The Vergecast - Introducing Decoder with Nilay Patel: Mark Cuban on the future of American business

Episode Date: November 10, 2020

This is the first episode of Nilay Patel's new podcast Decoder, an interview show that will put a spotlight on how innovators and policymakers at the frontiers of business and technology are navigating an ever-changing landscape. On the first episode of Decoder, Nilay interviews Mark Cuban. Mark is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, he’s a tech investor, and is on the hit show, Shark Tank. The conversation, recorded as last week’s election results rolled in, covers how interwoven business, technology, and policy are, whether its 5G, or the NBA bubble, or AI, or his investments into healthcare -- if you want to understand the landscape of the future, you have to understand tech, you have to understand business, and you have to understand policy. You can subscribe to Decoder anywhere you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everybody, it's Nealai from the Vergecast on this episode of the... Wait, that's not right. We took the Vergecast interview episodes. We made them bigger and better, and we turned them into a new show called Decoder with Nelai Patel. That's launching now. You can go subscribe to it wherever you get your podcast. But we're going to run the first few episodes in the Vergecast feed to promote it,

give you a sense of what it's like. So check it out. This is the first episode of Decoder. My guest, Mark Cuban. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct table. spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone

else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software.

What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to the first episode of Decoder. I'm Neil I Patel. editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my new podcast about big ideas and other problems.

I'll be interviewing executives, policymakers, and some other assorted troublemakers about what it takes to build the businesses of the future. I've spent over a decade covering tech, and I am more convinced than ever that every business is a tech business, with some familiar problems to solve and some big new opportunities to seize. So I'm very excited that my first interview on Decoder is with Mark Cuban. Mark is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks. He's a tech investor, and yeah, he's on Shark Tank. Rejoice, Shark Tank Nation. Rejoice!

Now, Mark and I have known each other for a little while, and one of the reasons I was excited to have him as my first guest is because we disagree on some things, and we enjoy disagreeing with each other. One of my goals with this show is to have my own beliefs challenged, and Mark is pretty good at challenging your beliefs. We recorded this conversation just after it had become clear that Joe Biden would win the presidential election, and we talked about what it's going to take to build. a new future. Pay close attention to how interwoven business, technology, and policy are in this

conversation. It didn't matter if we're talking about 5G or the NBA bubble or AI or Mark's investments into healthcare. If you want to understand the landscape of the future, you have to understand tech, you have to understand business, and you have to understand policy. That's why I was so excited for Mark to be the first guest on Decoder. There is also a pretty good story about meeting Donald Trump. All right, here we go. Mark Cuban. Welcome to Decoder. What's up? You're my first guest. It's like an honor. I'm so happy it's you. Yeah, well, if you can't get anybody else, I'm what's left. How are you feeling about, I mean, you've been obviously very vocal about the Trump presidency and what he has stood for.

How are you feeling about a potential Biden presidency? It depends what happens with the Senate, right? A big part of me thinks it'll be better to have a Republican Senate, believe it or not, because I think the retribution that would come from Schumer to be Mitch McConnell's twin would be a negative for the country. I saw a couple notes from banks. I've seen the markets today. That seems to be, I saw one note from a bank that was saying a Republican Senate would be great

for business. We would have sort of regulatory stagnation. We've lost our form of government. You know, we don't pick the best candidates. You know, I don't think anybody's here to say that Joe Biden and Donald Trump were the the best and brightest that this country has to offer or even out of the primaries from either party. And we, you know, we are now seeing the downside of having a political duopoly. And when a party gets power, they put power first and they get in their head that they're able to

take control and use that power. And that's a problem for the country. One of the things with the Trump era that I always thought was, it was like the elephant in the room is that, Donald Trump was not an effective bureaucrat. Like, he didn't know how his own machine worked. Right. And so it was just chaos all this. He would say, I would go on CNBC once a week and they'd be like, Trump said he's going to bang TikTok. And I'd be like, no, he's not. He isn't always talking about. He doesn't. He doesn't matter. But you don't think that, I mean, on one timeline, Joe Biden is a creature of the government. He might be more effective at doing stuff. On another timeline, you might get someone really Trumpy who knows what to do. So to your point, right? So if the Republicans

get the Senate, then Joe Biden has to be Joe Biden and tries to have to bring things together. And that's a positive, right? But think about what happens when one party has both sides. It doesn't matter what Joe Biden is going to think, right? You know, it wasn't like Mitch McConnell was taking guidance from Donald Trump on any legislative issue. Yeah. On any policy whatsoever. And I don't know, you know, and it's not like Nancy Pelosi was talking to Joe Biden and saying, what do you think? Or Chuck Schumer was saying, what do you think? I really want to know what Joe Biden has to say before anything came out. Look at stimulus. We need stimulus. This economy needs stimulus. People are dying. People are starving. And they're arguing about money for, you know,

charities in Washington, D.C. You know, it's just ridiculous the things that they're arguing about. Right. So let's talk about we got to, there's a pandemic. I want, you know, the NBA came through the bubble very successfully. The NFL seems to be a little. less successful at it. There is stimulus that's needed in the economy. Then there's a massive set of accelerating trends, things people saw coming for a long time that are just real now. And then there's actual real change that would have never happened on any timeline, right?

The one I always think of is like 2.2 million women have left the workplace over the past year. Of all of that, let's start with the NBA, because that's obviously you own the Mavs. You got through it. The NBA in this moment, obviously there was a lot of social. activism with the NBA. The bubble was just kind of a remarkable success that it happened and you were able to pull it off. But that blending, there's always been a blending of sort of entertainment in sports, of culture in sports. That's the heart of it. Now there's this

real blend of politics. There's a lot of criticism that the league got more political, that your ratings were down. How do you, do you think that swings back into balance? Or is that here to say? Two things. One, sports and politics have always mixed. Jesse Owens. Mahomet Ali. I mean, my guy, when he became Muhammad Ali, he wasn't allowed to fight for two years because he wouldn't go to Vietnam because of Vietnam had done nothing to him, as he said, right? You know, the 1980 Olympics, John Carlos, you know, holding their arms up in protest. And going forward, it just, it's always happened. So it's not like, you know, sports and culture and politics weren't intertwined. It's not like, you know, Richard Nixon didn't want to call a play for the Washington Redskins.

