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Mark Cuban: evaluation

29 Mar 2024 Lex Fridman Podcast #422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs

“I think a lot of… I just don’t trust the supposed volume- I just don’t trust the supposed volume that people say it’s happening at, versus everything I’ve read and seen.”

— Mark Cuban

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Speaker
Mark Cuban
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
29 Mar 2024
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

Transcript context

…You’re getting into the culture of organizations and leadership within organizations, and accepting any type of criticism, put aside DEI. When I criticized the referees in the MVA, I got fined. That was their option. I knew what I was getting into, not that they’re completely analogous, but it’s cause and effect. If I’m in a major company and I’m publicly criticizing or even internally criticizing a sales plan or a product, our product sucks. There was a Google engineer that got fired for saying Google had AGI, and nobody believed they did and they knew that created problems. It wasn’t DEI related, but it was saying something publicly that was, in the CEO’s eyes, to the detriment of the company. I think those are all analogous. If you’re trying to accomplish something within an organization because you think there’s a problem and there’s people speaking out saying look, we’re getting it wrong, I think I’m a victim of all this, and the company… Then leadership has got to make a decision. Do they agree or not agree? Are they right or are they wrong? Is it positive or negative to the company? And you decide. This conversation that conservatives are being silenced in organizations now, I haven’t seen it. The other side of your question, I think unpacking it, is what’s driving all this? Put aside universities for one. In corporate America, when I talk to people in corporate America about DEI, they always start talking about ideology. I’ve talked to Bill Ackman, who you’ve had on, and when I asked him, “Bill, you run your own companies. Who’s telling you what to do?” “They are.” “Who’s they? “It’s the universities, the people who have this ideology of DEI.” I’m like, “Did they force you? Did they coerce you? Did you lose control of your company?” “No, it’s not me. It happens to other people.” Then I talk to other people, same thing. I try not to go one-on-one in Twitter conversations on this topic. In the DMs, I’ll talk to people who are really conservative and I’ll ask the same question and be like, “Who’s forcing you to do this?” “It’s the ideology that’s everywhere. Didn’t see the Harvard thing in University of North Carolina.” I’m like I’ve never had anybody try to push me in this direction to do this. This was my business choice. I’m not trying to tell other people you have to do this. You make your own business choices. Where companies have made their business choices, and if somebody doesn’t feel confident or comfortable with it, they may feel they’re being discriminated against. You make your own business choices. Where companies have made their business choices, and if somebody doesn’t feel confident or comfortable with it, they may feel they’re being discriminated against. There was something I just read in the Wall Street Journal, where the Wall Street Journal had a company interview 2 million people, and the difficulty in firing and how people, when they were fired, 40% of the people who were fired felt like it was wrong, that they were doing a great job. Then it talked about the HR person going through the hassle of trying to explain to this person through performance reviews that they weren’t doing a good job, yet the people still thought they were doing a great job, despite being told they’re not doing a good job. I see that as being an analogous to all this huffing and puffing about reverse discrimination and conservatives not being able to speak up because if 40% of people who have been fired don’t believe they should have been fired, there’s a disconnect somewhere in how you think you’re doing your job. If you just feel like, I can’t speak up because of it, because of you’re white, and that doesn’t comport well with DEI programs, a lot of things are going to happen. Either that’s going to come up in your performance review, HR or your boss is going to have to address it in some way, it’s going to get to HR at some level, and then decisions are going to have to be made. You can’t just fire somebody because they spoke up. Somebody’s going to have to communicate with you. I think a lot of… I just don’t trust the supposed volume- I just don’t trust the supposed volume that people say it’s happening at, versus everything I’ve read and seen. And when I talk to people in positions of authority within organizations and ask them who’s forcing them to implement these ideologies, nobody says… Nobody says yes, that there is somebody. But on Twitter, it sounds great. It is true for Conservatives, but in general, you can sell books, you can get likes when you talk about this ideology, and there’s a degree to which, “Is this woke ideology in the room with us right now?” Meaning it’s this boogie monster that we’re all……

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