The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue: Mark Cuban on disrupting the American healthcare industry

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

Mark Cuban, one of America’s most famous and successful entrepreneurs, recently launched a new drug company - Cost Plus Drugs - that is disrupting the healthcare industry and significantly reducing the cost of prescription drugs for millions of Americans. In this episode, he extols the virtues of a capitalist system that is able to identify and provide real world solutions to problems that are often ignored by government agencies. Mark also shares his thoughts on the risk of a recession in 2023, how AI and ChatGPT could displace millions of knowledge workers, Elon Musk’s takeover of twitter, and why billionaires like himself are often demonized by politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events.This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you're a journalist and people don't trust you, it's always your fault. These people need to be represented. They are Canadian. They deserve to have a voice and a seat at the table. It is time to go back to the office, and the time is now. Russia had reasons to be concerned. They had reasons to be fearful. We're at an absolute turning point in reproduction. This is the problem with realism. They just treat all countries the same. They don't distinguish between dictatorships and democracies. Hello, monk listeners. Rudyard Griffith here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, our

continuing conversations called the monk dialogues. The monk dialogues are in-depth questions and answers with some of the world's sharpest minds and leading thinkers. On each and every monk dialogue, we go deep into the big issues that are transforming our world and shaping our future. On this episode, we speak with none other than Mark Cuban, one of America's most successful entrepreneurs on a new company. starting up that's disrupted the health care industry and is significantly reducing the cost of prescription drugs for millions of Americans. And who knows, maybe Canadians next. Mark also shares his thoughts about the risk of a recession happening in 2023 and how deep that might be the future of AI and its impact on your job. And his take on the latest trials and tribulations of another

famous billionaire Twitter boss, Elon Musk. Mark joins us from Dallas. Mark, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Thanks for having me on. Well, the whole issue of capitalism has certainly been a big focus here at the Monk debates. We've had past Monk dialogues on this subject. We've had mainstage debates at Roy Thompson Hall and the opportunity now to have a kind of check-in on the state and future of one of the most dynamic capitalist systems in the world, the United States with you, a serial entrepreneur who started a variety of different businesses, some of them at the same time, is that a big impact on people's lives and the economy is a privilege indeed. Mark, I want to begin our conversation today by having you

unpack for a little bit. You're thinking about how the profit motive and the kind of dynamism of capitalism today can be used to solve some of America's biggest public policy challenges. And in particular, let's have you share a little bit with our listeners what you're doing to try to help Americans access cheaper prescription drugs. It's an ongoing challenge for many of your fellow Americans in terms of the management of their diseases, their illnesses. They can't afford the drugs they need to be healthier, to live full and productive lives. So tell us a bit more about what you're doing with cost plus drugs and why you think it could be transformative for. American Healthcare. Sure. So Dr. Oshmiansky cold emailed me effectively and we got to the point where we started at a company called costplusdrugs.com. And it has a very simple mission. We want to be

the low cost provider of any medication we're legally able to sell and stop. And, you know, our business process is very simple. We buy drugs. We sell drugs. And we try to keep it very simple. And the need, I think, is pretty obvious to everybody. You know, in the United States of America, the idea that people have to choose between rent, food, and medications is just obscene in so many ways. And so we saw the opportunity. The medication part of the healthcare world is so obtuse and so opaque

that people don't know why they pay what they pay. You know, when you think about the typical process of receiving a prescription, You're at the doctors for whatever reason he tells you need a medication. And then the next thing they ask you is, what pharmacy do you use? And then you go to the pharmacy and there's that moment of fear where, you know, depending on your insurance or lack thereof or deductible, you don't know if you can afford that medication. You've just been prescribed. And waiting in line, you know, trust me, it's happened to me, you know, when I was broke,

waiting in a line, not knowing if you're going to, you know, look like an idiot, you know, because you can't pay and feel awful because for health reasons you can't pay, that's just wrong. And so we saw the opportunity to add transparency. And so when you go to costplusdrugs.com and you put in the name of the medication, right now we've got about 1,000 skews. If we carry it, not only will you see the price that you'll be charged, but we'll show you our cost. And so if a medication costs $10, we'll show you that it's $10.

