Mark Cuban on High Drug Prices, Taxing Billionaires, and 2028

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Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. Do you hear that? That sound, right? That means that summer's officially here. It means that grown adults just sprint into the street for a frozen dessert shaped like a cartoon. But this summer, Mint Mobile has a better treat. Every plan, including unlimited, is $15 a month. And unlike ice cream, it won't drip down your wrist or look nothing like the picture because anyone has any cash. Give it a try at MintMobile.com/switch. A front payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 month plan required. $15 a month equivalent to taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy. See terms. Fortunately, you should say the week, me last, right? You are the favorite billionaire. Yeah, one of them. Although you would be delicious, I will say. Elon would be gay me. Hi, everyone. David from New York Magazine in the Vox Media Podcast Network, I'm Cara Swisher. And once again, it is Scott Grieh August. I so never get tired of that. And while Scott continues his August adventures, who the fuck knows where he is, I brought on yet another guest host to make him jealous. This is my goal. It is Mark Cuban, entrepreneur and co-founder of Cosplus Drugs. He's here. Good to see you, Mark. He's good to be seen by you, Cara. It's always a pleasure. Yeah. Thank you. We had a problem with my shirt. It's M for Mark. It's M for Mark. Yeah. I know better. Yeah. Do you want me to tell you my Michigan story? Please. My son goes there. You know. And why cannot stand, cannot stand Michigan. Oh, my son loves it. But go ahead. So in any event, maybe three years ago, I had this guy pestering me online. I want to sell you the website, goblue.com. Oh. I go blue, obviously, as big at Michigan. Yes it is. I don't want it. He wanted all this money. And finally, he lowered it. We've won like hundreds of thousands of dollars. And finally, I said, no, no, no, he lowered the price to $38,000. And I was like, okay. And the reason I said, okay, is for two reasons. One, I invested in this company called Campus Inc. That does NIL licensing. So big college college college basketball football stars, they sell merchandise and everything. And they do it for Indiana University. And Indiana was playing Michigan in a football game. And I was going on the introductory football event that they have, which is really huge. And so the whole pregame thing. And so what I did was I bought it and I redirected Go Blue to Indiana's NIL page. And then I went on there and I said, you know, in the sake of a good rivalry, I have Go Blue. And you all should go check it out. And I went to the Indiana page and they sold a ton of Indiana merchandise. So that's not the story. So the story is I get an email from their general counsel at the University of Michigan. Oh, good. And also at the time, and also at the time, the president of Michigan. And he was like, no, this cannot happen. That's our trademark. I'm like, okay, give me 38,000 buy it back and we're done. He's like, no, we'll sue you. Just give it back to us for free. Yeah. I'm glad parody. I'm allowed to do a parody, right. It was fun. And it's no big deal. He's like, nope, give it back to us or sue you. I'm like, okay, I'm going to give it back to you. But let me just tell you something. I have a big platform. And every single time I get the chance to talk about how fucking stupid the University of Michigan is and how stupid you are as president. I am going to take advantage of it and get more than my 38,000. And here we are again, again, the nine other times that I'm scared of. Oh, this is great. I've never seen him like Michigan. I wear a Michigan dad hat and I get stopped a lot. I would try wearing an Indiana dad hat, but I can. My son would kill me. He would kill me. Exactly. Well, you know, are you an Indiana dad or you just have the hat? No, no, I went to. Yeah, I know you did. You're not an Indiana. No, my kids. I wouldn't let them go to school there. No. Well, why? Because the legacy is just too strong, just too much. Too strong. Too strong? No. I went in the blaze their own path. How are you doing? How's your summer going, Mark? Everything's good. Yeah. No complaints. It was my daughter's birthday yesterday. So eight, too much cake. Got no sleep. Um, you know, just the usual hanging out with the family. You know, it's been nice. Do you have any go-to vacations? I see you're not on a yacht in Greece or something. No, I'm not. The yacht's striped me as that guy. No. Our kids or two of the three is still in school. So we'll go to Laguna Beach and hang out there. You know, we'll take a trip to Europe or something, just to do something different. I was in Paris and it was right in the middle of the heat wave. I was too. Oh, my God. Oh, my, my doughnut. That was crazy. That was a crazy heat. And they're not used to it. No. No. And I mean, the aesthetics are more important than the health. They want those buildings to look like they're from the 16, 17, 1800s. And you're not going to be able to do like they do in New York and put an external AC or window AC or anything. And so it was brutal. Brutal. And then the place I stayed, I got an Airbnb. They had one fan and I said, do you, two fans are like, no, we have one. And I was like, I have to kill someone like immediately. But anyway, we've had a lot to get to today. I text to you and said, what do you want to talk about? You said health care, health care. So we are going to focus on health care, but there's a few other things. And first, let's talk health care, prescription drug prices had their biggest year-of-year drop in more than 60 years. President Trump is taking a victory lap for that while his Trump RX site, which is your company, cost plus drugs, is partnering with, maybe a factor, but experts say, abide near a policy requiring Medicare to negotiate drug prices is more likely driving costs down. You got a lot of criticism when this partnership was first and now it's not for me. I thought it was actually smart. Talk about it a little bit. Yeah, it's really simple, they refer traffic, you know, it's just, you know, a portal that people can go to, look up prices for 600 drugs. And if they make Obamacare, for example, well, a little bit different, but no, actually, you can get it. Yeah, I mean, you can, you go to TrumpRx.com and you put in the name of the medication. And if they have it, it comes up. And if we're the cheapest, it refers you to us. We've seen our volumes increase or sales increase. And the good news about that is Republicans want cheaper drugs and dependents want cheaper drugs. Democrats, so it's a win. And we've seen our volumes go up and, you know, when our volumes go up, our costs typically go down. And because we're cost plus 15%, we've passed on those savings. So we've literally dropped the price since TrumpRx launched. I think we've dropped the price for over 200 medications. So, you know, there's no downside. So talking about both of them, this policy from Biden and also what Trump is doing, requiring Medicare to negotiate drug prices at the same time. So a couple of different things. So with the IRA where you're negotiating for 10 different medications, that's a bonus, right? Because along with that, it also put a cap on the amount of out-of-pocket that comes with Medicare to $2,200. And that in turn increased premiums, right, because the insurance companies had to compensate for the cap that was made available to the patients, which is great for patients. I'm not complaining at all. So we kind of balance those things out. But there were some drugs where push down the price and that's always a positive. There's no downside there at all. But I think the bigger issue is that we had biosimilars come out. And that pushed the price of like-- Explain what that is. So biosimilar is like a generic for an injectable drug. Instead of it being a tablet, which should just be called a generic, it is an injectable drug. So like Stalara, Umyra, right, that are injectable. They had the equivalent of generic version, what it's called a biosimilar. And that dropped the price for Stalara from $128,000 a year to uncost plus. It's $365 plus shipping every couple months, right. For Umyra, it went from $8,000 a month to like $400 a month, $450 a month on cost plus. And so you saw some really, really expensive popular drugs drop in price significantly. And I think that drove it more than anything. What else has to be done to bring the prices down? So you want to be on the Trump org site because you want volume, right, presumably. People use it. The great job on IVF, right, meaning if you're trying to, you know, build a family and you need the fertility drugs, they were really expensive and he negotiations. You know, he put some some pressure on the GLP one guys and they came out and particularly within Medicare where in certain cases you can get it for $50 a month. So he helped push in that direction. So, you know, love him or hate him and I'm certainly not going to say anything that's going to change anybody's mind and I'm not going to try. But at the same time, you know, given credit what credit is due. So, you got a lot of trouble when you were arguing with people. You pulled a curse thing. I didn't think you should take that down honestly off when people argue. Were you surprised by that? No. Because I think your goal is very clear. You