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

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

Scott-Free August continues, and Kara sits down with Mark Cuban — entrepreneur and co-founder of Cost Plus Drugs. They dig into why prescription drug prices are finally falling, Cuban's war with the healthcare industry, and Costco's surprising Medicare play. Then: why Cuban thinks chips are the new crypto, and California's controversial billionaire tax. Plus — will Cuban actually run for president? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Terms apply. Our earliest childhood memories can feel so visceral. I have this memory of my mother standing on the beach, you know, the wind whipping her hair and her jacket, calling into the wind with my siblings out in the lake and the dam, you know, looming in the distance. But none of these memories were true. This week, Unexplain It to Me from Vox. Why can't I remember being a baby? Fortunately, usually they say they'll eat me last, right? You are the favorite billionaire.

Yeah, one of them. Although you would be delicious, I will say. Elon would be gamey. Hi, everyone, this is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher, and once again, it is... Scott Free 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 cause plus drugs. He's here. Good to see you, Mark. Always good to be seen by you, Kara.

It's always a pleasure. Yeah, thank you. You had a problem with my shirt? It's M for Mark. It's M for Mark. Yeah, I know better. Do you want me to tell you my Michigan story? Please.

My son goes there. You know that. And why? I 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, goblu.com.

Oh. And Go Blue, obviously, is big at Michigan. Yes, it is. I don't want it. He wanted all this money. And finally, he lowered, he won like hundreds of thousands of dollars. And finally, I said, no, no, no. And 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, you know, big 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, right? 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, good. And also at the time, deservedly. And also at the time, the president of Michigan. And he was like, no, you just 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 like, it's a 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 we're suing 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. Here we are again, again. For like the 900 times that I'm disgusting. Oh, this is great.

I've never seen anything like Michigan. I wear a Michigan dad hat and I get stopped a lot. Try wearing an Indiana dad hat. Oh, really? Oh, I think I can. My son would kill me. He would kill me. Exactly.

But, you know. Are you an Indiana dad or you just have the hat? No, no, I went to you. Yeah, I know you did, but you're not an Indiana dad. No, my kids, I wouldn't let him go to school there now. What? Why? Because the legacy is just too strong.

Too strong? Too strong? I want them to 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 ate too much cake, got no sleep.

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 other type. No. And plus with our kids, or two of the three, it's 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 Madonna. 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 have two fans. They're like, no, we have one. And I was like, I have to kill someone, like immediately. But anyway, we've got a lot to get today. I texted 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. But first, let's talk health care. Prescription drug prices had their biggest year-over-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 a Biden-era policy requiring Medicare to negotiate drug prices is more likely driving costs down. You got a lot of criticism when this partnership was first now. It's not for me.

I thought it was actually smart. Talk about it a little bit. It's really simple. They refer traffic. Yeah. You know, it's just, you know, a portal that people can go to look up prices for 600 drugs. And if they... Like Obamacare, for example. Well, a little bit different, but...

Oh, 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 percent, we've passed on those savings. So we've literally dropped the price since Trump RX launched. I think we've dropped the price for over 200 medications. So, you know, there's no downside.

So talk 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 $2,100 to $2,100. 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 it kind of balanced those things out. But there were some drugs where it pushed down the price, and that's always a positive. There's no downside there at all. But I think the bigger issue was 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 ejectable drug.

Instead of it being a tablet, which should just be called a generic, it is an injectable drug. So like Stolara, UMira, right, things that are injectable, they had the equivalent of generic version, it's called a biosimilar, and that dropped the price for Stolara for from $128,000 a year to on cost plus. It's $365 plus shipping every couple months, right? For Humira, 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 dropping 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 arc site because you want volume, right? Presumably, people use it. I think he's done a great job on IVF. Right? He said, meaning if you're trying to build a family and you need the fertility, drugs, they were really expensive, and he negotiated lower prices. Give them credit for that. You know, he put some pressure on the GLP1 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 them or hate them, 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, give them credit, what credit is due. 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 were arguing you. Were you surprised by that?

No. I think your goal is very clear. You want to 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, right?

And whatever side of that you're on, that's the button. you know, your buttons they get pushed and the buttons you try to push. But, you know, I ignore it. 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 which. Now, there was, prices did go up during COVID because the supply chain, et cetera, et cetera. How do, what has to happen next on a, on a bigger scale? On medication or across the board?