our cost. We market up 15%, so that's $1.50 markup. We charge a $3 pharmacy handling fee and $5 for shipping. That's it. And it's led to just some incredible savings to patients. And that's led us to grow. And we hope to continue to grow many times over where we are today. So Mark, I guess the question I have from this is, you know, we hope we think that capitalism is efficient, right? And that the whole idea is that when you see market failures, you're stepping in to exploit this, which is terrific for the benefit of consumers. But why didn't this happen before? Why has this system, this critical piece of American health infrastructure, for lack of a better expression, why has it become so dysfunctional, so filled with

rent seekers, with anything but transparency? It's opaque. Let's face it. People have no idea what they're paying for or why? It happened because it could happen, you know, but it didn't happen overnight. And it actually, it hasn't been going on for a long time. It's relatively recent over the last 20 years or so that the drug business more from someone buys drugs and someone sells, someone sells drugs and someone buys drugs, a simple process to let's vertically integrate it and create a lot of scenarios that make it more difficult for people to understand. And a lot of that, you know, and looking, knowing more about it now, I think a lot of that was because some of the biggest buyers are government institutions. And those are very people, you know, the institutions

have a very difficult time being efficient buyers. And that's not to say they shouldn't be the buyers. They should be, right? But they're not very efficient at how they buy in the processes they use to get best price. And when you see it. an inefficiency, someone's going to take advantage of it, no matter what the industry, and that's what's happened here. And you've seen, Mark, I guess, in preparing for this interview, I was surprised at the extent to which, you know, there have been investigations now around this industry, people that were clearly, in a sense, price fixing, colluding over how drugs were provided from, you know,

the manufacturer through a process where there was a lot of self-dealing going on. Did that surprise you as you began to kind of peel this onion just in case, you know, the extent to which these incumbent parties, many of them really weren't acting necessarily in the best interests of their clients? No, it did surprise me. If it was a surprise, we wouldn't be a business. There'd be no reason for us, right? But look, that's the way all systems work. And it's not just about capitalism. You look at any socialists or communist or mixed system.

people exploit opportunity. There's always arbitrarisers. There's always exploitation. There's always greed. And it's just, I think capitalism offers a better opportunity to overcome that because, you know, people look for inefficiencies. I look for inefficiencies. That's why I start most of the businesses I've started in my career.

Because, you know, Jeff Bezos, your margin is my opportunity. You know, Warren Buffett, when the tide goes out, you see who's swimming naked. it. You know, not everybody's in a position to evaluate and execute on that, but where it's possible, it happens. But what's interesting, your mark, is that you're introducing, like, transparency as one of the kind of sine qua nons of your company, right? You're revealing, in a sense, the cost structure of the product. So that's kind of interesting, because in a sense, you know, it's kind of harder, therefore, to game the system. If you're, if you're showing.

Right? Because one of the challenges every business has is to know what business they're in and what product they actually sell. And while on the surface it appears that our product is just medications, we buy drugs, we sell drugs. Our real product is trust. We're in an industry where there's a complete lack of trust when it comes to the financial aspects of every element of the healthcare industry. You know, you trust your doctor, hopefully. You trust the hospital you go to on everything but the economics. who within the healthcare supply chain does anybody trust financially? And so our move for transparency, I felt was needed because of the lack of the ability to understand it, but that's what led to trust. And that's why I put my name on it, because it's the only company I have that I put my name

on it because I knew that trust would be the primary differentiator, right? There's the only reason people are going to buy medications, be a mail order to start, and we'll evolve from that here shortly, but it is because they trust. And if I'm going to put my name on it, not that everybody trusts me per se, but at least they know I'm trying to a gender trust. And I needed the transparency to support that. Right. Final question on drugs before we move on some other key topics that I want to dig into

with. Are you concerned about the large percentage of drugs that are manufactured now outside of the United States? I was reading somewhere that something like almost 100% of all U.S. high blood pressure medication is manufactured. Guess where? Wuhan, China. Kind of kind of interesting. I'm, you know, I was surprised to see these numbers, the extent to which these supply chains now stretch all the way around the world. They're located now, increasingly in a country. that's becoming an adversary of the United States on a variety of fronts. What if anything can be done about that? So a couple of things.