Yeah, but you're talking about stars, right? In the in the finals, like every NBA player has a social message on the back of the jersey. That's a different, I don't think the median athlete in any pro league felt comfortably for it. In 1980, athletes did not go to the Olympics. Yeah. You know, I mean, but I get your point, right? But part two to that is Joe Biden won the election, you know, and I think there's a real feeling of accomplishment that who knows how big an influence or how small an influence, but there was influence. And I think that that is going to be rewarding to a lot of people within the NBA.

Yeah. So you think it's here to stay? Yeah, I think it depends on the circumstances, right? When you have a broken political system with candidates that people are either not in love with or hate, you're going to get activism. You know, if you have problems, and again, let me take one step back. Activism to end racism is not being political. Yeah. You know, that's an American ideal.

if you're not trying to support the end of racism or do things to end racism, that's an American. It's not about being an activist. That should be part of our daily lives. If we see it, say something or do something, or, you know, be anything but. You know, and so, but I do think that we will see when there's challenges, there'll be increased confidence to try to have an impact. So as you think about the NBA coming out of this, obviously there's some discussion on when the season will start again. And there's some discussion about how to obviously reset that business. What do you think that you've learned from the bubble and operating the pandemic that will persist into the next version of the NBA?

When we shot season 12, the Shark Tank Friday nights on ABC. Good plug, Mark. Yeah, you know that. But we did it. We shot in the bubble in the Venetian in Vegas. And one of the things that was underlying at all was there are hundreds of people who work on the set and work on the production whose livelihoods dependent on this. And the same thing applied with the NBA. We realized the players realized what was at stake and how important it was to so many people.

And that made it important to them. And that encouraged them to follow the rules, not that they wouldn't otherwise, but it really made everybody very specific in everything that they did and very considerate. So, you know, I think what we learned from that was if you give people a reason to do the right thing, they will. right if you communicate honestly with people to do the right thing they will when you let people know what's at stake they'll do the right thing but it takes leadership and it takes communication we had leadership with adam silver we had leadership with you know the national basketball station players association right the mbpa and you had leaders from lebron james chris paul

Dwight Powell, et aloe, Kyle Lowry, Andre Adela, people who stepped up and communicated to their membership and you need that leadership in order to get the results that we got. Why do you think it's going less well with the NFL?

I mean, I'm a Packers fan. They were just like out of running backs yesterday. Yeah. I mean, two reasons. One, there's just a lot more people. Yeah. You know, we had 17 person roster, you know, 37 people in a traveling party. There's 53 people on an NFL roster

plus the traveling party. And they're traveling. We weren't. So the challenges are just. just going to be unreal. They sleep in their own beds at night. We didn't. Yeah. You know, just getting that all executed on is very, very difficult. And they deserve credit for having gotten, it having gone as well as it has. Do you think when you come back to the NBA regular season, you'll be able to pull it off once you have travel? Yeah, we're going to try. I think so.

Again, but it's easier for us because we have fewer people that we have to deal with. Coming out of that, I talked about things that we saw accelerating. Work from home is one of those things, e-commerce is one of those things. What are the trends that you're surprised by? I mean, from the technology perspective, none, really, but from a libertarian perspective that it's been as dramatic as it has been, I refuse to wear a mask group. Yeah. That's surprise more than anything. I thought people would, you know, would not politicize it nearly as much that it was an opportunity for us to come together. You saw some of that at the beginning and yeah, we can blame it on Donald Trump, but still, you know, it's just people just not wearing masks at the expense of

their own families to try to prove a point. I just didn't see that coming. Do you think that the, I know you're very critical of Facebook and the other social networks. Do you think that they're responding to that appropriately now? Right? They obviously amplified a lot of that message. Yeah, particularly Facebook. Facebook says that. But, I mean, during specific, this interminable election week, we've seen the major social networks to varying degrees get more aggressive. Do you think that that's going to hold? Right. The problem, they're trying to, again, deal with symptoms, not, you know, the problem they created. It's almost like TikTok creates dance and music virility. Facebook lives for political virility, you know, and that's a problem. And, you know, you can argue that

Mark Zucker doesn't have that responsibility that you want to know who the idiots are and they're the cell's front and center, right? But on balance, when you look at what's best for the American people, it's been, it's been horrific. It's been a disaster. You know, we talked about maybe maybe Congress will do things in a Biden administration. Maybe we won't get legislation. Up until now, there has been sort of bipartisan criticism of Facebook all the way to we should break it up. Do you think that that kind of remedy actually solves the problem or is this a leadership problem? Breaking it up doesn't solve it because it's all about algorithmic amplification is the problem. Right. So you're putting somebody effectively with Facebook. You're putting someone in a room and putting speakers all around the room.

and re-educating them. It's like Facebook camp, you know, where whatever bubble you're in, that bubble is being thrown at you continuously in a re-education process that you may or may not have asked for. Now, you may choose to stay there because you always do have the right to leave. And that was always my perspective originally. You don't have to be on Facebook, right? You're not getting something you're not asking for.

But they become re-education camps. And that's a problem. No, I hear from a lot of people who say, we actually can't leave Facebook. Right? I mean, I think with Twitter, it's like you can Twitter's small. You know, it's 22% of the American public interacts with Twitter. And then by the numbers, it's actually only one in 10 Americans.

