspect of it is just a kind of super awesome feature. It's also a password manager and I highly recommend you use a password manager. And so this is combined password manager and the ability to generate as part of the, you know, the usual generation of a new password when you send up to a thing. It also generates emails and phone numbers. And soon I read, which is interesting, they can generate credit cards. sometimes places require credit cards for sort of quote unquote free trial. So if they can actually pull that off, which I don't know how they're going to do, it's pretty awesome. And in general, I'm just a big supporter of companies innovating, how to maintain people's privacy in this Internet age, where there's so much money to be made from people's data. So it's an interesting sort of technological and business challenge of how to protect the data. So hats off to Cloaked for doing a great job. Plus the interface, as you mentioned, is super nice, which is really important because the kind of sign up process to a new website should be effortless and Cloaked doesn't get in the way. Go to cloaked.com/lex to get 14 days free or for a limited time, use code LexPod when you sign up to get 25% off an annual Cloaked plan. This episode is also brought to you by Notion, a note taking app that I've been using forever, but they have awesome team collaboration tool. Man, it must be forever ago that I first saw Notion recommended to me, but I was always the cool kids that were using Notion.