One, we're building a manufacturing facility in Dallas for fill and finish that is geared towards drugs that are on the FDA list of shortages, right? So it's incredible. You talk about inefficiencies. It's insane that there are common drugs, sterile water, potosa and other things, that go on shortage. And it's because there are people out there trying to game the system. because they know if they restrict supply, then there's an immediate need, then all of a sudden, pricing goes up.

So we'll deal with that. Second, when it comes to drugs that we resell that are manufactured overseas, we have quality control people that go there and go on site and sample so that we do as best we can. And we think we do a great job of protecting as much as we can. Right. So, you know, it's not like, regardless of where it's manufactured, and this is a two-part question, regardless of where it's manufactured, it's not hard to do quality control, whether you go there or do it from here, right? And so if one of those manufacturers really try the game the system, I know there's books and movies and documentaries that say otherwise,

but they're not the high-end manufacturers, right? Because that business is going to implode very quickly. And you're seeing a big, I don't want to say search because I haven't been in the business long enough, but there are a lot of manufacturers that are now outside of China that are in India and other countries where there's a little bit more trust and in their public companies in there or here. So there's more reason for them to be above board. But I'm not, I have, we haven't had any concerns, like I said, because we, you know, we know if trust is our product, we have to do our best, you know, and nobody's perfect. We have to do our best to protect

against that. And before we jump on to another topic, yeah, yeah. Just want to say, I just want to say again, if you're out there and you have medications, particularly generics, go to costplusdrugs.com. And just put in what you take. It doesn't matter what the medication is. You know, worst case, you'll have a good feel for what it should cost. And it's not just for patients, too, corporations, right? You may have a company you work for may have a good or poor health plan, high deductible, low deductible, but somebody's paying the bill one way or the other.

And if the price that the health insurance company is charging your employer is way out of line, you should say something because that's the only way drug prices are going to come down across the board. Okay, that's my sales pitch. Thank you. It's important stuff. And it's just, again, great to see a kind of market solution when often, let's face it, the knee-jerk response here often is to go to government and to try to, you know, solve these problems from the top down through, through regulation. And again, I'm not against all that, not to get to go on attention, but I'm not against government involvement at all, right? Because there are issues of scale.

I think government's going to be absolutely necessary when it comes to specialty drugs, the drugs that cost 100, 200,000. But what needs to change is how government negotiates those things, right? Because we've set up these hurdles and these benchmarks that play to the hands of the payers and the providers rather than to the benefit of the patient. And those organizations have done a great job of miseducating the decision makers in government. hopefully one of the things that being transparent really benefits taxpayers is we create a benchmark for pricing. And so now you can go, you know, the government can have something to compare to. And there's already been studies, not commissioned by us, just by third parties who are going on looking at our drug prices and says, saying, if Medicare had purchased these 77 drugs from cost plus, we would say $3.6 billion a year. Wow.

You know, if Medicare would have purchased these few urology drugs, this just came out a couple of weeks ago, it would have saved $1.6 billion a year. And so being that benchmark for pricing will allow government to be smarter. And obviously, we're having conversations to help support that. Are there volume problems there, Mark? Like, can you satisfy for, you know, the full scale of the market or in a sense, do you run into cost and other problems? Do they scale with you? Yeah, the little baby pills are really easy to scale. Well, let's switch to the economy.