Across the board. Talk about it across the board. Well, I mean, just generally, there has to be improvements in processes, a 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 high or low, is the deficit, you know, the debt that we're paying a trillion dollars a year on. And you're starting to see that. I don't know what interest rates we're 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- People are much worried about this. Right. And so, you know, if you think of a 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, and 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 case-shaped economy where people who are struggling are true.

really 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. six percent was It seemed like my first mortgage 12 percent.

12 percent, mine too. Mine too. You're right. I mean, credit due, deficit, Trump, right? Like Trump has risen the deficit more. Everybody, yeah, everybody. Yeah. Trump, Biden, you name it.

Trump, I think, get wins. Well, in terms of aggregate, 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 before.

Absolutely. But when you think about what has to be done then, so what happened, you know, this has to do, healthcare, 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 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. A technical name for these guys? Well, there's a bunch of them, right? So, you know, so there's the big health care conglomerates, the Cigna's, the CVS's, etc. 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. it's them. You know, they own clinics, they own, you know, doctors. They hire, you know, 10% either

directly or under contract, number of doctors at the biggest healthcare conglomerate. And so, you know, that creates so much friction and so much cost in the system that 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 even understand them, and I'm a smart I don't understand where the, it's not easy for anybody. No, that's why we started cost plus, right? Oh, I use cost plus. And I thank you for that.

At costplusdrugs.com. Nobody knows what something costs. Nobody understands why it costs 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 leverage 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 you're reducing the amount of time they're able to spend with patients, but 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 for med school start to decline. It's my brother's number one complaint.

He's a doctor. Number one complaint. Yeah, it's all the shit they make you do other than caring for the patient. And it's not necessary. You could extract all that. If you just got rid of PBMs and literally not even get rid of them,

If you just say, made a law that said PBMs are no longer able to control formularies. 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, to the 80 million people we cover, and not just for one drug, but for your entire portfolio. Panoply. Yeah, so that's costing you hundreds of millions or 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 controlled substances. We don't want to deal with that. But not everything's generic in some critical. No, not everything is. And so then there's brands and branded specialty drugs. and we'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 costplusdrugs.com, they will diminish us on their formularies. And 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 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 Kahn, when she was suing these guys, was using our price list and our markups to define how much people were getting ripped off and to, you know, towards your settlement. And now if all of a sudden you could see what the actual cost is of your Zarelta 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 only... But you can't publish the prices of the ones you can't get, can you? Correct, right. Well, yeah, 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. Could you not get those lists, Mark? And

Publish. 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 selling. But let me give you the perfect example. There is something called TRICARE, which provides pharmacy to the military. People that are enlisted now, people that are retired, wherever they may live, right? And Elizabeth Warren went to them and they said, okay, TRICARE, you have hired this company, this big PBM called Express Scripts, right? I know them well. Right? So Express Scripts. And so I want to know what you're charging the government

every time somebody in the military or formerly in the military uses a drug that you carry. Express Scripts 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 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 breakup big medicine bill that Josh Hawley 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? Is it even have it in the House? No.

No one's even brought it up. And I pushed it, you name it, right? 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. We have midterms coming up.

Yeah. Maybe after the midterms? Hopefully. Will they get any guts? So another big news in the health care, I don't know what you think of this. Costco is getting into the Medicare business. The company is teaming up with nonprofit insurer scan group to launch Costco branded Medicare Advantage plans in two states and Medicare supplement plans in a third.

The plans will integrate Costco offerings like prescriptions and over-the-counter drugs plus vision and hearing products. Talk 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. By the way, it's so confusing because I have kids and so I want to keep my insurance. But what do you think of this kind of thing? It's a sales and marketing effort, right? 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 Healthcare, 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 are 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% hicky that you have to pay for out-of-pocket for medical, right? And then 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, you have the same problems, even though you're on Medicare.

People say take A and B, not advantage, and D. That's what people say. Yeah, and get supplemental insurance too. Right, right, exactly. But 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 future of it. health care turning it over the big business. No, no, no. Yeah. So again, what has to happen is what? So you've got to get rid of the middleman, 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 conglomers, are ripping them off.