Right. And 8% of the people create 92% of the tweet. I just feel like the answer for Twitter is like, yeah, we're censoring everybody. We're putting labels all over everything. Quit if you don't like it. Yeah. Twitter, you know, because people come on to Twitter to yell. Yeah.

Right. You don't really have, and, you know, most of them have, you know, crazy profile pictures and don't use their real name. And so you don't have to take them seriously. On Facebook, they're your friends or your family. They're people you know 90% of the time. And so that just has a different impact on you, you know. And so, you know, one of my kids' parents, you know,

going on there saying, you know, the elections being stolen or, you know, Joe Biden has dementia or the Democrats are leading to communism and will be Venezuela within four years. And then three of their friends come in and say, you're right, you're right, you're right. that's a different conversation than Patriot 462, a golden Christian, you know, that's been on since, you know, July of 2020, saying Cuban, you're a communist. Yeah. It's funny that sometimes I think I have bad mentions, but before I came on, I went and looked at your Twitter feed. I'm like, oh, oh, this is a different scale of a problem.

But Facebook is really, you know, it's wound itself into people's lives. It's your friends are there. They have multiple interlocking products that you might be interested in. It seems a lot older, right? Yeah. And those people are more susceptible. It's like Fox News does its damage. Facebook does even worse damage because it gets reinforced by people you actually know that are in your physical, your life bubble, in addition to just being on some wide social media net that you really don't know the people and they're abstract. Facebook's not abstract. And that's the huge difference.

What I'm getting to here is solving that problem. You don't think breaking them up and making them compete would work. No, because if there's Facebook one and Facebook two, they're both going to be the same, you think? Same thing, right? Because, you know, and it doesn't make it any easier to control them because they're a smaller company. As a matter of fact, you might ignore them more and it gets worse. So do you think the other option, which I think of is sort of the Josh Hawley option is we'll make Facebook a regulated monopoly. And do what? You'll carve away section 230, the law that says platforms aren't liable for what users publish.

you'll do algorithmic transparency, you'll make them audit every content moderation decision they make. Yeah, that's tough, right. But I do agree with what Roger McAmy said, and I take it even further. Yeah. You know, he said to dismiss 230 for anything that is negative, that negative algorithmic amplification. I think you get rid of 230 for any content that has seen any algorithmic amplification. Once you're amplifying it, you're making editorial decisions, right? It doesn't matter It's automated, right? Because someone had to build the automation and incorporate and build those weights and balances. And so once you start amplifying it, regardless of how you got there, now you're a publisher.

You're making choices on what content to present to people. You know, you're making choices that, you know, this person leans right. And so I'm going to keep on giving them more and his friends lean right. So they're all in this bubble and they, you know, this particular type of content, again, it's no different than TikTok. What TikTok's brilliant about is, you know, if I watch basketball videos, they know I'm watching basketball videos. It doesn't matter who I follow them. Yeah. Right.

They just know. And so they keep unfundling them. Facebook does the exact same thing and it incorporates politics into that as well because that's the nature of Facebook. You know, you're going to get that political commentary and news and videos and all that. So if you're amplifying any content, I don't care if it's Dallas Mavericks content because it's, you know, All Dallas Mavericks fans, no 230 protections. I see what you're saying. 230 is designed to help people moderate to incentivize the platforms to pull things down.

You're proposing, and I've heard this from Roger in the past as well, you're proposing, if you amplify, you make it bigger than it could have been on its own. But where do you measure that? You don't have to measure it. Either you do it or you don't. So either you get content in chronological order or you get it, even in algorithmic-defined order from people you follow. Period and story. Yeah.

Social network and it's supposed to be social. So if you and I have a conspiracy theory discussion and the people that follow us see it, you know, or in a group we're in, so be it, right? But if you amplify it, so the conversation that my wife's friend finds its way to you because the algorithms know that you're interested in this type of content, but you have no idea who this other person is, the parent of my kid, you know, of my kid's friend, That's a choice to deliver, and you deserve no 230 protections at all. And if that doesn't work, then you look at going back to, okay, we're not going to make you moderate everything other than the way we moderate now.

But we're going to make you go back to the old school social network where you get based off of your followers. So a thing that strikes me at that, and I think this is why I'm particularly interested in talking to you about it. That is a pretty heavy-handed regulatory scheme. And maybe the government's too broken ever figured out and pass it. But you're now getting in there and you're designing the architecture of the platform. I don't think it's heavy-handed because the heavy-handed was with 230, right? Because prior to 230- I disagree. So let me finish that.

Okay. Prior to 230, like when we were doing broadcast.com and audio net, any piece of content that I had put on there, I had to have a license for, period of end of story. Yeah, but you're saying because of 230, they've been able to create moderation decisions that they're not liable for. Right. Like they get to make whatever kinds of moderation. They're marketing decisions, right? They're marketing decisions. And you don't go, you can't put something on CNN.

And let's just say this is user-based content. Every day at 3 p.m., we randomly pick something from the internet. And we ask you if you want to put it on CNN. They have to get a license before they put that on CNN, right? They're not going to have platform 230 protection that I'm aware of. Maybe I'm wrong, right? Because that protection doesn't hold it to broadcast linear telephone. Bits are bits. Why should they be treated differently?

Right. I think there is a very narrow, boring answer or arguments we had about that. And what the broadcasters are able to do with user content from other platforms. But here, it seems like the challenge is we're going to change the incentives for how Facebook runs its moderation system. Right. And so we're going to take away 230 protection. If you amplify it, you're hoping that that one incentive change actually changes how they operate. We're simplifying them, right? Because a lot of their moderation, comes from the negative impact of their amplification, right? So when you put everybody in the education camps and they all get Stockholm syndrome

and all have started agreeing on everything, right? Now you can potentially have a problem that needs to be moderated. So you saw that what was the one, the group they just shut down? Stop the steel. Stop the steel, yeah. So now you have all these people coming together and now they have a moderation issue, right? Now, how do all those people come to commonality in the first? place. It's not like they all follow each other.