I'm really curious. This is a fascinating moment for the American economy, the fastest rate of a series of rate hikes, really in monetary history. You have to go back to the 1970s to look at something similar. What do you think the state of the U.S. economy is today and going into 2023? I think it's, you know, in my own personal experiences here in my portfolio companies, I think there's a lot of uncertainty. people feel like the economy is still relatively strong, that companies, particularly tech companies, when there were workers shortages, went too far too fast and hired too many people. And they're going through a pruning that is not unexpected, but it's not across the board.

I think while inflation has certainly been an issue, demand really has not. Now, some people would tell you there's a lot of people borrowing and that's fulfilling and that's supporting the, demand, but, you know, inflation has been painful for all these companies, but the demand is still there. And so, you know, maybe the Fed will keep on raising prices. I don't have an opinion one way or another. I don't think anybody really knows. It's really just, you know, trial and error. But, you know, I don't think we're in a recession and we'll see what happens. Hey, Monk podcast listeners, I wanted to let you know about our other weekly audio program. It's called Friday Focus. And hey, guess what? It comes out each and every Friday. It's half an hour long

and it provides you with a masterclass on international events, all the big issues and ideas shaping our world. We've got that for you each and every Friday here at the Monk Debates. Simply access via our website, triple W monkdebates.com. Click on Friday Focus in the top right navigation. you'll get all the details or check out a sample of the program in the same podcast feed as the main Monk Debates podcast. I hope you'll join us for the next edition of the Friday Focus podcast. Now back to our program. Mark, you know, the history of recessions are often what they call the consequence of a policy or more than anything else. It's hiking too far, too fast for too long.

Are you concerned maybe at all what you're seeing in the economy in terms of the potential of 2020, that these high interest rates that have a long lag time, months, in some cases, you know, over a year for their full effects to be felt, is there a risk here that, you know, the Fed has a dual mandate, is it focused too much inflation maybe in not thinking enough about jobs and the underlying necessity for employment and for an economy that has credit that makes it work? I'm not as concerned as some commentators I've seen simply because, they can reduce interest rates very quickly. And really depends on the horizon you evaluate on.

And so if you think if they've made a mistake, how long does it take to correct it? So if they go too far, too fast, and you see unemployment rise relatively quickly, I think the nature of industry today and business in general today is once rates start to recover, everybody will dive in because they'll anticipate that rates will continue to go down lower and there will be some level of quantitative easing that will be a put on all businesses. And so I think the Fed could err on going too far too fast, and it may catch them some grief when unemployment goes from 3.7, depending on how you define it right, to 5.2, let's pick a number out of left field.

But then the minute things turn, you'll see the stock market explode because everybody will anticipate rates going down, and that changes the valuation. And when valuations go up, then everybody feels a little bit more flood. People who participate in the markets feel a little bit more flush. And that leads to more private investment, which means to more startups. And so I think that's an issue. I think a second issue that's not being considered is what's going on with artificial intelligence right now. I think, you know, the things we're seeing with chat GPT, I can't emphasize enough how impactful that that's going to be on employment,

not necessarily in a bad way, but just in a transitional way. And so when companies regroup, let's say when rates start to fall again whenever that is, a year from now, two years from now, who knows, how companies hire and the roles they take will start to evolve even more with AI. There's a reason why the top 10 companies by market cap, the United States, are all experts in AI. When you look at Google and Facebook and, you know, go down the list, Netflix, you know, they all are really, really good at it. And so, you know, Netflix isn't a top 10, but you get my point that, you know, AI matters. And I think that changes. And so you can't look historically and say, okay, the way companies responded to transitions and interest rates and capital availability is going to be the same. Do you think, Mark, that inflation in a sense is really a product of the extraordinary response to the COVID pandemic because we are going to have this big potentially deflationary wave of technological change.