want a lower prescription drug crisis. Yeah, it's just the people, you know, that's just the way it is. You know, there's two types of TDS. There's Trump derangement symptom and there's Trump devotion syndrome. Right. You know, and they're both equal equal, right? And whatever side of that you're on, that's the button, you know, your buttons to get pushed and the buttons you try to push. But you know, like I said, there's nothing I'm going to say that's going to change anybody's mind about Donald Trump and I'm certainly not going to try. And when you're thinking about what has to be done next, you can't just put pressure on these people because you have to have other things happen, right? How do you keep that up? The idea of it. Of what you know, there was prices did go up during COVID because the supply chain etc etc. What has to happen next on a on a bigger scale? On medication or across the board? Across the well across the board. Talk about it across the board. Well, I mean, just generally there has to be improvements in processes or reduction in prices and all the inputs are changing, right? And I think the missing piece that's really driving a lot of inflation, you can argue whether it's higher low is, you know, the deficit, you know, the debt that we're paying out trillion dollars a year on. And you're starting to see that I don't know what interest rates were doing the last couple of days, but you know, the 10 years up to like 4.6 4.7, the 30 years over 5.3. There will be a much worried. And so, you know, if you think of it big picture, you always look at the extreme and say what would happen, right? We saw what happens if there's zero interest rates, everything gets inflated. But let's just say in this won't happen. Hopefully that well, I'll put it in context when I graduated from Indiana University interest rates were 15%. Is there a potential for interest rates to go to 15% again? I don't think so. But if they did just for sake of example, the price of everything would go up, but more or just as importantly, the price of stocks would go down significantly. The price of assets would go down significantly 61% of people own stocks directly or indirectly, that's going to change that wealth effect, which I think is holding some people up. Now, there's still that K shaped economy where people who are struggling are truly struggling and it's going to get worse, but if interest rates go up, it'll get dramatically worse for them. But at the top of the K, it'll get worse for everybody else as well. And that's my big concern because we don't know what that inflection point is. We don't know is it 6% is it 8% who knows, but we know there is some level where the only people that would get rewarded are savers. Right. Exactly because they'll get more money. I remember that 15%. I remember it was crazy. 6% was was seem like my first mortgage 12%. 12% my to my two you're right. What I mean credit do deficit Trump, right? Like Trump has risen the deficit. Everybody. Yeah, everybody. Yeah, yeah. So Biden, you name it Trump. I think get wins well in terms of agrib, but it's a lot of big numbers too. Yeah. Right. A 5% growth on a bigger number is going to be bigger than a 5% growth. Absolutely. But when you think about what has to be done then. So what happened, you know, this has to do health care, of course, is one of the biggest costs for people. Yeah. We have an economy, a health care economy that is driven by just a few companies. You know, they they are the middlemen are driving up the cost of everything. You know, not just pharmacy, but also medical costs. You name it. There's nothing they don't they don't contribute much of any value yet they increase the cost they, you know, they make it more miserable for doctors to be doctors. Well, name for these guys there. Well, there's a bunch of them, right? So, you know, so there's the big health care conglomerates. The United is the signal is the CBS is et cetera. And they have hundreds if not thousands of subsidiaries, which include PBMs, which include third party administrators, which include co pay maximizer, all these consultants. There's just so many ways that they get into your pocket and you don't even know it's them, you know, they own clinics, they own, you know, doctors, they hired, you know, 10% either directly or under contract number of doctors at the biggest health care conglomerate. And so, you know, that creates so much friction and so much cost in the system that every we don't even control the cost of our health care system anymore. No, it's interesting because I think about my own I have a bunch of prescription drugs and I do not even understand them and I'm a smart person like I don't understand where the it's not easy for anybody. No, that's what we started cost plus, right? So I use cost plus and I thank you for that cost plus drugs dot com. Nobody understand nobody knows what something costs. Nobody understands why cost it. Nobody understands why there's a different price for everybody. Nobody understands why there's no transparency other than cost plus drugs literally. And so if you don't understand these things, it's designed to be confusing. The more information asymmetry, the better levers they have to raise prices and create friction and that's exactly what they do. And there's a lot of indirect, not obvious scenarios that are created. So so much work is done to be able to provide the information that they require for each claim for each medical instance or pharmacy that you're driving doctors crazy. Not only are you reducing the amount of time they're able to spend with patients, but you're you're creating burnout to the nth degree and I wouldn't shock me, you know, if we're starting to see the number of applicants from medical starts to decline. Yeah, it's all the shit they make you do other than caring for the patients and it's not necessary. You could extract all that if you if you just got rid of PBMs and literally not even get rid of them. If you just say made a law that said, um, PBMs are no longer able to control formularies. Are that thing you have to look at with your insurance coverage to see if your drug is covered or not. That gives the PBMs all the leverage to go to all these big brand and specialty drug manufacturers and say, look, if you don't do exactly what we want in paying rebates, doing business or not doing business with cost plus drugs, then we're going to diminish your positioning on the formulary so that you're no longer available to the 80 million people we cover and not just for one drug. But for your entire portfolio or will yeah, so that's cost you hundreds of millions of billions so they have that much control and they do so little, you know, they don't really add much value. What do they try to do to your company? What is the biggest challenge you guys face? Well, they just they tell these brands like we have almost every generic other than control substances. We don't want to deal with that. Everything generic in some way, not everything. So then there's brands and brand specialty drugs and they'll go to the brands and say, look, we have millions of customers. Right. We have millions of millions of people. Why won't you sell your brands through us? And the answer is always identical because the PBMs have told us if we deal with cost plus drugs dot com, they will diminish us on their formularies. As I said, it could cost tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars across their entire drug portfolio. And they're like, Mark, we love you, but we can't cut off our nose to spite our face. And the reason that they're afraid that the PBMs are afraid is because of what we've done, what we've done to the pricing of biosimilars and specialty generics, right. When we started publishing the price with our cost, everybody all of a sudden had a reference point with which to negotiate from even the FTC, Lena Khan, when she was suing these guys was using our price lists and our markups to define, you know, how much people were getting ripped off and to, you know, lead towards your settlement. And, you know, now, if all of a sudden you could see what the actual cost is of yours, a relative or whatever it may be, and see what the price would be with only a 15% markup, that destabilizes the pricing and revenue for all the PBMs and the insurance companies that. You can't publish the prices of the ones you can't get. Can you correct? Right. We have because we don't know what our cost is. We can't sell them. And they don't want us to be able to sell them specifically. You know, get those lists marked and pups are published. No, no, literally it's like fight club, number one rule of fight club is you can't talk about fight club, number one rule of PBM contracts and pricing, you can't talk about it. And I'll give you the perfect example. You're a clever man. I bet you could get your hands on them. It's not that I can't, but it doesn't really help me in terms of pricing, right. Or something. But let me give you the perfect example. There is something called try care, which provides pharmacy to the military. People that are listed now, people that are retired, wherever they may live, right. And Elizabeth Warren went to them and they said, okay, try care. You have hired this company, this big PBM called express grips, right. And I know them well. Right. So express grips. And so So I want to know what you're charging the government every time somebody in the military or formally in the