So this is what groups you're recommending, what videos you're recommending, beyond just what your friends are retweeting? You cause the problem through, you know, the way you define your algorithms. And look, the whole nature of neural networks is they're going to start not thinking for themselves, but, you know, when you, neural networks are a black box at their base, right? You can't just go back in and reverse engineer and just tweak one thing for a lot of applications, right? And And so it's not as simple as saying, okay, we're going to moderate your algorithm so A, B, or C doesn't happen. That's heavy-handed because you have to anticipate the outcome and then track it back

to where you think it initiated, right, versus just saying, look, be a social network, keep out terrorism, keep out, you know, all the things, no titties, right? And you've done your job. Yeah, I just, what I was getting at is, yep, that's one way to do it. Isn't the other way to do it to somehow make the market more competitive? That's what I worry about, right? It's strange that you and I are in different ends of that, right? Because what you and I often argue about is like net neutrality, where I'm like, the market's not competitive, regulate the hell out of them.

And here we've flipped. No, here's the problem, right? The problem is with AI, there's AI halves and AI have nuts. TikTok is amazing because their AI is better than anybody. That's what accelerated it. And it took them being part of bike dance and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get there. right, Parlor tried to compete with Twitter, right? Many people have tried to compete with Facebook over the years, right?

But it's going to be very, very difficult to give the quality of result back in terms of your interaction with any platform because it's hard and expensive and time-consuming to do AI right. And we all ready, so when you look at the stock market and you look at the companies who are just crushing it at the top, they're all the companies that are the greatest in the world at AI. No exceptions. Any $500 billion, $1 trillion or more market cap company, all of them do AI incredibly well and have spent these hundreds, if not billions of dollars, hundreds of millions, if not billions. That's where the game is today. In terms of AI, there's just a limited scope of companies that can truly compete because this whole conversation we're having, the foundation of Facebook success is

artificial intelligence, right? Yeah. Do with that? I mean, to an extent, I think there's a big network effect. I think there's a high switching cost. Well, yeah, there's a high switching cost, but the network effect, early days, that was network effect. Now there's that amplification we're talking about because if the amplification wasn't impactful, we wouldn't be having that part of the conversation. So let me ask you that's a question another way.

This is something I haven't thinking about a lot. And I'm curious for your read on it. I look at Google Search, which we know is a good business. It prints money for Google. And no one has built a good competitor to it. it. I think Microsoft just keeps Bing around because they don't want to admit that all their users are going to switch

to Google, right? But why hasn't anyone, why isn't Apple built a competitor Google search? For the same reason I just told you. Because they don't have the AI chops to do it. Right. You don't think, you know, Microsoft doesn't just keep Bing around because they don't want to be embarrassed because they need to enhance their

AI. If Microsoft made a quantum leap in AI, they could make a quantum leap above and beyond Google for their search. But I feel like it's the same with YouTube. Like YouTube is a much simpler kind of product, right? No. You don't think so.

No. I mean, again, what are you feeding people? Yeah. The underpinning of every conversation we just have had in terms of success and failure and competition is artificial intelligence. And the biggest challenge we have, and I say this all the time, is we have companies that are AI have not. And what Google is doing with search is not antitrust.

They're just better at AI than most companies. That's all. So look, you're Strike Tank Season 12, you just filmed it, right? Like, you're an investor. Someone comes up to you and says, hey, everybody in the YouTube ecosystem is always mad. The inflection point for every YouTube creator is a video explaining why they're mad at YouTube. That's the end of their timeline. We're going to build a better product for them. Are you going to say, well, what's your AI? Is that your first response? Three years ago, I looked at companies. I invested in one that just didn't work, right? Yeah. But today, yeah, absolutely. And I get all these people come and say, oh, we've got great AI.

I get this guy from MIT, this guy from Harvard. He's deleting this, leading Ph.D., so what? As you step back and look at that investing landscape, what's your decision-making framework? Is the first cut tell me about your AI and let me validate it? Or is that three steps down the line? Lately, if you're trying to sell me on AI, I'm probably telling you, you're not really doing AI. and you can do what you think you want to do. Yeah.

Because it's expensive. So if they get $100,000 in AWS credits or Azure credits or Google Cloud and they blow through that and now all of a sudden they don't realize how much money they're going to have to spend and, you know, because running all these models and trying to make it all work together is not only expensive, it's time consuming and it's hard. And then you've got to get the results because just because you do it in an AI doesn't mean the results are going to be impactful the way you want them to be. You could spend a billion dollars on an AI search engine project and it's not going to be near as, unless you just get

just these rocket science people, right, that are just beyond the best of what Google and Microsoft and Amazon and Facebook have and Apple and Twitter have, right? You're going to need to find those anecdotal people, right, those people that are outliers, these outliers that are just beyond the intelligence of what these major companies have, then maybe you have a chance. Do you think the kill zone is real? Like, I hear from small companies all the time. Look, there's a kill zone. We can make something better than what Google has today, but they will see it as a feature

and they will eat us so we'll never get funded. Well, no, I mean, that's not a kill zone. I mean, forever in the day, you know, I've always asked the question, are you a product or a feature? Yeah. Right. So that's always been an issue. And you're always competing, you know, 50, 60 years ago they were competing with IBM that

Microsoft you're always competing with. Now, then Google, then Facebook. It's just, you know, that's just the nature of the beef. But there's not really the kill zone from a product perspective because most people don't try to go head to head for their primary products. There's just no good reason to. You know, you can't any more than going ahead to head to head with Tesla has been hard. Why do you think Tesla has been so dominant in the EV?

I mean, because Elon Musk is smart as fuck. And his technology, he always comes out with things, what makes you think, why didn't I think of that? Yeah. And then not only does he make you think that, then he executes on it. So he went from competing with every major car manufacturer and everybody who invested in and probably said, okay, I'm taking a risk, but you're probably out of your mind. There's no chance.