I agree with you. Chat, GPT, just use it. You get a sense of the power lurking in that thing and it's only the beta version. Yeah, I mean, it's on version 3.5. Imagine when we get to version 7, 8, 9, and 10. Yeah. So, I mean, is the future really one, the near term future, the next three to five years, one of increasing technological disruption? Maybe, in fact, disinflation. We're back to the last decade where. Yeah, I don't think we get disinflation because I don't think it's a manufacturing impact type thing. And I think you're going to have some inherent inflation in the supply chain as companies move manufacturing to the United States. But like, With our plant in Dallas for drugs, it's all robotics, but we still need 72 employees to run it. So while there will be robotics and there will be transitions in the types of jobs, I think that with the move of more manufacturing here for security reasons,

for close, you know, just the whole thing of just in time inventory, global just in time inventory is really changing and could be close to dead, you know, for a lot of industries. So I think you'll see a little bump there in terms of inflationary. I don't think you're going to see just a huge deflation because of AI, but I think you'll see much more efficiency in corporate jobs, right, where companies don't need as many people as they thought they otherwise might need in middle management in particular or in staff positions.

I think we can't look at inflation as being just, an impact on on capital or just being a function of capital. There are so many other things that are happening because just all these supply chain changes that are for, you know, for national security issues, right? And for, you know, resolving all the just and time problems that that have to be fixed. Again, I think there's so many inputs into the inflation puzzle or the inflation, um, formula that we won't know until we know. Right.

it. The future is, the past is not necessarily a guide to the future this time. What's your advice mark to people in the, you know, in this fast-changing labor force that, you know, has been affected by COVID, now inflation, now, you know, maybe the effects of AI are going to happen sooner than we thought. It's more of a near-term thing than a mid-term thing. What advice you have? How do people just manage the careers, opportunity, education, employment? careers are dead. You are a free agent and like a free agent in sports, you have to improve your skill set in order to be able to improve your earnings or whatever your goals are, right? Whatever your mission is that makes you happy, it makes you wake up with a smile on your face, you're going to

have to be agile. You're going to have to be curious. You're going to have to learn. Not everybody wants to have those skills. A lot of people just want that nine to five job and come home and do whatever they choose to do and that's great. But you're just going to have to be honest with yourself that choices are going to have to be made. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, what was it, Warren Buffett? Instead of this moment, you know, you have to get really, really good at something. It's no longer just kind of showing up and getting by. You're going to have to really have real skills, real ability, an ability to contribute to whatever enterprise you're in. Do you think people have caught up to that? Do you think people understand that?

The underpinning of that is, you know, we live our lives as an arbitrage on time. Can I get somebody to pay me more than I think my time is worth? And, you know, will somebody value my time enough to pay me when I'm worth? And so I think that's the missing piece that the most valuable asset we all have is our time. That's the one thing we can't ever get back and we all value it differently. And we all look to improve that value differently. I'm a big believer like Warren has said that if you find something you love to do and then be great at it, that creates the most opportunities. But not everybody's going to do that and not everybody can.

Some people just find themselves in circumstances where they don't have enough control over what they're able to do, whether it's because of kids, where they live, whatever it may be, illness. And so it's not so much the people who recognize it. the people that recognize the opportunities or recognize what they need to do, they're just going to do it, right? They'll do the things they need to do to increase the value of their time. It's everybody else, and we don't know how big that population of the everybody else's are. And we don't know necessarily how to deal with it. But the real issue is, you know, the old saying, you're only good is your weakest link. And that applies to countries as well.

And I think, while we get dogmatic about what we need to do in terms of helping people, you know, either we should or we shouldn't. or they pay their own consequences. You know, none of that is ever really true. We, but, you know, I'm a believer that we've got to do our best to lip from the bottom up. I'm a trickle up guy as opposed to a trickle down guy because the stronger the bottom is, the more opportunity there is for the top. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about human potential. Do you, do you think we've figured out how to, I don't know, how to really identify and then,

you know, bring along and enforce. and support potential. I just have a feeling that there's a huge amount of potential in our society that's still going, going wasted, unutilized, under-resourced. Yeah, we don't. We have no idea, right? Because one, it's a moving target. Two, you know, I love to have this conversation about precision medicine and medicine in general.