military uses a drug that you carry. Expresscript said no. The military said we're not going to show you. That's proprietary information. Get the fuck out of here, right? Like you said, you know, you can find it if you need to find it, but President Trump could ask for it. They would say no. Wow. So we can't know their prices. They can't know their prices. They hide them, and that's what they do, not just in this instance, but across the board. Right. So we don't know. So we don't know. That's why they're terrified of cost plus drugs. Well, what has to give? What has to give then? Well, I like the, you know, I love the break up big medicine bill that Josh Holly and Elizabeth Warren proposed in the Senate, but not one single senator got behind them and co-sponsored it. Wow. Where's it in the house? Isn't it even habitant in the house? No. No one's even brought it up. And I pushed it. You name it, right? You, anybody, every senator, when I saw you right at those events, I talked to all of them. What did they say to you? Quietly behind the scenes. Quietly behind the back. We want their money. Yeah. Yeah. We have, we have midterms coming up. Yeah. Maybe after the midterms. Hopefully. Well, they get any guts. So another big news in World of Health. I don't know what you think of this. Costco is getting into the Medicare business. The company is teaming up with nonprofit insurance scan group to launch Costco branded Medicare advantage plans in two states and Medicare supplement plans. And a third, the plans will integrate Costco offerings, like prescriptions and over-the-counter drugs, plus vision and hearing products. It talked about this. It was really, you know, I'm getting close to Medicare. And although I have insurance, so I don't quite know what I need to do in that regard. Right. By the way, it's so confusing. Because I have kids. And so I want to keep my insurance. Right. But what do you think of this kind of thing? It's a sales and marketing effort, right? It's, I mean, I don't know enough about the details to say if it's good or bad. There are some, you know, the thing that people don't realize about Medicare in general. It is driven mostly by private insurance companies. It is. Medicare advantage is all private insurance united health care. In this case, the new one with Costco, you know, Costco does a good job. Hopefully, you know, it'll be an above board product because not all of them are. No, they're not. Then you have traditional Medicare part A part B. But then you have to buy supplemental insurance because you still, you know, have a 20% hickey that you have to pay for out of pocket for medical, right? And then you, it doesn't cover your pharmacy. That's part D. So you use that from a traditional insurance company. So you're getting, you have the same problems, even though you're on Medicare. People say take A and B, not advantage and D. That's what goes. Yeah. Yeah. And get supplemental insurance too. Right. Right. Exactly. But it does this help if a company like Costco is doing this. People have a lot of trust in the company. No, it's still the same numbers. The math is still the same math. You can be more efficient and offer incremental benefits. So you might, you know, Costco could offer lower cost over the counter drugs. They can offer lower cost prescription eyeglasses because it's Costco. But it's not the feature of healthcare turning it over to big business. No, no, no. Yeah. So again, what has to happen is what? So you've got to get rid of the middle man, right? And so what I push for all the time is to get cities and states and companies to let me look at their contracts because what I do is I've set up my clod. So I'll just run and anybody can do this. I run the contracts through clod and I just tell them where they're getting fucked over. And they have no idea. I literally had some big, big companies do it, talk to me, realize just how badly these PBMs and TPAs, the big, the big, big climbers are ripping them off. And now they're changing to, you know, their pass through PBMs like right way and 360 or Smith RX and right, I forget all the names of them. But in any event, so there's alternatives, you don't have to go just with the big guy. And you're doing the country a big disservice and look, you know tech, right? And so you know these guys are trying to do all they can to figure out AI and it's expensive. The easiest way for any big tech company for more, with more than a thousand members, you know, employees and families is to look at their healthcare benefits because every penny they save on their healthcare benefits is cash flow that goes right to the bottom line. And they, it's just not their core competency. And what happens is their HR departments, particularly in tech, are always under manned and understaffed. And you know that when somebody has a problem at Vox Media, whoever does your healthcare and benefits, they go right to HR and they complained about getting, you know, having to go through this pre-authorization process, about the claim being denied. And HR spends 90% of their time doing that and doesn't have the resources to look at reducing costs. And when they do see it, I'll walk in the door and meet with them and huge companies, mark you right, we could save millions if not tens of millions of dollars or more and give us a 20 PE. That's 200 million, two billion dollars, whatever it is, a market cap, but we're afraid of our employees because they don't want to change the logo on their card. They want that same insurance card. So for the one time in all of tech history, they're afraid of their employees because the HR people. And all I tell them they have to do is two things, run their contracts, all their healthcare contracts through cloud or chat GPT and just say, what's the prompt? What's the prompt? How am I getting fucked over? Oh, all right. Okay. Is that the technical term? Yeah. It really, really is. And it'll tell you because the game they play, the PBMs in particular play is they mismatch definitions. They'll say, this section is for pass-through pricing on drugs. We will pass through all the rebates. Then at the bottom of that paragraph, they'll put in the definitions and they'll say, well, that doesn't include specialty drugs or other fees. Which is awesome. And then they get the option of what to make a specialty drug. Right. Yeah. It's just, they game the whole thing and the reason they can do that is these contracts are 50, 100, 200 pages long in some cases. There's no human that has enough coffee available to them to literally go through and drink it. They've gone through and put contracts through where, and these are contracts provided by these huge insurance companies, multi-hundred billion dollar companies, right? And they have misspellings that, you know, this says 36%, this says 46%, and they didn't even catch it, right? It's so minor. Yeah. You would think, you would think the grifters would be good at, good at, oh, they're brilliant at it. Right. Yeah. Because that's to their favor. They can't spell. Right. Well, it's to their benefit. So that's why you need AI. You want it for every single company in this country. If you want to benefit from AI and have it pay for itself, all you have to do is this one thing. To apply it to healthcare. Yeah. Put your contracts in there. You know, we know what I've been doing around this Paramount deal. I have a friend who's a lawyer who's been putting it into claw at all the stuff. And then he sends it to me and I have to tell you, it's fucking accurate. And then I say something, everyone's like, how did she know it would turn out this way? And I was like, this is good. It matters. The person matters, the prompts and how, oh, yeah, you have to be smart. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it's him and, and the pro, the him and the prompt and clawed with not by itself. And you have to be smart enough to know when clawed is wrong. That's right. That's right. But I have to tell you with the combination it's been startling. Oh, it's great. Right. But like, it's like using clawed or Shachy PT for for healthcare, right? It's like, well, you didn't tell me that you had this blood test three years ago, right? So I gave you the wrong answer. So I have to correct it. Right. Exactly. So speaking of healthcare costs, I want to continue and finish on this. You had a post on X the other day that got people talking. You wrote, if you own shares and a fund that owns any big of the biggest insurance carriers, you're part of the cost of healthcare problem in this country. Those companies put the share price over the health of you, your family, co-workers and friends. The worst part is that they will lie and mislead you to make more. All the funds you own that you will sell if they don't divest their interest in the biggest insurance companies. That's something else to do that. Explain why you're calling this out now and do you think funds will actually divest? So no, they won't. Some can't just because it's SPX or it's part of an index, right? But they won't because their interest is just in making money, not in doing what's best for the country. And it's the same with the big insurance companies. Their fiduciary responsibility, at least right now, is to shareholders. All they care about. Yeah. Reminds me of tech companies. But go ahead. Yeah. Right. But when you listen to the core of the earnings conference calls or run them through your favorite LLM, right? And you just