And he changed the game, right? So it's not like it's not capable of happening, but you need five Elon Musk together that have, you know, Elon Musk says he's going to do the boring machine. And he does it. He says he's going to do a space rocket that lands again. And he does it, right? A recyclable space rocket. You need that type of person in order to beat people at their own game when they've been doing it for 20 years.

Google's not a startup. Facebook's not a startup. Netflix is not a startup. Apple's not a startup. Microsoft's not a startup. These guys have been doing it for a generation. And so you've got to come with your A game. And that's not to say there aren't some people out there that are just fucking unbelievable and can blow everybody away.

There are, but they know it. And they're working on the vaccine, right? Working on creating things that aren't about search. Because if you're trying to change the world and you are the best, the best of the best, at AI, the last motherfucking thing you're working on to search. Yeah, because it looks like a solved problem with no entry. And not even that there's no entry. Let's say you do it better than Google.

Yeah, you can make money. But, you know, particularly Gen Z, that's not the goal. You know, making money as a byproduct, changing the world for the better. That's the goal. And that's the beauty of Gen Z. and that's why I'm really hopeful about this country because that's their mission. They all have a social construct

of what they're trying to accomplish. So breaking up Facebook, you're just going to have two companies doing the same thing or three. I mean, if you think Facebook is too big, you and I have talked to each other for years about telecom companies, and I've always thought those are too consolidated,

and we're kind of seeing it now. 5G is launched. It's here. There's a PCMag story that came out today. The United States has the slowest 5G in the world. Hopefully it'll inch up better. we have seen kind of the AT&T consolidation. They own Warner.

Seems like they're making big changes. Jason Collars, and you see a Warner Media sweeping through it. A bunch of HBO people are gone. We'll see what happens to CNN after the election rumors there. Do you think their eyes are still on the prize? You think the big telecoms are distracted? Because it feels like they're all over the place.

Yeah, they are because, you know, they hope for linear television to last longer than it did and it didn't. But they're still, where they're making their money is selling broadband. And, well, they'll make more money is selling via. 5G, but you also have to realize, and I'm not the expert in here in terms of the technology for 5G, but Huawei was the leading provider and low-com provider, and now all of a sudden it was gone, right? And then there were different decisions made on a millimeter wave and what was the best approach. And, you know, it's happening. It's not happening as quickly as people would like, or the quality

is not necessarily there, the way people would like. But I don't think there's any question now, and I think I told you this when we talked that, you know, 5G will replace wired broadband. And then 16 will replace whatever, you know, comes along there. I think by the time this will come out, I can say this out loud, but this, here's the 12 Pro Max. Right now I'm in rural America. I have two bars of 5G. It is not fast enough to replace my wired broadband here. So I think the curve for that is going to take a long time.

Well, but you're a year in, right? So it might not happen to you immediately. But, you know, the minute I can put a 5G MiFi in my house because I have a decent 5G signal, done. Yeah. Done. And places I travel where I know that there's 5G instead of using wire, you know, Wi-Fi from a hotel, done, right? I'm doing it.

And so they don't have a choice but to compete. And that was also my always my thing to you, right? Because, you know, it was always localized or territorial at some level with telecom. And that territorial perspective is being decimated right now. But it's being decimated, but there's still only three national carriers. Are you hoping to see more like regional, 5G competition. I'm not even that.

Even with three, because the spectrum, that's going to be hard, right? Yeah, yeah. But even with three, that's three more. That's two more than what you were talking about when we had our competition.

That's fair. How do you think that the, you were talking about linear TV going away? You obviously, that's a big deal for sports. It's a last thing holding linear TV together in many ways. You are seeing, especially with AT&T,

the bundle of content and access, T-Mobile just launched a TV service. That is in some ways to me, like that's the net neutrality moment, right? AT&T is going to zero rate HBO Max, T-Mobile's cable-ish thing, T-Vision is going to be prioritized in that network. If the only thing holding all that together is sports, where do you come in and play? I mean, it's hard to say. I don't have a good answer for you. I really don't.

It's something I'm still learning and still trying to figure out. I don't have a good answer. What have your conversations been like? Trying to find that equilibrium. you know, how do we disrupt ourselves? How do we, you know, how do we sustain our partners and do the right thing for our customers? You know, you can't just always maximize revenue.

You got to look, you know, it's not just short term. You have to look long term. And so trying to figure out what our options are. That's part of the challenge, you know. Have you thought about going direct NBA? Well, but, you know, it's going to be expensive, right? Yeah. We also have partners, you know, the players association isn't just all of a sudden going to

say, let's reduce our revenue by. That's already happened with the pandemic. right so we don't you know that's your problem five years from now but you know the life cycle of a player is 4.5 years so you know like the idea of Netflix for NBA where anybody wants to watch the NBA pays the fee and you've got the app and it all lives inside of there you don't think that's workable I don't think it's workable but I hear people ask about it all the time yeah no everybody asked about it all the time it's trying to find that equilibrium right because you have to do with all the stakeholders and you know including the players we split our revenue 50 50 with the players

And so it's not a unilateral decision, and it's not just a technical decision. Technically, it's easy. That's not a problem at all. Yeah. You know, it's more, you know, what do our customers want? When do they want it? How do they want it? And where do they want it?

But do you think having three, let's say 5G works and the Time Warner cable monopoly in New York City is finally decimated and everyone's getting wireless access and they have a much choice? Now you've got three providers who might say, well, unless you pay us an access fee to our network. No, I mean, because look, Wi-Fi is not going away, and we can still go wired, and there's still a variety of options. So, yeah, that's the last thing I'm worried about because the one thing that would really, you know, again, particularly with the younger generation with that social construct that we talked about earlier, that brand that does that, say goodbye to every customer you have ever had or ever will have. You just can't get away with that anymore. It's not 20 years ago where, you know, you can have any color you want as long as it's black. You know, those days are gone.