Our body, and this applies to mental health or provides to education, everything, you know, our body is made up of about three trillion plus variables, minimum, right? And all of us are unique in how those variables fit together. And we're all wired differently. And we haven't figured out the commonalities. We all don't know ourselves well enough, right? Because as you wage, your body responds, your mind responds, everything's a moving target over time.

And so it's really difficult. I think the search is right. I think we should keep on looking. But it's really difficult to say we've figured out how to enable human potential. You know, we're nowhere near that yet. Any idea how we do a better job? Is this something, you know, that traditionally government has let on it. It's had some positive, you know, effects through its education system, through at least here in Canada, we have public health care.

We try to make big investments in people's human potential by an effectively underwriting a lot, if not all, their health care risk. Is that where we can look for solutions? Yeah, I mean, again, it's when the more you have to focus on, And the people that have challenges, the less you can focus on everything else. And so you've got to, you know, you got to check those things off the list. You know, kids have got to be able to eat. There's got to, you know, there's got to be health care for kids. There's got to be food for kids.

There's got to be education for kids. Those should be absolute, you know, within the United States, within Canada, and every country who can afford to do it. Because those are the kids that are going to help us figure out the problems. the answers to the problems that we're talking about today. And you can't, you can't dismiss them because everybody at some level has some empathy. I don't care who you are. You know, nobody, even though the worst person ever looks in the mirror and just says, okay, I have, you know, I'm the worst person on the planet. Everybody's got some empathy and we've got to recognize that with that empathy, we've got to be able to help those who need it the most.

And to me, that is the most capitalistic formula ever. Because when you look at America, Inc. And maybe it's not saying American Inc. is not going to make a lot of people happy. Right. But when you look at it as an equation, how do you make us a strong and help the country reaches potential? You've got to optimize.

You've got to optimize across all the variables of everybody that's involved. And that means helping the weakest of us. you know, get the help that they need and the support that they need. So we can focus on the things that move us forward. You know, if I'm, when I have a basketball team, I, I have player development coaches for all players because somebody's going to get hurt at some point or somebody, you know, we're going to need you to step in next person up. And so a country is the same way. When we have people who are uneducated, who are not healthy, etc., it's awful hard to move the ball forward. I think we've got to start realizing that in this country. And it's just good business. It is just good

business because everybody becomes more of a contributor to the economy. Yeah. Are you concerned about the perceived concentration of power of some industries? You know, tech for a while has been the target of, you know, criticism in terms of aggregating too much power over society, over discourse of what people can or don't say. or do say. I mean, you know the arguments that K Street lobbyists in Washington write laws, tax codes, to advantage not the people that need to be lifted up, often the people whose human potential needs to be identified and celebrated and nurtured, but often the people that are at the top,

they're defending the incumbents of the system. Yeah. Well, there's no question that, you know, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely. And there are issues with tech. But I don't think there's legislative answers. I don't think changing, you know, Section 230 or, you know, removing algorithmic amplification is going to make a lot of changes. And here, you know, that's a free speech issue, right?

And that's a governmental free speech issue because you can't legislate it. Now, and the other side of it, you know, corporate advocacy has always been part of what Canada is, what the United States is. And, you know, it's great when it's what you agree with and it's not so great when what you disagree with. I don't know that you can legislate a change there. So that's where capitalism comes in and that's where Elon can go into Twitter and do what the hell he damn well pleases because he bought it and he paid for the right. And post dot news and what, you know, the other ones, Megadana, I forget what they call it. You know, they can come in and compete as well.

And so there you have to have it, we get so caught up in social media thinking, where, you know, when's the next tweet, when's the next post? And we think in terms of one minute, three minute, five minutes, one hour, right? And how many, how many likes do I have in an hour? You've got to have a much longer horizon in order to be really to really be able to understand and attack the problem. And no, you know, Google's been around for 25 years, give or take. Facebook's been around for less than 20 years, give or take. That's nothing in the bigger scheme of things. And really, it's only the most recent manifestation as social media. media combined with phones that have really, so that's 15 years, less than 15 years.