say, did they say anything about reducing costs for patients? The answer is never yes. Yeah. You know, and if they maybe save something here, they're making it up in fees or somewhere else. They're not. They're fairly saying like one company, one PBM insurance company said their earnings are going to be a little bit lower for two years because they're making this one adjustment on rebates. But they'll make it up after that and more than compensate and get back to their normal margins. Get the forgotter like nobody is going to change their habits that run these companies unless it impacts it where they care. And that's the price of the stock. So does that happen? And it works with South African companies at works. Right. No, it can't. When someone, you know, if you had Bernie's saying, do this, if you had, you know, Jai Paul doing this instead of pushing for Medicare for all and just talking trash there, something could happen. If you had Republican. pushing it. It could happen. But again, that's where their money's coming from. And I'm not saying Bernie and giant bar getting it, but a lot of people are. So what would you, what reaction did you get? Not a whole lot, honestly, just a couple of articles and, you know, some requests for quotes. And nobody said, yeah, I did it. Not one single person. Yeah. I'm going to do it, Mark. Thank you. I shall do it. I shall do it. Now, yet another post of yours is generating buzz this week of prediction that one outlet says has investors watching you posted chips as an asset class for the new crypto. Explain for me. Yeah. I mean, I sold most of my Bitcoin. I went from not being a believer to being a believer thinking, um, it's a better golden gold because it's digital. And I also believe that it would be a good hedge against political and geopolitical instability. That it'd be a hedge against, you know, um, economic instability. No, it really got washed out too, by the way. Yeah. Bitcoin has lost the plot. Yeah. Right. Well, all the things I just mentioned had to come true. That's what the Maxi's were pushing. Right. It's protection protection against fiat instability. You know, money printer go burr. Right. Money printers burring as much as it could possibly burr. Right. And the dollar is down. And so you would think the price of Bitcoin and dollars would be skyrocketing, particularly with all this geopolitical instability and all the uncertainty. But it's not. It's, you know, it's flatline for the most part. Because if there's not a good narrative, like any other stock, right? If the narrative isn't good, supply demand defines the price unless it pays dividend with these don't. And so people aren't buying it. And the reason I said chips are the, the next thing is because it's not intuitive until you really think about it, right? Chips are like, you know, the Nvidia chips, AMD chips, maybe TPUs from Google and some others. Amazon's trying to make their own, you know, all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Apple is right. They're like apartments, right? You can rent them. And when they're brand new, they're worth the most. And you might as well rent them out at the highest price. And then over time, they degrade in quality because you can't improve them. At least not now. And so I think it makes a good investment. And it makes one that you can create a really cool narrative about. And there's so much money chasing it that the crypto bros kind of like these types of things, right? And so narrative makes economic sense. Lots of money there. How do you make it an asset class and just the stocks in it, the stocks of companies that make it? Yeah. You can tokenize it. You can use crypto there to tokenize it and sell it as a real world asset. They can do tokenize the stocks. No, tokenize a chip. A chip. Yeah. A chip. You know, here's, here's the right to the, to, to you own the rights like a barrel of oil, you can buy it and sell it, right? Oh, like what Michael Sailor was doing, right? What kind of, yeah, yeah, with the Bitcoin itself. That's a lot more complicated. That's more financial engineering, right? But more like you can put contracts on the chips and lead and take the share of revenue created from that chip and sell it. Right. Oh, interesting. Are you doing that? I'm still trying to learn. There's, I mean, it's relatively new. What's the, what's the reaction to that? I mean, it was like interesting. Let's see what happens. And the crypto bros that are still holding on. You're an idiot. You know, you're dumb. All they're, all they're, what are they waiting for? What are they? What are they actually? They're hoping it will go to the sky. What? Well, there's, there's still a chance it gets hot again, right? Yeah. Members supplying demand. I mean, a, a stock's not a whole lot different than a baseball card, whatever's hot and whatever has the, the, the greatest narrative. So Bitcoin and all the others, the theorem could go up. I'm really disappointed in the theorem because it has smart contracts. And my hope when I got excited about it was that we'd be able to use smart contracts and the, the ledger of Bitcoin to create better social media applications to create new types of applications that feed data to, to other things, right? Like tracking the weather so I could buy weather insurance for a maps game in case it snows. You know, that type of thing, but it never really came to fruition. And everybody just tried to play the same games. How can I extract the most amount of money from a new blockchain? Because the biggest downfall of crypto always has been the marginal cost to create a competitive blockchain is close to zero. So everybody created their own set amazing it was. And you can't have that many. Right. Right. Because then it goes say like Trump coined down to zero and then he lives all your money. But a lot of it was, it was crazy to say, but a lot of it was a scam, like, I believe. Yeah. I mean, look, I went, when Trump coin came out, I'm, again, I'm not, it's not even relevant to Trump. He doesn't have the only meme coin or shit coin out there. I literally emailed the people I know at Coinbase. So what the fuck are you doing putting this shit coins out when you know all you're going to do is watch people lose their money? Because it's just a game of musical chairs. And then you, you know, online if X is like anything, they'll tell you, we know it's musical chairs. We know it's not even as good as a lottery ticket. And that's why we play, right? That's our gambling and that's our rush. Well, there's also, there's also another idiot out there. Well, yeah, well, that's the whole point right there. Yeah. And so it's just gambling and it's just, that's the rush they get. What can people do with either their prescription drugs? What's the one thing? Is it insurance, not investing insurance companies? Is it, is it moved to away from the express scripts or whatever? What is the one thing people can do to start moving the ball? Because politicians certainly won't, it's got to be the CEOs. So self-insured companies provide insurance to 67% of employees who get insurance from work, 67%. So most of it, yeah. Yeah. And so if those CEOs got their shit together and weren't idiots and just run these contracts through their LLMs and just adapted their contracts accordingly, the whole business would change like that. Yeah. I like you're convincing. If you're not idiots, you idiots, that's, that's how you persuade people. Yeah. No, I, yeah. You know, you get the point though, right? How would you, what would you call a CEO of a company that has a chance to save millions of millions of millions of dollars, increased their stock price as a direct result, improved the health and wellness of their employees and their families and refuses to do it. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're right. Idiots. Yeah. No, you want to be right or you want to be effective. That's right. And you're not even being right. You're looking like an idiot. And so I'm hoping, I can't name the company, but there was one company who did exactly what I said exactly. And they just got back to me and they said, we're saving millions upon millions more than we ever possibly could we get an, we did an audit, we're going to get a refund. And I said, please, just do one thing for me. Just say on your quarterly earnings conference call that this is why earnings are up. Yeah. Yeah. Because if you do that, then their copycats are, she does it. You're right. 100%. We listen to Mark. Okay. Mark, let's go on a quick break. We come back. Billionaires buying sports teams. You might know something about that. Support for the show comes from shipstation. One of the underrated miracles of the modern world is the global shipping network. It's wild. You can box something up, slap an address on it and have it show up halfway around the world in just a few days. But there's still ways to make it more efficient. That's where shipstation comes in. Shipstation is an end-to-end order fulfillment platform for e-commerce businesses powered by AI trained on decades of data from billions of shipments across the world. Shipstation adapts to your unique business, alerting you when stock is low recommending the best carrier selections and rates and automating tasks to save you time. 