And now they're changing to, you know, they're passed through PBMs like Rightway 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 disqualification. service. 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 with more than a

thousand members, you know, employees of families is to look at their health care benefits. Because every penny they save on their health care benefits is cash flow that goes right to the bottom line. and it's just not their core competency. And what happens is their HR departments, particularly in tech, are always undermanned and understaffed. And you know that when somebody has a problem at Vox Media, whoever does your health care 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, and I'll walk in the door and meet with them, and huge companies, Mark, you're right. We could save millions, if not tens of millions of dollars or more, and give us a 20 PE. That's $200 million, $2 billion, 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 health care contracts, through Claude or chat GPT, and just say, where my- What's the prompt? Where am I getting fucked over? Oh, all right. Okay. Is that the technical term?

Yeah. Yeah, it really, really is. And it'll tell you because the game they play, the PBMs in particular play, is they mismatch definitions. We'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 all of them. 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. I have 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.

They, you know, this says 36 percent. This says 46 percent. And they didn't even catch it, right? It's so mine. Yeah, you would think, you would think the grifters would be good at, good at. Oh, they're brilliant at it. Right. Because that's to their favor. They can't spell. Right. Well, it's to their benefit. So that's why you need AI. So if you want 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 health care.

Yeah, put your contracts in there. You 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, and everyone's like, how did she know it would turn out this way? And I was like, this is good. But it matters, the person matters, the prompts and how. Oh, yeah, you have to be smart. It's him and, and the prompt and Claude, not by itself. And you have to be smart enough to know when Claude is wrong.

That's right, that's right. But I have to tell you, with the combination, it's been startlingly. Oh, it's great, right? But like, it's like using Claude or ShotGPT for health care, 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 re-correct it. Right, exactly. So speaking of health care 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 owned shares in a

fund that owns any big of the biggest insurance carriers, you're part of the cost of health care 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. Tell the funds you own that you will sell if they don't divest their interest in the biggest insurance company. 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 SBX or as 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. That's all they care about. Yeah, reminds me of tech companies, but go ahead.

Yeah, right? But when you listen to the quarterly 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 rarely 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 fuck out of here. 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? I mean, it works with South African companies. It works.

Right. No, we can. When someone, you know, if you had Bernie saying, do this, if you had, you know, Jaiapal doing this instead of pushing for Medicare for all. and just talking trash there, something could happen. If you had Republicans pushing it, it could happen. But again, that's where their money's coming from. And I'm not saying Bernie and Giapal are getting it, but a lot of people are.

So what reaction did you get? Not a whole lot, honestly, just a couple articles and 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. A prediction one outlet says has investors watching. You posted chips as an asset class to be 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. I remember. Thinking it's a better gold than 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, economic instability? No. No. Scott got washed out, too, by the way. Yeah. Bitcoin has lost the plot. Yeah.

Tell me why. Explain. Well, all the things I just mentioned had to come true. That's what the maxis were pushing, right? It's protection against fiat instability. You know, money printer go burr, right? Money printer's burying as much as it could possibly. 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 flatlined for the most part. Because if there's not a good narrative, like any other stock, right? If the narrative isn't good, supply and demand defines the price unless it pays dividend, which these don't. And so people aren't buying it. And the reason I said chips are 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. Apple is, 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 then? 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 different types of- Stocks. No, tokenize a chip. A chip.

Yeah, a chip, you know, here's the right to you own the rights. It's like a barrel of oil. You can buy it and sell it, right? Oh, like what Michael Saylor was doing, right? Well, kind of, yeah, with the Bitcoin itself. That's a lot more complicated. and that's more financial engineering, right? But more like you can put contracts on the chips

and take the share of revenue created from that chip and sell it. Oh, interesting. Are you doing that? I'm still trying to learn. I mean, it's relatively new. 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. Holder. holder. What are they waiting for? What are they actually? They're hoping it will go to the sky. Well, there's still a chance it gets hot again, right? Remember, supply and demand. I mean, a stock's not a whole lot different than a baseball card. Whatever's hot and whatever has the greatest narrative. So Bitcoin and all the others, Ethereum could go up. I'm really disappointed in Ethereum 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 ledger of Bitcoin to create better social media applications, to create new types of applications that feed data to other things, right? Like tracking the weather so I could buy weather insurance for a MAVs 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 block. 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, said, amazing it was, and you can't have that many. Right, right, because then it goes, say, like Trump coin down to zero and then you lose all your money at it. But a lot of it was. I know it sounds crazy to say, but a lot of it was a scam, I believe. Yeah, I mean, look, I when Trump coin came out, again, it's not even really, 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 these 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 the 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? Yeah. And so it's just, 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 invest in 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, 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 how you persuade people. Yeah. No, you get the point, though, right?

