Mark Cuban on the NBA, Cost Plus Drugs, and How to Fix Politics

23:28And what happens then that turns the hospital into a subprime lender, right? Because now they go in either through the emergency room or they show up not knowing what their deductible is and then the hospital will loan them money because they want them to reach be able to pay the deductible. So then they can then charge the insurance company or the employer if they're self -insured, but wait, there's more, right? So then, let's just say someone in gets a hip replacement, pays her $5 ,000 deductible, and they own $10 ,000. Right? The insurance company, even though they have a contract that says it's $15 ,000 between the provider and the payer, the insurance company, they don't just write the check for $10 ,000.

24:05Right? They say, we'll give you $7 ,000. You don't like it come and get us. And so when you talk to a hospital CFO, they're like we lose three to five percent. We can lose as much as 50 % on the subprime lending. And so they have to event all these costs to compensate for what's happening on the other side on the payment process. Then of course you have the pre -authorizations. And most of the pre -authorizations get approved after everything is said and done, but they get the time value, the money of the premium and not having to pay it, and they've eaten up all these doctors' time. And the doctors are the ones getting underpaid, so you're going in for a transplant and you know the doctor might make $10 ,000 unless it's a big name visit you know surgeon I want my doctor make it a shit ton of money right to make sure that you know so you have this connectivity between all the pieces that really hasn't been thought out right and those insurance companies either own the pbms or are owned by the pbms and what they do because they're together and they also are vertically integrated to own clinics and hospital, not necessarily hospital clinics and other providers, right?

25:13So they have all these intercom company transfers that allow them to gain the system. So with the ACA, you depending on the circumstances, the insurer has to pay out 80 to 85 % it called the medical loss ratio. And so you would think that's just straightforward. But if you're vertically integrated, you can put some over here, could all the profits into your PBM? Right. And show that you've spent all this money because you wrote that check to the PBM. Yeah. And so that's what happens. One of the biggest insurance companies had $161 billion of intercompany transfers. Oh, we got it. Intercompany transfers.

25:55That's 0 .3 % of our GDP. Wow. Just move the money around to make money. Just moving money around to make more money. So if you get rid of them, who should take the rest? Would you replace anything? So yeah, so it's great question, right? So healthcare is easy, right? Presuming, you know, if you get the right doctor and everything, you go to the doctor and they tell you what's right or wrong, right? Go home. Wrong, okay? What do I need? Then once you know what you need, there's only two questions, whether it's medication, surgery, whatever it is. How much is a cost? And how do you pay for it? Yeah.

26:27Cosplusdrugs .com is still the only pharmacy company that publishes an entire price list. the only one and we've been in business three and a half years. That in and of itself is crazy. But then once you get into the system and you don't know what anything costs, then they can charge you whatever. And then in terms of how do you pay for it, that's the who takes the risk. And so deductibles are going up, no matter whether it's Medicare, Part D, even Medicare, Part A and B have higher deductibles, Medicare advantage, they shrink the network increase, networks. So out of pockets going up, so patients are the first line of defense that the insurance companies are trying to push the risk on.

27:06But better in my mind is to combine kind of a market where you get rid of the insurance companies. There's no premiums. Get rid of the big pbms. There's no, you know, manipulation, if you will, of the funds with intercom company transfers. And you say to, you create tools that allow patients or their employers working with them to go out there and find the best solution for them and to shop. And hopefully you've saved a lot of money from your not paying premiums and you can pay for what you need. But what you can't pay the government will own you that money if it stays within the price parameters that have been set.

27:47So it's negotiating without negotiating, right? And they've done that to a certain extent, reference -based pricing with Medicare, you know, Medicaid for Medicaid patients. And so now, if you or I can pay for it, we just pay for it. But we've saved all that money and not paying premiums. And slowly but surely we're getting more and more reinsurance options for individuals. So for catastrophic insurance, so in case God forbid, the worst thing happens, you have an option. So that's one place of risk, but if you're not paying premiums to an insurance company, you can pay for your reinsurance. And then if your HIPAA replacement is 15 ,000 and you have 3 ,000, you can use financing, but it's guaranteed by the government.

28:29Kind of like we do with college, you know, you can use the financing the school has, right? But it's guaranteed by the government. Kind of like we do with houses. You can use the mortgage plan, but it's guaranteed by the government. The most important thing that we have available to us are healthcare. The government is like whatever. So if you take the risk and allocate it within a price control, price control is right wrong work. But if you're a patient, you're shopping for care and it stays within the benchmarks that are set, then go for it. If you want to spend more, right? You think the doctor doesn't participate and you want to get better?

29:06Go for it. But then all of a sudden you've got all this money that's not being paid in premiums That's available to people to use to save whatever. That's how I would look at it. Yeah The so you've built a cost of the drugs personally because you have this what you care about it Obviously you have this distribution advantage. You have the capital advantage to get it started Let's imagine if you were a young entrepreneur, you know, a mid -20 something Mark Cuban in in 2025 and trying to you know Be a man's successful like you've been how would you think about that or what would you pursue for cost plus drugs I don't know, you as entrepreneur.