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Thousands of recipes from celebrated food publications around the world, local news from all 50 states, sports coverage from across the globe, audio stories you can take anywhere, and daily puzzles exclusive to Apple News Plus, all curated just for you. New subscribers try it for free for one month at news dot apple slash learn terms apply. Mark or back. Family drama is complicating the blockbuster sale of the LA Lakers, Jeannie Bus, controlling owner of the Lakers, is challenging her siblings' attempts to sell the family's remaining 17.8 percent stake arguing the sale can't happen without her consent. This comes after former Disney CEO Bob Iger and thrive capitals Josh Kushner, the other Kushner agreed to buy the Lakers from current majority owner Mark Walter and a deal valued at 12.5 billion Walters in a bit of trouble with all manner of his very problematic empire, whatever it is. Iger and Kushner are already buying 65% of the team adding the bus family shares would bring their ownership to roughly 83%. And now this is a world you know well. I was really fascinated this. You bought the Dallas Mavericks in 2000. You sold your majority stake in 2023. We're talking about chips as an asset class, but our sports teams seem to be an asset class now. And I'll note recently Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said he was open to you coming on as a minority owner, but the team is just kidding. Yeah. He was just kidding. Yeah. And investors at this point. But you'd I assume you'd buy it if it was available presumably. But that's on the price. So explain what's happening here for me. I find this really interesting, especially you know you have Iger in there, which is interesting. I think he's the pretty one and Josh is the money. Explain what's happening here. Couple things. One, it's a vanity asset. Like if I didn't buy the Dallas Mavericks, probably wouldn't know who I was. Right. I mean, you would cause a tech, but most people would not. I would not be a celebrity. I wouldn't have gotten on Shark Tank. Right. David Stern, Rest and Peace was the commissioner of the NBA. And you still always say I made you by finding you all those times. And he was right. You know, it is the ultimate vanity asset. It was in your behavior. No, you know, there was there's 30 NBA teams, 32 and other leagues. And so we know Jerry Jones's name, not because he was in the oil business. You know, people now know who Josh Kushner is, not just because of his brother. And so that it won its vanity asset to because it's a vanity asset. And now the leagues are allowing private equity to get involved. That's increasing the prices because private equity chases where the narratives are, you know, and this is crypto for rich people in some respects, right? It's where the fun narrative is. But from a true business perspective, there's two sides to this. One, if you can leverage it to build, you know, so if you look around staples that were crypto.com center, right? There's all kinds of cool stuff. There's if you go by, there's the battery outside of Atlanta, right? There's by the chase center. There's all kinds of stuff, right? And so if you're able to build all that stuff, you can make real money. So it's not the team per say, but it's the leverage it gives you by the traffic. And once you own the arena, you can do concerts, which is where the Mavs and the Dallas stars that we shared their arena with made most of our money, right? By doing concerts in a foreign Brooklyn with the nets. Yeah. You don't even have to have a good basketball team. No, you don't. You really, really don't because the Delta women's basketball team. Yeah. But the Delta between the number of fans when you suck and when you win a championship, you can raise ticket prices, but it's not a huge number in the bigger scheme of things. It's all driven by the externals, the real estate and by streaming, right? Because the NBA's got a huge revenue deal and you divide that by 30 teams. And that's real money. And so, you know, that increases the valuation as well. And if you want to win, it's going to cost you decent amount of money to win even with the second apron, this new thing they put in in the NBA. And so you've got to be willing to, you know, accept putting money in to cover losses in most cases and be willing to invest in all these external things. That was the thing with me. I don't want to be in the real estate business. I want to be in the basketball business. And it really changed to be a P E driven business as opposed to people like me and Jeannie bus who were cared about the fans. You didn't want to do restaurants. No, I don't want to do any of that shit, right? And I pretty much would have had to. Right. And so what is going to happen with Jeannie bus to explain her as an owner? I mean, I love Jeannie. I love Jeannie. I love her lover, lover. She cares about fans. She was always engaged. She wanted to do what's best for, you know, not just Lakers, but playing her fans playing her well in that show. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And that, you know, it's a fair, you know, representation of Jeannie. She's just got a good heart. And so we'll see what happens. I really don't know. But what do you think's going to happen here? What can she stop them? That depends on the legal aspect. It depends if she can buy them out. Right. Oh, that's right. Has she come to you? She has to keep 15% and I have no idea if she can buy out her siblings. That's a lot of money. Because if she can, then she can. She doesn't have to buy all of them out. Just enough to get to 15%. Well, I think they all want to sell. I think all I think they're five of them. Is that right? Five of them, right? And so you would think they would sell to her, you know, would there is there others who could buy it? Well, no, the whole I grew group, you know, the I grew a Christian group could. But yeah. And could they sell it to somebody else? Yeah. But I want to say controlling owner. So and she has to be over a certain amount. Would it be? Yeah. Would it be attractive to them to have heard have that if they own so much? I don't know. I mean, she could possibly even offer them a little bit more than Josh and Bob are. Oh, oh, offer over a Walter. Do you mean? No, no, no, no, no, no, the family. So they've got the family has got the trust in their existing holdings. And you've got Bob Iger and Josh Kushner coming in offering the 12.5 billion, right? And taking out Walter and the siblings, right? And the so would they want to stay if they can't take her out? Yeah, they probably would because I don't think she wants to stay forever. And I think she only would do it based off of what I've read for the term of the contract she has with Mark Walter, which is what four years left, I think. So, so what do you imagine is going to happen here? What has what should happen? How about that? I mean, what should happen is she should be able to do a contractual arrangement where she commits to sell her percentage to Bob and Josh and four years in exchange for running the team for those four years. Yeah. And that's what should happens. Why would she want to do that? Because she loves doing it. She loves the Lakers fans. She loves being part of it. I mean, look, it's I mean, having been there is stressful, but at the same time, it becomes your identity. And you get to learn to know all the fans and you get to love them. They love you. And you know, it's just a different feeling. And how do you assess Bob Iger as this is in this chapter? And Josh presumably lives in New York. Yeah. Bob, I love Bob, right? I think he's smart. He's fair. He's caring. He's empathetic. He's an LA guy. He's an LA guy. He knows the scene. Right. I'll see him at Clippers game. And anybody who would support like you bring his son all the time. And anybody who would support the Clippers when the Clippers were bad is a true basketball fan. Okay. All right. And so that that means a lot these days. Yeah. So where is this all going? These prices of all these sports names. You know, there's a lot of financial engineering involved. And so really kind of correlates to the NASDAQ and to the price of tech. As long as money's coming in, you know, that big chunk of that money goes to private equity, a big chunk of, you know, people's holdings can be borrowed against to buy a portion of the team. So, you know, if it's $10 billion and you have to own 15 percent, you have to come up with 1.5 billion. And you're probably not going to write a check because it's after tax check. Right. So you borrow against other assets. And that gives you the 1.5. You get emergization depreciation from the players contract, which maybe, you know, offsets the gains you anticipate from chat GPT, you know, open AI going public or, you know, anthropic going public. And so there's a strategy there. But if the price of those assets drop, two things can kill, right. One, if the price of those assets drops, so you can't borrow against them or you get called in, right. That's a real problem. And two, all the TV money for all the four big professional sports is built on the fact that by streaming the games, you can add more subscribers and have less churn and better. Well, you're reading all this stuff now with Paramount and all that's going on, right. They need a couple things to work for them. They need Paramount Plus to not only add subscribers, they need to reduce churn. And if the sports contracts do both of those things, add subs reduce churn, it's worth the price paid. If they don't, the shit hits the fan. Yes, it does. And there's a big problem because now Paramount's money's going down. And along with that, you've got a lot of problems, but go ahead. Yeah, in this particular sector, right. And then you have legacy media with CBS, right. And so if all the fees and everything that are charged, like the carriage fees, if they can't get the money they need from the cable networks, because they're getting messed up. or from Fox, whatever it may be, that's more problems for them. And that's all driven in impact sports rights fees. Right. Right. And then that's the golden goose at this point. So prices don't have to go up. They don't have to go up. No, not at all. Like when I am first about the Mavs in 2000, the value of my franchise actually went down the first 10 years. What did you buy for? What did you buy? 285 million. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's cheap. Doesn't it feel cheap? Looks cheap now. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Moving on. Let's go to this idea you find insane. This is your rant period of the show. California voters will consider proposed one time 5% tax on billionaires this month, a measure backed by representative Rokana. One big question is how founders whose wealth is tied up in a company stock would pay the tax without selling shares. Kind of suggests the state could provide loans and exchange for shares. But the terms that are long but not infinite, you call the idea. I think the word is insane. The technical term arguing the state would be essentially lending billionaires money so they could give it right back as taxes. I have to agree with you on this one. And I have different thoughts on the bill. I think people should pay more taxes who are wealthier as you know. But tell me more about your concerns and where this is. You know, Sergey Brins, you know, bust in the bank trying to stop this thing. It may it'll ultimately probably will pass would be my guess is my guess. But I don't know. I mean, I can tell you at a base like my my daughter just graduated from college and she was asking about living in L.A. I'm like, you can't afford it, right? The taxes are insane. But going back just to the billionaire stuff, right? People don't realize that a billionaire doesn't mean you have a billion dollars in liquid assets. Chances are you might have five percent if you're lucky. The rest is a stock is what you're saying. Or and it might be in non- not publicly available stock. It might be an ill-liquid assets that you can't sell. Which is why they borrow against it all the time. Well, yeah, if they're able to it, it's more recent that you're even able to borrow against private stock, right? But even then there's so many things that can work against you. You know, and you in particularly now companies aren't going as public as much as they used to. Like it's a big deal for SpaceX. It's a big deal for open AI. It's a big deal if anthropic goes public, right? All these other AI companies in particular, it based in California, that are raising money at 10 billion dollars and more. Those guys might, I mean, like if I'm investing in one of those, I don't want the money going right into the pockets of the founders, right? You can take a little bit, but if you're, let's just say to make it easy numbers, if you have a company that's valued at 10 billion dollars and you have three founders that each own 10 percent, they're billionaires by the state of California's definition. The chances of them having 50 million dollars in cash are zero. Zero. So now all of a sudden, what Row wanted to do, and I like Row, we get along great, I respect them. I think it's hard to the right place, but he's a politician first, right? And so the idea that, hey, Perry, you just did this AI thing and you did a company valued at 10 billion, you own your 10 percent, you are a billionaire. Kerry, I know you don't have 50 million or anywhere near it and you don't have liquidity at all. So I'm going to loan against your shares in a non-recourse deal, right? And we'll give you that 50 million dollars so you can give it right back to us. And if you can't pay us in the future, we'll just have, we'll just keep the shares of your stock. Well, what does not pay actually mean? You've seen many tech companies who have grown, grown profits, right? Added thousands of employees, right? Who knows how much in taxes, particularly in the state of California, you know, just benefited the communities and the founders don't have 50 million dollars. Tell me about this tax, how you're feeling about it. I think it's ridiculous. I think it's going to cost the more that I'll say, look, people say, well, you're a billionaire, right? Well, look, you're already getting people moving, you're getting companies moving. So they said that they would raise 20 million, because you can delay it, right? You don't have to pay it all at once. The estimate amount that I read when I was looking into all that stuff was 20 billion dollars a year. And 90% of that was going to go to medical, to medical, right? To make up for the money that was lost in the Medicaid need to work stuff, right? And then 10% for education and like, well, you have to do the math. Could you lose, if the average job pays $100,000 before benefits, right? Could you lose 200,000 jobs a year? The answer is yes. You could be cutting off your nose to just light your face. So how would you do this? Because people, you know, there's this, I mean, the polling is very clear with voters. Oh, no, everybody wants my money. And, you know, unfortunately, usually they say, the week, me last, right? And so, and I get it. You are the favored billionaire, although you would be delicious, I will say, compared to many of them. Yeah, we know. Yeah, you want to be so good. I mean, the obvious answer, you spend last, right? Right. But, you know, the reality is, California doesn't have a lot of really way to raise taxes. No, they do. You know, they, they already charge a lot on, I think they're, they already charge on capital gains. They charge the same amount as ordinary income, you know? And I forget, and there's, I forget which tax is at 13.3%. But they already get you coming and going. And so in terms of where you can probably raise some additional money is maybe, you know, stock buybacks. I'm not a big fan of stock buybacks. I think it's financial engineering. The federal government always taxes on maybe the states can do a little bit there. That's not going to raise $20 billion, though. You can tax on some of the loans on public companies, or you can make it easier for people to go public. Start, you know, making, working with the SEC, doing whatever you can. I don't, I don't have an answer here. Making it easier to go public, making it easier to sell shares to stock so that you have an actual event where they would pay capital gains tax, because your capital gains tax is already damn high. So what about an alternative minimum tax that like Scott is, and I don't have a problem with that either. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like the Warren Buffett thing, right? Because it used to be all the time. I mean, I remember when I started microsolutions that I had to pay money on retained earnings. Like if I kept too much money in the bank, I had to pay taxes on it. And I was like, okay, whatever. That's the law. I'm just going to keep on running my company. That's the way most entrepreneurs think. If you made it so that you had to pay an alternate minimum tax, and preferably at the federal level as opposed to the state level, then you know, you would get more tax and then hopefully whoever comes in next, we could reimburse or we could change those Medicaid work laws so that everybody who deserve Medicaid got it. And so that even with Medicaid, and I think it medical too, if your assets increase for whatever reason, you get a job, they don't immediately take it back to recapture the Medicaid money. You know, there's so many ways that you go about and alternative minimum tax is as good as any. And so what do you make when you consider the anger and the clear, you know, anti, I just saw yet another poll today around AI around meta, the meta case in Oakland, California happening right now, the data centers. I've been doing show after we, I've been talking about this free. I went into visit some Facebook people and they asked me what I thought. I said, people hate you. And they're like, oh, yeah, but what do you think? I go, people hate you. I was like, it's, and I said in data centers, it's just a proxy for that. I wrote a tweet about that. I tweeted exactly that. Yes. I know you did. And I was like, they hate you. And well, some of them can be good. I said that many of them aren't. And you really are treating these people like shit. And I think Facebook is the worst of the worst, right? Yeah. Well, Elon with the gas spewing things in in Memphis didn't help matters or your friends Kevin or your friends. Kevin just wants to make money. Yeah. Really? I had no idea. No idea, right? But let's talk about meta. And I'll give you this is my Michigan like experience with meta. Okay. Every single week, I get emails from little old men and ladies saying, will my cure for diabetes work? Or I just ordered your cure for diabetes for 294 dollars. Oh, no. And I'm like, I already know the answer now, which is they're using an AI version of me. And meta allows it. It's always on Facebook, right? Where I come in and I say, and I've seen it. And I've sent it to him. And I said, look, you know, I will