I do. That's how I talk. How would you, what would you call a CEO of a company that has a chance to save millions and millions and millions of dollars, increase their stock price as a direct result, improve 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. 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 does. 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 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 they're copycats. They're she. They'll do it. You're right. 100%. We listen to Mark. Okay, Mark, let's go on a quick break.

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New subscribers try it for free for one month at news.apple slash learn. Terms apply. Mark, we're back. Family drama is complicating the blockbuster sale of the L.A. Lakers. Jeannie Bus, controlling owner of the Lakers, is challenging her siblings' attempts to sell the family's remaining 17.8% stake, arguing the sale can't happen without her consent. This comes after former Disney CEO, Bob Iger and Thrive Capital's Josh Kushner, the other Kushner, agreed to buy the Lakers from current majority owner Mark Walter in 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%. Now, this is a world you know well. I was really fascinated at this. You bought the Dallas Mavericks in 2000. You sold your majority stake in 2023. We're talking about chips is 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 the next- Yeah, he was just kidding. Yeah, he was just kidding. Yeah, on the investors at this point. Yeah.

But you'd, I assume you'd buy it if it was available, presumably. But that's- Yeah, neither-the-price. Yeah. It depends 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. A 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 because of tech, but most people would not. I would not be a celebrity. I wouldn't have gotten on Shark Tank, right? David Stern, rest in peace, was the commissioner of the NBA, and used to always say, I made you by finding you all those times,

and he was right. You know, it is the ultimate vanity asset. Wasn't your behavior. No, you know, there's 30 NBA teams, 32 in 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, one, it's a vanity asset. Two, 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 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 se, but it's the leverage it gives you by the traffic. In the surrounding area. Yeah. And you can do it once you own the arena, you can do concerts, which is where the Mavs and the Dallas Stars that we shared the arena with made most of our money, right, by doing concerts in events. Or in Brooklyn with the Nets, yeah. They don't even have to have a good basketball team.

No, you don't. You really, really don't because the Delta. Well, they have a good 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 MBA'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 wanted to be in the basketball business. And it really changed to be a PE-driven business as opposed to people like me and Jeannie Bus, who cared about 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 Gina. I love her, love her, lover. She cares about fans. She was always engaged. She wanted to do what's best for, you know, not just Lakers, but the Lakers fans. Kate Hudson is playing her well on 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 art. And so we'll see what happens. I really don't know. What do you think is going to happen here? Can she stop them? That depends on the legal aspects of it. It depends if she can buy them out.

Right. Oh, that's right. Has she come to you? Because 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't, then she doesn't have to buy all of them out, just enough to get the 15%. Well, I think they all want to sell.

I think there are five of them? Is that right? Five of them, right? And so you would think they would sell to her, you know. Is there others who could buy it? Well, no, the whole Iger group, you know, the Iger-Khrushner group could But, and could they sell to somebody else? She wants to say controlling owner, so, and she has to be over a certain amount.

15%. Yeah, would it be attractive to them to have her have that if they own so much of them? I don't know. I mean, she could possibly even offer them a little bit more than Josh and Bobber. Oh, oh, offer over, Walter, you mean? Yeah. No, no, no, no. The family.

Well, no. 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. 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 what do you imagine is going to happen here? 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 happen. 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, having been there,

it's 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 and they love you and you know it's just a different feeling and how do you assess bob eiger as this is his next chapter and josh presumably josh lives in new york um yeah bob i love bob right i think he's smart he's fair he's caring he's empathetic right he's an l-a guy he's an l-a guy he knows the scene right i would see him at clippers game and anybody who would support like he'd 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 means a lot these days. Yeah. So where is this all going, these prices of all these sports teams? 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, a 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%, 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 amortization and depreciation from the players contract, which maybe, you know, offsets the gains you anticipate from chat GPT, open AI going public or 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 drop 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 of 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 is going down. And along with

that you've got... They've got a lot of problems, but go ahead. Yeah. 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, you know, messed up or from Fox, whatever it may be, that's more problems for them. And that's all driven and 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 first bought the Mavs in 2000, the value of my franchise actually went down the first 10 years. What did you buy it for? What did you buy it? $285 million. Yeah. Yeah.