And so can, will they be the incumbents forever? I don't think so. And will AI have an impact and will entrepreneurs, well, is there some 12 year old boy or girl right now, figured out a better way? Yeah. It's not like my teenagers are into Facebook. They're not. My teenagers don't use Twitter.

You know, so there, it's just different for future generations. will continue to be. So what you and I may think, hopefully, is not even relevant five or 10 years from now. Yeah, there's new winners being dreamed up right now. Just as we move towards the end of our interview, you mentioned Elon Musk, and I'm curious about your views on Twitter and what we're seeing there, because you're somebody who has, you know, pretty stellar reputation, I'll say it, for being a corporate leader, inspiring the businesses and companies, employees that you work with. What is, what do you think of Elon's approach here to Twitter, how he's gone about kind of assuming control of this company? What we've seen, some of it from the outside looks pretty chaotic.

It looks pretty personal at times in terms of kind of his agenda or interest or ideas. What's your take on it? He's an entrepreneur. He gets the sometimes it's ready fire aim. Sometimes it's ready aim fire. I can tell you, you know, many of the companies I've started, obviously smaller scale or even acquired. It's, okay, here's what I think. And then it's, okay, here's what I want. You know, here's how I want to program it. He paid $44 billion for the right to do that. Will it be right? Again, it's only, it's been less than two months. And so we don't know. I don't know the economics behind the same. seen to know, you know, what his obligations are, you know, to people who, investors who gave him

money, money he may have borrowed. That'll come into play at some point. But he's going to find out, you know, one way or the other, whether he's making the right decisions. But again, corporate advocacy, like I was reading Caras Swisher today, who's talking, well, maybe this is just a media play, and he wants to be the next Murdox. You know, he wants to be, you know, the Rupert Murdoch of social media. Okay, you know, there's no greater, I mean, Rupert Murdoch is the grandfather of corporate advocacy, you know, via media. Maybe he's trying to replicate that. That is his right to do so, but, you know, I'm using post. Dot news, and it's fun. I like it, right? There's not the immediacy because there's not as many users, but, you know, we'll see what happens. And it's not like Facebook and Google and Microsoft aren't

paying attention to this. And, you know, if Twitter turns into the Fox News of social media, there'll be an MSNBC and a CNN and something else that pops up. But the funny part to me is all the people who are like, rah, rah, rah, this is all about free speech and, you know, dismissed what Donald Trump is doing on his platform. You know, it's just there's a lot of hypocrisy going on, but the reality is that he paid for the right to do whatever he damn well pleases, even if, you know, there's a lot of misinformation coming from him. It's not free speech. It's his speech.

You know, and it's not, okay, we're leaving it up to whoever wants, you know, it's an open door. It's, you know, the public square. No, it's his square. And he pays $8. There's no public square charging $8 to, you know, for you to speak. So, but he paid for the right. And as an entrepreneur, I can see a lot of what he's thinking. Let's throw it up against the wall and see what sticks and see what works for me.

And, you know, worst case. There's going to be a lot more traffic that he thinks he can monetize. Final question. And it's just to spring off, you know, the debate around Elon Musk. I mean, do you think that billionaires are getting a bad rap today? You know, AOC's, you know, comment that every billionaire is a policy mistake. You know, it's easy. Everybody needs, every politician needs to demonize somebody, right?

And the underpinning of that is you demonize people based off of their bank account, which is wrong, every which way. But, you know, growing up or when I got to Dallas and I was sleeping on the floor and I was broke and I was fired, if someone would have said to me, okay, Mark, and you know, a couple of decades, you're going to be demonized for being a billionaire. Would you be okay with it? I'd be like, bring it on, baby. Let's go. You know, it's not necessarily a policy mistake, but it's mostly luck. You know, in a scenario or a society where economics go to an extreme, you're going to get extreme beneficiaries. And you're going to get in that same system, you're going to get people who are, you know, at the bottom who are victims of it. And the key is understanding which you are and having some self-awareness and also recognizing what truly helps. Now, the problem with what Elizabeth Warren and AOC do, they don't truly understand what the impact of what they're doing is. And I'm not saying, well, if there's not billionaires, the system won't work. It's not that at all.