You know, every individual, every Gen Z, every millennial for the most part is a brand. And if you happen to be that fuck you telecom provider and no one's going to want to be on that, you know, telecom provider, you're going to, your brand is going to be toast. I'm watching these sort of like new look reverse carriage disputes play out in sort of tangential ways, right, HBO Max isn't on Roku, stuff like that. It is happening, right? I mean, Roku is basically saying pay, if you want to be on this platform, we're the biggest, pay us. I mean, real estate is always your value, right? Right, but it's not driving people to switch away from Roku's yet. Yeah, but Roku is not, you know, it's us or nothing.

Yeah. You don't have to use Roku. A lot of people don't. And a lot of people don't even know what Roku is, you know, and there's no territorial limitations. Oh, you live in Dallas. You have to use Roku or you don't use Roku. It's, hey, we're marketing.

We're getting out there. We're marketing nationally, globally. And we're convincing these customers. And if you want to get to those customers, hey, me, okay. You know, it's not. we have this bandwidth. We're one of three 5G providers and pay us

to be on here. And look, let me take a step back. The original conversation that we had was based off of websites, right? Because that's the whole net neutrality thing. You know,

websites aren't going to be able to get access, which is all turned out to be fantasy and nonsense, right? There's never been, you know, five examples, maybe over the years, the past 12 years, maybe 15 now,

of companies that, that have been tamped down, right? And those weren't even company-specific type things. You know, so this is not a website issue anymore. And most of what you're talking about in terms of streaming and access is website or app-driven. And so you're not, you know, I don't see anybody limiting apps, you know, no, you know, you're on Google. Now, Google and Apple, that's a different conversation, right? The limit they have.

But I don't think from a telecom perspective, I haven't seen anything to even suggest that that's a possibility. Well, to me that it's not, it's the consolidation to just come back to that theme over and over again. It's AT&T, one day will zero rate CNN and charge Fox News for access. You might think that's a great thing. I see that as like a particular kind of power. No, and I get it, right? But remember how Fox News got started. They paid for all that.

Yeah. They paid for sub, 10 bucks a sub for month, right? Because when bandwidth was limited, you had to pay to get access. And so I just don't. don't see it happening that way because the competition comes from another direction. You know, you're not, the bandwidth isn't necessarily going to be bandwidth right now is, the cause is becoming negligible, you know. And so there's so many different ways to deliver bits, you know, whether they're video

or anything else for that matter, it's just not going to happen, right? There's no many different ways and someone could put up a private 5G network. You know, there's just where someone will just sell off spectrum and, you know, just do it, you know, within a small area. like we're seeing 5G networks within manufacturing environments. We're going to take a quick break, but stick around. Mark and I are going to talk about his decision-making frameworks and the projects he's working on now.

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We've all seen Mark's decision making happen on Shark Tank. That's one part of it. But I wanted to know what his larger approach is. So Shark Tank's a TV show. Yeah. Right. So I have an infrastructure in my time where I can help a lot of these companies just become bigger and better. And I'm helping entrepreneurs and I'm teaching people to be entrepreneurs. And these people that come on the show and present us are setting the example that the American Dream is alive and well. Those are all. all wins that aren't directly related to how much money can I make. Where I'm making investments to change the game is, you know, one of my companies, it's called the Mark Cuban Cost Plus drug company, literally the name,

because I wanted there to be no question about what we're doing. There's a drug called albendazol that's generic now, and it's for a hookworm. And there's still hookworm epidemics in Alabama and Texas and other places. It's $200 a course. This is a generic drug. So we created a company that went, and right now we're doing two things. One, we sent somebody overseas to a manufacturer that makes it for another country. They made it for all these other countries, but no one would import it here because they wouldn't take the time.

And we sent someone over there to make sure the manufacturing was perfect. And now we bring it over there, over here. We gave away thousands and thousands of doses to Baylor to test it all. And we were ready to give away more and start selling it to Alabama. but the COVID blowup is that's using up all their resources. But long story short, we're selling it for our cost, eight bucks plus 15%, right? So we're effectively selling it for what's going to be our cost plus that it's going to be $10.50

instead of $200, right? So those are the types of things that I'm focusing my time. We're trying to do the same thing with insulin. I'm building what's called an API in one of my buildings in Dallas. It's an advanced pharmacy, something or other. I forget what the I stands for. And we're just going to be making generic drugs and selling. them at cost plus 15%. Period. End of story. We're going to post it all on our website so you know

exactly what our costs are, and we're going to fuck the pharmacy industry. Now, the challenge for us is they're so entrenched with how they do pricing and how they do pharmacy benefit management. We're going to have a battle, right? And there's no antitrust there. And you talk about, you know, talk about kill switches, right? That's typically what they do to drug companies. They'll just buy it or they'll try to preempt them. But we're going, you know, all those drugs that we can make, and some I'm not going to go into now because I don't want those pharmaceutical companies to come after us. They've always tried to buy us through the back door, and it's just not going to happen. Those are the types of challenges I'm really looking at right now. There's a project I'm

working on that's just in its empathy called sick bank, right? There's an economic model that says if at your company you get one week or two week six days, sick days, right? Well, if everybody contributed one sick day from their own personal sick bank, right, a days available, into a centralized sick bank. And the companies paid some amount of money for that day. Let's say, you know, it's $268 on average. Then we can have a centralized sick bank where if you get sick or I get sick or, you know, cure gets, get sick.