Wow, that's cheap. Doesn't it feel cheap? Looks cheap now, yeah. Yeah. All right, moving on, let's talk about this idea you find insane. This is your rant period of the show. California voters will consider proposed one-time 5% tax. billionaires this month, a measure backed by Representative Rokana. One big question is how founders

whose wealth is tied up on a company stock would pay the tax without selling shares. Kana suggests the state could provide loans in 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 billion. I think people should pay more taxes who are wealthier, as you know. No, that's fine. But tell me more about your concerns, and where this is, you know, Sergey Brin's, 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 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 5% if you're lucky. Rest is in stock is what you're saying.

Or, and it might be in non-publicly available stock. It might be an ill-liquid assets you can't sell. Which is why they borrow against it all the time. Well, yeah, if they're able to. 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 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, based in California, that are raising, you know, money at $10 billion 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 and you have three founders that each own 10%, they're billionaires by the state of California's definition. The chances of them having

$50 million in cash are zero. Zero. So now all of a sudden what roe is, wanted to do. And I like Roe. We get along great. I respect them. I think his heart's in 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 a $10 billion. You own your 10%. You are a billionaire. Carrie, 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 I'm, I'm going to loan against your shares in a non-recourse deal, right? And we'll give you that $50 million 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, paid 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. Tell me about this tax, how you're feeling about it. I think it's ridiculous. I think it's going to cost them more that it'll say, and 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 a year, and 90% of that was going to go to medical, to Medi-Cal, 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 slight 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

they'll eat me last, right? And so, and I get it. You are the favorite billionaire. Yeah, whatever. Although you would be delicious, I will say, compared to many of them. Yeah, we know. Yeah.

Elon would be gaming. Go ahead. I mean, the obvious answer, you spend less, right? Right. But, you know, the reality is California doesn't have a lot of leeway to raise taxes. No, they do not. They already charge a lot on, I think 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 taxes are at 13.3 percent, 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 something. 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 working with the SEC doing whatever you can. And I don't have an answer here. Making it easier to go public, making it easier to sell shares of 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, 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 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 at Medi-Cal 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 can go about it, and alternative attacks is as good as any. And so when you consider the anger and the clear, you know, anti, I just saw yet another poll today around AI,

around 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 for you. I went in to 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 I think? I go, people hate you.

I was like, 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, many of them aren't. And you really are treating these people like shit.

And I think Facebook is the worst of the worst. Yeah. Well, Elon, with the gas spewing things in Memphis didn't help matters. Or your friend Kevin. Or your friend Kevin. 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. 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 them, and I said, look, we'll cure diabetes, whatever, da-da-da-da-da. 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're grandparents, your grandparents, right?

And that's acceptable. All that kind of bullshit is acceptable top to bottom in your organization. It's just like health care. 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. And YouTube is the culprit for the most part. 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. Well, that's also books generated. That's Amazon does that. Right. 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 the mindset is the bigger picture, this is the greater good. 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 ask for an exact match for your adword, 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 their specific details are. They're gaming the system.

It's financial engineering to try to make up all that money. Which they need to do. Yeah. And so that's, you know, the ends justify the means, right? And that's just wrong. Look, I'm not anti-Data center. I literally had an office right above. My MAV's office, the practice facility,

was right next to an IBM soft layer data center. You know, and so, no, 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. Because. So what to do? So leadership.

Honesty. Right. 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. dollars. Sounds great, right? Until you look at the fine print and see all the references that they

used, 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 elimination of fraud. I'm like, $265 billion, that's like, that's a big number. Elon tried it. Seemly, 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 health care. 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 health care.

It was a disaster of 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? They extrapolate the extrapolate from Taiwan from 1995, a paper-based system, and they applied it to the U.S. budget, right? And so they get, you know, 3 trillion times 8%, you know, and it gets there 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 health care for each person, dollar month per person. Everybody's, yeah, let's go. Republicans before it, everybody before it, 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 change what we pay the best hospitals in the country, right, to Medicare rates, they would make up the losses in revenue by the reduction in administrative costs. That's the biggest bunch of horseshit. If you walk into a really nice hospital, right, it's designed to be a really nice hospital. It's got all the machines that go ping, the really, 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 Ghiapal's Medicare for All, right, like in this article in this study, they just accepted that as fact. There's just no way. And then the Krem Dela-Krem in both of those Medicare, for all legislations that were proposed. Section 4, 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? Right? Yes. We'd all 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 job... 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 up and save... We may need an entirely new system. Yes, we do. Which actually Trump gives us an opportunity. If he can't build that ballroom, maybe we do need a ballroom, a smaller one. Maybe we do not need those shiny horses, I could tell you.