But like if with a wealth tax based off of unrealized earnings, what have happened? There'd be no cost plus drugs. Because if I don't know how much I'm going to make, I have to keep, believe it or not, you know, regardless of how wealthy you are, you don't have everything in cash. So when someone pinpoints your net worth, that's not all cash. It may be a big chunk may be the Dallas Mavericks. It may be in cost plus drugs. You know, you're not keeping billions of dollars in cash.

And so if your behavior has to change, then things will change economically. You know, there'll be downstream impacts. I went and talked to somebody who was one of the economists who helped Elizabeth Warren put together her wealth tax, who said it benefit the economy. And I just asked them a very simple question. Did you do a one-year model or a 10-year model where 10-year model is behavioral changes? It was a one-year model. And, you know, so the discipline, I'm not against paying higher taxes.

I think that's being patriotic, right? I think, you know, I've gotten so much from this country. I'm willing to pay more. I think my taxes for 2021 were 38%. You know, it was okay. I didn't like writing the check, but I understood it. And I was okay with it. And I think you have to, you just have to recognize that we're just one piece of a

bigger puzzle. You know, it's not that there's like a lot of us, right? And it's just, you know, however many there are, there are, but you've got to look at what's best for the country. And just demonizing somebody for the sake of political points is just wrong. And just being intellectually dishonest in what you present is wrong. But yeah, I don't mind being, you know, billionaire tears going into Elizabeth Warren's cup that she's selling, you know, and that's fine. But if you're going to try to solve a problem, really try to solve a problem. don't be dishonest about it, which I think Elizabeth Warren is being, and come up with better solutions.

I'm game, right? Yeah, well, thank you, Mark. And, again, we salute you for your work, you know, trying to bring market forces and transparency to bear on the U.S. drug market, empowering consumers in the process, and hopefully driving down prices for everybody. As a result, I think that's just a great application of entrepreneurial spirit and capital towards, you know, a public good, a public end.

we often forget that, that a lot of capitalist activity that we engage in has public advantages. It has public purpose. It's not all about private gain. Yeah, for 100% because, you know, like you and I started online in our conversation, what's the definition of capitalism? It's not to make as much money as you can. The beauty of capitalism, you get to choose the outcomes that you strive for. They're not chosen for you. And if your outcome that you're striving for is to educate kids. You get to choose that job. It's, you know, it's not from each according to their ability to each according to their needs, right? You get to, if you feel your abilities, where your abilities are best used is your choice. Always. Always. And that's the beauty of a capitalist system.

It's the concept, well, capitalism is bad because everybody's out, you know, greed is good, you know, be greedy in terms of your personal goals and educate as many kids as you can. Right. Be greedy in your personal goals and help as many underprivileged, you know, families as you can. Spend the time teaching kids to read, spending time being, you know, with patience, then, you know, whatever it may be that makes you happy, do it. That's what a capitalist system is. You get to choose. You may not choose what makes you the most amount of money. Most people don't. That's okay. Yeah. Well, thank you. Wise words, Mark Cuban. Thank you so much for coming on the monk

dialogues today. A real treat for the monk membership. And so appreciate it, having the opportunity to have this conversation with you. Yeah, it was fun. I really appreciate it, Roger. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Well, that wraps up today's dialogue. I want to thank our guest, Mark Cuban, certainly gave us a lot to think about, including some great career advice on the potential for purpose in your day-to-day working life. I appreciate it that. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard or on any of our podcast, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. Also a reminder that our weekly current affairs podcast, Friday focus that comes out, guess what? Every Friday is available as a complimentary

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