cure diabetes, whatever. And then when you read the fine print all the way at the bottom, this is just an AI representation of Mark Cuban. It's not real. This is for entertainment purposes always. And to Facebook, that's good enough. Facebook knows that it's bullshit. Facebook knows the little old ladies are getting ripped off, right? And the point is that defines the culture of the organization. If you're willing to rip off little old, if you've grandparents, your grandparents, right? And that's acceptable. Everything, all that kind of bullshit is acceptable top to bottom in your organization. It's just like healthcare. They do the same shit, right? I was just recently meeting with a bunch of publishers who are worried about audio piracy of books. You know, they're doing pretty well with audio books and actually it's a good, strong business. But you know, they get pirated all the time. YouTube is the culprit for the most part here. And people do AI, now AI versions of books and all kinds of books. Everybody's books. Oh, yeah, I see books about me that are just AI nonsense. that's also books generated. That's Amazon does that. But YouTube does AI audio piracy. But see, that's the whole thing. This is where AI and data centers truly are the bad guys, because they are so expensive, right? They're going through every bit of cash that they have. They're having to borrow on top. So in the mindset is the bigger picture, this is the greater good, right? Whatever it takes. And so, and I tweeted about this too, I forget the exact example, but it used to be with Google AdWords that when you asked for an exact match for your ad word, you got an exact match, right? Now it's an approximation, right? And also it used to be that there was a set price. Now the price varies, but it always goes up, right? Whatever the specific details are. They're gaming the system. It's financial engineering to try to make up all that money. And so, which they need to do. Yeah, and so that's, you know, the end's just to find the means, right? And that's just wrong. Look, I'm not an anti-data center. I literally had an office right above my Mav's office, the practice facility, was right next to an IBM software data center. You know, and so, you know, it was no big deal to me, but it wasn't an AI data center. At least not yet, right? You know, so getting back to that idea of this taxes, it's all yes, of course, it's because so what to do? So leadership, honesty, right? You, things that we lacked, right? And again, I'm not going to talk about the president, but I'll use Medicare for all as an example because since we're talking healthcare, like there was that study, I don't know if you saw it, that said, Medicare for all would save $1 trillion. Sounds great, right? And so you look at the fine prints and see all the references that they use, right? So they, I looked at these numbers to get to a trillion and one of the numbers was $265 billion that, and it was the elimination of fraud. I'm like, $265 billion, that's like, that's a big number. Come on, try it. It seemed the, I think he cost us money. Yeah, it didn't work at all, right? So I go down to the footnotes and I'm like, okay, there's this article that was written in 2003 about Taiwan and their conversion to universal healthcare. I'm like, okay, so what happened? Well, Taiwan went from a paper system basically and a market-driven system to a transition to universal healthcare. It was a disaster the first couple of years, but there was this article written that said they saved 8% on waste. So what does the authors of this article extrapolate? They extrapolate from Taiwan from 1995 a paper-based system and they apply it to the US budget, right? And so they get three trillion times 8% and it gets their $265 billion. That is the problem. You've got something that everybody wants. Like if we walked out there and we said, it's a dollar a month to give healthcare for each person, dollar a month per person. Everybody, yeah, let's go. We're probably going before everybody before, right? But we're not trying to figure out a solution, right? We don't know what those costs are. A lot of the reasons we talked about earlier, but you can't lie about it. You have to put together a plan that gets you from here to there. Another thing that they did was they said, if we changed what we pay the best hospitals in the country, to Medicare rates, they would make up the losses in revenue by the reduction in administrative costs. That's the biggest bunch of horses. If you walk into a really nice hospital, it's designed to be a really nice hospital. It's got all the machines that go ping the really expensive stuff, right? And they've got the most expensive doctors. If you start paying doctors in those hospitals, Medicare rates, you know what they're going to do? They're going to opt out. They're not going to be available to anybody on Medicare, right? And the hospitals are going to opt out. But in both Bernie's and Representative Jaipal's Medicare for All, right? Like in this article in this study, they just accepted that as fat. There's just no way. And then the Krem daily Krem in both of those Medicare for all legislations that were proposed. Section four, administration. At the discretion of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, they have the option to figure out everything basically. It's a fucking politically appointed position. How would it be going right now? Yes, we don't have measles, measles for everybody. And then Salmonella. It'd be a disaster. And yet they just make it seem like everything is perfect. That in the case of the gyro, I'm going to push back. I don't think anything is perfect. It's like a sentiment of people are tired of what you talked about at the top. So fix the problem. Yeah. Well, fix the problem. Don't come on. They made an entirely new system. Yes, we do. Which actually Trump gives us an opportunity. If you can't build that ballroom, maybe we do need a ballroom, a smaller one. Maybe we do. We do not need those shiny horses. I could tell you. But you get the point. Yes, I see your point. Right. They come up with a plan so we can actually solve these problems instead of throwing out bullshit. Well, it's bullshit gets thrown because bullshit has been thrown. But anyway, let's go on a quick break. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Odo. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odo. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce and more. And the best part, Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odo for free at Odo.com. That's O-D-O-O.com. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds. A pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over a thousand dollars. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where fetch comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats. According to ConsumerAdvocate.org, you get paid back up to 90% of vet bills at any vet in the U.S. and Canada with claims paid back in as little as two days. Go to fetchpet.com/save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com/save. Support for the show comes from Harvey AI. The future of law is agentic, not just tools that assist, but AI agents that navigate complex matters. That's why Harvey created agents that can do the work from end to end. They build a plan, pull from secure data sources, run sub-agents in parallel, and draft the work product ready for your review. So you delegate the work and on the judgment. Trusted by more than 60% of the AMLA 100 and leading Fortune 500 legal teams, Harvey is the AI operating system designed specifically for legal work. Harvey AI tailored for law. Learn more at Harvey.AI. Mark, we're back. Scott and I have talked a lot over the years about who we want to run for president and one name keeps coming up. Let's listen to a clip. By the way, who's going to be the next president? Because according to AP, you get to decide. I'd rather have Mark Cuban. I vote for Cuban. He's clearly positioning himself for Ron, and I hope he runs. I want cubes. Super smart, super impressive guy and a decent man. I would take Mark Cuban, honestly, I would. I would like that because I'd get to go to the Lincoln bedroom, largely. That's my goal. I get a lot of shit for saying that by the way, but I don't really care. I have actually written saying you should run. We have very funny texts, and you have resisted. So one thing I've asked more than anything else, because I've been interviewing all these different possible candidates or Democrats. I'm going to move to the Republican soon. It's hard right now. They don't want to talk about it. And they'll trump his picture in some in a more substantive way. Talk about why you don't want to run, explain for people. So I don't have to anymore. Because everything is, it's all laws. You got everything. I think like an entrepreneur, right? If I see, like we're just talking about Medicare for all, I want universal healthcare in some form of fashion, right? We need to make sure that everybody in this country has a right and gets care, healthcare that they need. It would help the economy out of the idea, all the second and third order effects are enormous, right? And so if I was president, you would think, well, you could go, I've talked to people at HHS, CMS. There is no from here to there. And I've talked to, you know, about the break up big medicine bill. There's not one single senator that wants to support it other than those two. Same with the legislation, you know, I've talked to Bernie's people about how do we change this? They, whether I was president or not, they ain't going to change. Their self interest stays the same. Whereas as an entrepreneur, I can do things like cost plus drugs, cost plus wellness, all the other things that we're working on that allow me to have an impact. I can go and bang on the door of a CEO and call him moron or her or moron to their face and actually institute change. You can do that as president now. You can call people moron. Well, yeah, you could, but then I got to kiss the babies. I got to do all the stuff. I got to worry about stuff to maybe I'm not the best person, you know, or most qualified words. I have to have temperament, which I don't have. I have to have patience. Again, allow now just so you know, yeah, it's allowed, but doesn't make it right. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Although I doubt you'll go down those roads, but the idea is you're more effective outside and inside. Yes. Yes. I can do things, right? I can create change. I truly believe I'm going to change healthcare because yes, I've already had a big impact. You know, I've seen things change. I've seen people come every day. I hear about people like you mentioned, you're using it right, gospel, shrugs. I mean, every day I hear stories. Yeah, we had somebody who just, um, we helped, she literally got a heart transplant and then her new insurance plan wouldn't pay for the rejection medications. And they came to us and we fixed it. We're working with a family from Australia now who can't get photon radiation because they don't have it in Australia yet. And we're connecting them with a variety of different doctors through cost plus wellness. And so those are things I can do, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, as opposed to, okay, Mark, and your calendar today is a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu who, you fuck. You would handle him. Well, I feel. Yeah. I mean, the guy who put a target on every Jew in the world's back, right? Yes. Yes, him. That's him. Yes. Exactly. See? See? You're already doing it. So you don't think you can be effective as I think what you're doing. I don't have the temperament or patients for it. The patient's for it. Now, when I say that to people, I said he doesn't think he has temperament, and everyone's like, he's lying. Really mean it. Really mean it. You should run as a Republican. That would fuck them. Oh, no. That's what, if I was going to run, that's what I would do. I can't win as a Democrat, not with the DSAs and all that shit there, right? And oh, by the way, speaking of Medicare for all, I read Al Saeed's book on Medicare for all. It's not bad. He has a lot in common with Trump on some of his positions on drugs. But, you know, it wasn't a bad book. I think people just look for things that are not what is, they're looking for something different. The Tea Party to, you know, you know, change it, hope and change, Tea Party, Trump, not Trump, J6, now, DSA, anything that's different. It's just like what people said to me about Trump, Trump won. I had a buddy that I played basketball with, and I'm like, I know this guy, yada, yada, yada. It's like, let me just tell you something. I've been voting for politicians my entire life. You know what they've done for me? Nothing. Why would I vote for a politician again? I've been voting for Democrats my entire life. All right. So then, what are you going to do? Run as a Republican though. Oh, that would be fun though. It was so much fun. Please do it. Just for fun. It would be fun. JD Vance's head would blow off. See? Part of you is thinking of it. I can feel it Mark. No. Of course I've thought about it because you bring it up every time we talk. Do it for me. Do it for me. Anyway. I'll tell you what, when they auction off at night in the Lincoln bedroom, I'll buy it for you. Oh, thank you so much. As long as Trump's not there. Absolutely. Honestly. Anyway, one more quick break. We'll be back for predictions. Support for the show comes from Delta Airlines. Every athlete at the top of her game knows that greatness isn't just a destination. It's a grueling life-long journey. It's built on early mornings, silent sacrifices, and an unwavering drive to outclimb the achievements of yesterday. Delta is the journey of a WNBA athlete, and Delta is there every step of the way. Delta is proud to host these competitors, providing charter flights for every WNBA team, to elevate their travel experience and champion equity on every leg of their trip. Keep climbing with Delta Airlines, the official airline of the WNBA. People are big mad about data centers in the United States this summer, but don't sleep on how mad people are about flock. Flock cameras. If you haven't noticed them, don't worry. They've noticed you. You may have heard about them in your reels or on flock talk. I have never, in my life, been as pissed at the government as I am now that flock cameras exist. Americans are going to war against flock AI surveillance cameras, and people are going around and literally sign them down, absolutely destroying them. An AI surveillance apparatus goes against the very essence of freedom and the core values of our country. It's not right. It's not conservative and it's sure as hell ain't American. The flock surveillance cameras have popped up all over the nation every state but Alaska. But this year, dozens of cities and counties across the country have cut ties with flock. And on today's explain from Vox, we're going to tell you why. Okay, Mark, let's hear a prediction. James Tallerico. Let's go. Oh, okay. Tell me. Yeah, I'm a big fan. I mean, I know you are. I think he's honest, he's trustworthy, he cares. He'll do the right thing as opposed to the politically expedient thing. I think he truly wants to change, you know, bring back reality to politics. And I think he's got a real chance to win. Yeah. So you really do believe that. I mean, the polls are pretty good in his favor. Yeah, and you can't tell him polls anymore, but you can't, you know, but he's going into red areas. He's going into red areas and drawing big crowds. Big crowds. And what would you say to some of those voters who, I mean, first of all, Ken Paxson seems like literally a villain. It's just everything he does seems awful. Yeah, I'm not a fan. Yeah. No, many people are. But how do you say then to those red voters? Do it's best for the state of Texas. Do it's best for your wallet. Do it's best for you, right? There's nobody in the same thing my buddy who voted for Trump in 2016. I say the same thing to all these voters. You've been voting for Republicans all these years. What have they done for you? Now it's time for somebody who is going to literally be able to sit with you at the dinner table and discuss your budget and be able to relate to it. And hopefully, you know, with health from folks like me, go talk to grocery stores, go talk to manufacturers, go talk to oil companies, whatever it may be, and come up with some solutions. We really try to change things beyond just legislation. All right. Talleriko, that's it. All right. I'm going to be a very, very short prediction. It's met a trial that's happening in Oakland right now. It's a trial brought by 29 states, which charged the company with violating federal child privacy and state consumer protection laws. They're going for product liability here in nuisance and public interest. California's deputy attorney general said in an opening statements, this is another, by the way, Rob Bonta case among the others. There's a lot of states here. There's a ton of states. Meta's business model can be summed up in four simple words, hook the users, hold them for as long as they can, harvest their data and then hide the truth in the public when making public statements. I thought it was highly effective, which was hook hold, harvest hide. Yes. You're crazy. At the beginning of the cigarette, I have not said this before, but they're coming from everywhere. I hope so. I truly, truly, truly hope so, because whoever controls the algorithm controls the mind of your kids and the mind of adults too. I mean, in politics, mandami, right, brilliant with al-said, really, really good. And once you, you know, impact that algorithm, that's what you see on your feed. The best way to know what your kids are about is just ask to see their TikTok YouTube and Instagram feeds and just go looking through and you'll know exactly who they are. Yeah. Anyway, Mark, I really appreciate it. We want to hear from you. Send your questions about business, tech, or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com/pivot, just submit a question for the show or call 855-51-Pivot. Tell us what you think about Mark Cubes. Okay. That's the show. Thanks for listening to Pivot. Be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel and back next week, Mark. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Anytime, Carol. You know I love you. Lincoln Bedroom. Lincoln. Lincoln. Thank you. Think of me, Cuban. Today's show was produced by Larry Namens. Zoe Marcus, Taylor Griffin, and Todd Wiseman, Ernie Enderdot, engineered this episode. Nishat Kerwa is VoxMedia's executive producer and podcast. Make sure to follow Pivot on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening to Pivot from VoxMedia. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things, tech, and business. [BLANK_AUDIO]