But you get the point of all this, right? I see your point. Right. Like, 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. Kara here. The other day, I saw a picture of Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, Courtside.

She was wearing a t-shirt that read Trans Kids Belong. I think this was an epic move, and I have so much respect for that. Go, Cheryl. This week, Cheryl is on Megan Rapino's new podcast. why are you like this? Megan asked Cheryl why her t-shirts are more than just a fashion statement. There's just so many things that we could really champion for women and other marginalized groups. And I just heard from so many people

what it meant to them. And so we've continued that. The conversation with Megan gets into why Cheryl is the WNBA goat from being one of the first openly gay coaches in the WNBA to standing with her players during Black Lives Matter. She also recently became the winningest coach in WNBA history.

You should check it out. Why are you like this wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube? Elon Musk and a lot of other very smart people think we're all going to have robots at our house any day now. But when you look at where the tech is today and how far it has to go, you might reach a different conclusion. This idea that humanoid robots are coming to live in our house and I went and explored that is just not true. That's Joanna Stern, the tech journalist who spent a year outsourcing her life to AI and robots. That's on channels, the show about tech and media and what happens when they collide. Wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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 a run, and I hope he runs. I want cubes. I'm super smart, super impressive guy and a decent man. I would pick 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. I have. We text all. We have very funny texts. And you resist it. It's the one thing I'm asked more than anything else, you know, because I've been interviewing all these different possible candidates through Democrats.

I'm going to move to the Republican soon. It's hard right now. They don't want to talk about it until Trump is a picture 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, right?

You've got everything, I think like an entrepreneur, right? If I see, like we're just talking about Medicare for all. I want universal health care in some form or fashion, right? We need to make sure that everybody, this country has a right and gets health care that they need. It would help the economy, yada, yada, 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 breakup 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. Whether I was president or not, it 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 them a moron or her or a 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 that maybe I'm not the best person, you know, or most

qualified towards. I have to have temperament, which I don't have. I have to have patience. Again, allowed now. Just so you know, it's changed. 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 than inside. Inside. Yes. I can do things, right? I can create change. I truly believe I'm going to change healthcare. I'm positive. 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, cost us drugs. I mean, every day I hear stories. Yeah, we had somebody who just, 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, on your calendar today is a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu who, who fuck. You would handle him well, I feel. Yeah, I mean, the guy who put a target on every June the world's back, right? Yes, yes, him. That's him. Yes. Exactly. See? See? You're already doing it. So it's not, so you don't think you can be effective. I think what you're... I don't have the temperament or patience for it. The patience for it. Now, when I say that to

people, I said he doesn't think he doesn't temperament. Everyone's like, he's lying. Really mean it. Really means it. Although you should run as a Republican. That would fuck them up. Oh, no, that's what 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. 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. Went from the Tea Party to, 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. He'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. You know what they've done for me? All right. So then what are you going to do? Run as a Republican. Oh, that would be fun, though. It would be so much fun. Would you just please do it just for it? It would be fun. Jay DeVance's his head would blow off. See, part of you is thinking of it. I can feel Mark, come on. 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. I'll tell you what.

When they auction off a night in the Lincoln bedroom, I'll buy it for you. Oh, thank you so much. As long as Trump's not there because he's a little creepy, honestly. Anyway, one more quick break. We'll be back for predictions. Okay, Mark, let's hear a prediction. James Talleyico. Let's go.

Oh, okay. Tell me. Yeah, I'm a big fan. I'm a huge fan. 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. That's right. 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 Paxton seems like literally a villain. It's just everything he does seems awful. Yeah, I'm not a fan. No, I don't think many people are. But how do you, what do you say then to those red voters? Do it's best for the state of Texas. Do what's best for your wallet. Do what'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 help 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, Talarico, that's it. All right, I'm going to be a very, very short prediction. This meta 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 and 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, that is a great. It's the beginning of the cigarette.

I have not said this story, 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 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 slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 85551 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. We'll be back next week. Mark, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Anytime, Kara. You know I love you. Lincoln Bedroom. Lincoln Bedroom. Think of me, Cuban.

Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, Taylor Griffin, and Todd Wiseman. Ernie Ender. engineered this episode. Nishat Kerw is Vox Media's executive producer of podcast. Make sure to follow Pivot on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening to Pivot from Vox Media. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.