And 14 days is not enough. You just borrow up to 20, up to another 14 days. And then we'll pay you based off of your salary because your company's already put the money in. but, you know, just the economics work like a bank, right? A little bit like an insurance company. You know, different ways to approach the, you know, healthcare. Those are the types of things that I get excited about because I'm not, even it's tech,

it's all tech driven. There's all the tech underpinning. There's AI applied in a lot of different things. But it solves a company, you know, tries to solve. Who knows if we'll be successful, but we're going to try to solve these social problems that need to be solved. And is that related to, I mean, we started this conversation with government, gridlock, the government's not effective, our politics are broken. Is that just a direct

reflection of your feeling that way? Yeah, of course. Because a lot of people would say, like, I think about the amount of people who look at GoFundMe's for health care and say, aren't you, you just, but you just made taxes. That's all you just did. Yeah, it's ridiculous, right? I mean, our health care system is broken. And it's because, you know, it's a lot simpler than people are making it out to be. And the answer is not Medicare for all. You know, one of the studies that I'm funding and one of the companies I'm working with right now, I just has to very simple question. In Toronto, Canada, right, the province of Ontario, a hospital there has pretty much the exact same expenses as a New York City hospital. Real estate's the same. Doctors cost

the same. Everything's the same for the most part, except a couple of little things. And before I go into those, number one, I looked at what does Medicare pay for the top 35 procedures? And what does the province of Ontario pay at Toronto Hospital for those same 35 procedures? 30 of them are significantly They pay less, significantly less in Canada than even Medicare. And our hospitals say that they lose money, but the hospitals in Canada are for-profit, not big profit, but they're making a little bit of money. I'll love it a little bit of money. Now, what are the things that make the difference?

The new beds being built in this country are single-bedrooms. In Canada, they're all multi-bed. I had kidney stones in Canada, so I can tell you, right? They're multi-bed rooms. I like the idea of being your roommate in the hospital in Canada. There's a real, it's a real picture. Have you already had kidney stones? No, thankfully.

Painful, painful, painful. Literally sitting in a waiting room in Canada and Toronto, Toronto Hospital, Toronto General Hospital, and I'm dying, right? I mean, I'm puky and I'm dying. People coming up asking me for autographs, autographs. And so they put me on a gurney into a section in a hallway just to keep me away from people. But number one, just imagine the change in the cost structure for hospitals. instead of being allowed to build one bedrooms in a hospital, a newly built hospital or update,

you had to do two. Just think what happens to the cost structure immediately level. Another thing, in Canada, they cover 70% of the CAPX, including property. One of the challenges in hospitals here is they want to get bigger and bigger and bigger because the bigger the hospital, the more things, you know, the more money the CEO management makes, the bigger shit you look like you are. Yeah. And a lot of times they'll go into new lines of business, cardiac, orthopedic, whatever, that don't always work but are expensive.

And so you see paintings, you see pianos, you see all the shit you see in the hospital. And they'll raise money, whatever. They don't do any cost accounting on that. And so they don't know. Literally, a lot of hospitals don't even know how to account. So they use this thing called activity-based accounting, which allows them to kind of lie on these reports and make it seem like they're losing money. when if we just changed it so that for any CAP-X, the government will cover 70% of it. You figure out the 30, so you don't just rip off the government all the time, and we'll make it work, right?

So those are two big things. And then, you know, there's some other little variance things that we don't have to go Medicare for all. The foundation of what makes it work in Canada is government isn't all that volatile. They don't have the Donald Trumps of the world, at least not yet. because if we tried Medicare for all, like I mentioned a little bit earlier, you know, and then you get another Donald Trump type in and he just tears it apart. Now we have no health system. So you need to have competition, but you've got to pick the right way.

So that's another project that I'm working, actually multiple projects that I'm working on. It's interesting because the ones that you've talked about, they're in industries where there is rampant consolidation, right? Government protection. Yeah. It's like my parents or doctors, their hospital system, like where I grew up, there used to be eight hospitals and now they just slowly emerged. And my joke was always they worked at competing hospitals and we could always pick.

And like it's just inevitably now they work effectively the same one. Right. So part of the problem is competition. Yeah. Right. So if one of those hospitals has single bed rooms and that, you know, you're, they're part of the network from your company. Then the other hospital better have single bed rooms.

Yeah. And if you're not part of that network, you know, then you're going to have to compete to get access to it. And look, the insurance companies have no incentive to pay less, right? So they're paying the biggest hospital, the most marketable and best brand, more money than they should because they make, you know, after their medical loss ratios, they're making 15% of a bigger number, which makes them more money. And the hospital is getting paid more so they can float up more buildings and build more shit, right, that may or may not be needed. And then the hospital who doesn't win those battles or hospitals, see them. Yeah.

They're gone. But isn't that that root, that consolidation, that drive to get bigger and bigger and bigger. Isn't that the heart of many of the problems? Not even a tiny thing. The heart of the problem is there's no transparency on cost. You know, the Trump, CMS did this where they're making you publish your prices coming up, okay? And so you'll be able to have actual prices and see that. And you'll be able to do some shopping where you can, right?

But the reality is, look, I've turned into such a healthcare geek. There's this thing called Med-Pact where they do all the Medicare pricing analysis and everything. And I've read their transcripts, the most boring shit ever, right? And a lot of the foundation of the problem is hospital saying all the time, we can't make money at Medicare or Medicaid rates. And so that is the fundamental issue. And so now you can't make money and everybody believes that's the truth. Now they're just getting paid more and more that they're just spending on all this other stuff.

And then there's two other things that I think that I will bring in. Like in Canada, they pay for the malpractice insurance for the hospital. Yeah. All right, that's a smart thing to do, right? In Canada also, and it would help the hospitals of smaller sizes, every procedure gets paid for, every single one of them. And so part of the health care thing I'm working on, every procedure gets paid for it. Because what happens is you can walk into a hospital. And if you don't have insurance, then there's a whole process, you still have to give a certain amount of health care.

then there's a whole process that the hospital has to go through to get reimbursed. And that should be taken care of. And that reduces part of the risk as well because that's just basic health care rights. You know, but we don't do that here. We make it circuitous, you know, make it circular to try to get hospitals to get reimbursed. So these are all common sense things that can make a huge difference that we can learn from Canada and wouldn't be all that difficult to apply here without going to the extremes of Medicare for all where you kill private industry, healthcare.

And if that happens and somebody who just hates Medicare for All and guts it like we've seen try to happen with the ACA, we're not caught in a catch-22 because there's no way to prevent some executive order from being written from a president in the future that says, okay, you know, just like the mandate's gone, you know, just like health care.gov is gone in Georgia. You can't protect against those things from happening in all. And that's the real underlying problem for Medicare for all. We've got to take one more break, but when we come back, we're going to talk about Mark's involvement in politics and hear a pretty good story about President Trump. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited.

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We're back. Now, if you've been listening to Mark Talk, he obviously has big ideas in healthcare and competition policy. Honestly, to me, it sounded a lot like conversations I've had with senators, other policymakers. So I asked Mark if his goal was eventually to do this as a policymaker himself. Do you think this work that you're describing happens in the market at the entrepreneurship level, which is kind of where you're describing it?

Or are you, your eyes on the prize, are you thinking that you're going to go be a policymaker? Because the conversation we're having sounds a lot like a policymaker conversation. Yeah, no, but you need support at some level, right? And being the policymaker doesn't help it at all, right? Because there's only so much you can do. But, yeah, I mean, I've sat. I tried to explain this to Trump and I'm, psh. Wait, give me, look, he's got, it's over.

Give me a story about you talking to Trump. No, I mean, look, so the genesis of all this with health care is once McLean gave the thumbs down to repeal the ACA, they still needed a repeal and replace at some level. Yeah. So I'm like, okay, if I was going to do a repeal and replace, what would I do? And so I started going through all this stuff that I just talked to about. And I went to present to Jared Kushner and some of the other people and Alex Azar. And look, you know, their heart was in the right place, but the politics was in a worse place.

And I just happened to be in there and they're like, well, the boss would like to see you. And I walked in. I'm like, okay, what the fuck is he going to say to me, right? Yeah, I know we had a little disagreements on stuff. No big deal. Sit down. And I started talking about, you know, what we're trying to do. Like I just was talking to you.

And he's like, okay, so what do you think about, you know, me selling? You know, no, I did a deal. Did I tell you I did a deal with Boeing to sell planes for them? Oh, my God. You know, I'm like, okay. You know, he just subject to subject to subject. which is fine. It was 20 minutes.

And then I'm getting up to walk out. And I had one of my shark tank suits on. He goes, damn, Mark, you look good. Have you been working out? Well, at least they got the compliment. A tailored suit makes everybody look great. That wasn't tailored off the show. What was tailored off the shelf?

We only have a few minutes left. But what I'm realizing is that you and I have opposite viewpoints, depending on where we are in the stack. Down here at infrastructure, I'm like, you got to regulate it. we have to the government should do stuff and up at the very consumer facing how does facebook work i'm like i think we should break them up and have more competition and you're like we should tweak their algorithms it's that is a really strange spread i'm not dogmatic about anything yeah nothing i'll look at every problem and i'll say how can it help you know depends depending on what we're discussing

how can it help the american people in one way or the other right sometimes enabling business that's what you need to do. You want, you know, you want companies to grow and be successful. Sometimes it's technology and you need context, right? Sometimes it's health care and it's just a motherfucker right. And we can't see how to do it right. So you can't just say, and that's part of the problem going forward on all the politics, right? Because I'm terrified from either side. You know, the Republicans are dogmatic about trickle down and the Democrats are dogmatic about their version to trickle down. We're going to give it to a government program, have people apply and hope it trickles down to the people who need it, who need it. We learn from the stimulus and the fact that,

you know, stimulus will help us now, not more programs, but stimulus, we learn to trickle up works better than anything. And hopefully we'll learn that going forward. And you won't see Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell being dogmatic and doing this because this is the way it's always been done. It seems like whatever happens next in the Biden administration, the fundamental question will be, can they actually operate the government? Because these questions are pretty massive And no matter what we've talked about, they require some amount of actual policymaking to get done. Well, if they can get passed, right? Yeah.

And so to me, the ultimate Biden skill set is, can he lead? Can he bring people together? Because that's what we need more than anything. And if he's able to do that, then the legislation will probably be fair as opposed to dogmatic. You know, my greatest fear, as I said earlier, is if the Democrats win the Senate and Chuck Schumer turns into the Democratic version of Mitch McConnell. And he just does everything that Mitch McConnell did, which was horrific, right? But to the benefit of the Democratic Party. And, you know, we start talking about, you know, Chuck Schumer putting party over country. And that leads to more civil problems and challenges. And so I guess what I'm saying is I don't trust the Democrats to do the right thing because power corrupts. An absolute power corrupt. Absolutely. I guess we'll see. Mark, it has been, I'm so happy that you've been the first guest on this show. This has been a great conversation.

Yeah, we covered a lot of stuff, didn't we? Wait in one hour. We're just like flew through it. I knew it. We're going to have to have you back. We'll have like a midpoint check-in on the first year of Biden. We'll have to have you back soon. Oh, I'm happy to, right?

I hope it's just brilliant and smooth sailing and everything's amazing. All right, man. Thank you so much. Thank you, man. So that's the first episode of Decoder. Thank you to Mark Cuban for being our first guest. And thanks to you for the listening. We hope you enjoyed it.

We would love your feedback. You can tweet at me. I'm at Reckless. We have more to come. this is just the beginning. Decoder is a production from the Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Sophie Erickson, our audio engineer is Andrew Marino. Our music is by Breakmaster Simatur. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcast. We'll be back next Tuesday with another episode of Decoder. See you then.