29:38Like if I was just getting out of college right now, I'd be all AI every day, right? Because I think the disconnect, I think employment for computer science graduates, and I said this 10 years ago, I got crushed, 2017 actually. I said, you know, AI is gonna put programmers out of business at the early, beginning stage programmers, and people should all year in idiot. But now big companies are gonna find ways to use AI. So they're gonna reduce your sales force or revelate off people, small companies have no clue. You know, and there are only 22 ,000 companies, I remember this from the Kamala campaign, 22 ,000 companies with 500 more employees.

30:1630 million, right? Now a lot of them are single -wants -pronors, but, you know, 5 million have 500 or less. That's where you want to go try to get a job. As if you're AI native, because you've been using it through your four years a college or two years, you know, or, you know, two years from now having had four years experience, they need you. Yeah. You know, maybe they have one person who's picked it up to people. Yeah. But if you have a business background, which you can learn in school, and you become an AI native, you can walk into a small company and say, I can help you. Right. I can create agents for you that will go out and look for things.

30:52We had one of my Shark Tank companies is Rebel Cheese and they added a direct to consumer business. and they created an agent that compares the weight that comes off a scale for what there's in it or the box type and what they were invoiced by UPS or FedEx and compared to the price list. Always got overcharged. Always. This little company is saving thousands of dollars a week just by using an agent. And it's not anything difficult or advanced. So being able to walk into a company and say, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this. It's no different than what systems integrators have done for decades.

31:35That's what I did in my first company, Micro Solutions. You don't understand PCs, you're a small company. I do, I know networks, I can program. I'm gonna write you an application that emulates what you're doing, but faster. Now it's no longer about emulation. Those days are gone. It's about how do we change the process by removing pieces to make you more efficient, more productive, more profitable? So you were the PC Wave, then you were the internet wave with broadband at a big outcome there. If you were starting a company today, would you try to build a foundation model company or a vertical application or?

32:06No, neither. What do you do? Because they're all going to be customized. I literally would hone my business skills as much as possible. Domain knowledge will be more of that. Domain novel knowledge combined with understanding of AI is the win. Right. So you would go with some sector that hasn't yet been developed by AI and build up? small companies, you know, regardless of sector. But if you wanted to start something that could be big one day. Right. Because if I work with one shoe company and I analyze what they do, then I say, okay, I'm going to charge you, Xperture, and X -Action, and I'm going to do the Asian for you, and I'm going to monitor the agents.

32:39It's SaaS at one level, right? But it's customized SaaS where it, you know, in his AI advances, the model advances and the agent advances. And so, you know, factories, you know, talking now like at Cosplus Drugs, we have a robotics factory and we use AI agents to monitor everything. You know, in our cost to run the factory is a fraction of pretty much everybody other than India and China and we'll catch up to them. You know, and so understanding how business works having that domain knowledge and then being able to apply it and then being able to scale it by taking it to all those companies in similar circumstances or creating agents that modify the agents based off of the information you're getting from all your customer companies.

33:21Yeah, that's the new SaaS potentially. Yeah, totally. I want to zoom out and talk to general business success and advice. The internet lists your net worth, I believe it, over 8 billion or something to the effect. But one thing that typically when people become super wealthy, it's because of one big thing, but it seems like you've sort of compounded wealth in decades. And I think the biggest liquidity events, though, I don't even know if I'm wrong, are the company you sold and the other. And the maps. And so, and then there have been other efforts. What do you think is the thread, the through line, when you look at your career and the ways in which you've made money that others can learn from?

33:56I look at business as a sport, right? And I just love to compete. And that keeps me going just, there's always something new and always something changing. And it's almost like the forums, right? I just like to be intellectually challenged. When I first started, I was always the youngest guy walking in the room. I'm the oldest guy walking in the room. And I like kicking everybody's ass where I can, right? You know, you got your CS degree from Harvard, Fuck you, I don't care, right? Sounds like Lingerie can rush. But I like that challenge. And I understand patterns, and I understand being able to create new things.

34:32And I think that's served me really well. It's like cost plus drugs. You know, we launched in January of 2022, we're serving millions of customers. We're changing people's lives. And everybody thought I was an idiot. You know, you're taking, and we're working outside the system. Right. You know, everybody, Amazon, everybody else, okay, we're going to work with the big pbms because that's where the money is. And I'm like, no, they're the problem. Yeah, work with the problem. Right. You know, it's the innovator's dilemma. Yeah. You know, we're going to take what they can't do. And, you know, when you run with the elephants, there's the quick and the dead.

35:00Yeah. We got to be quick and aggressive. And so I think that's a big part of my skill set. Yeah. You know, whether it's starting an audio net, which is the first streaming company, HDNet, the first all high death network, you know, cost plus drugs, what I do with the maps in terms of bringing in technology. It was always about you know Steve Jobs said it best everything's a remix. Yeah, you know It's about taking what I know right and just learning whatever's coming up and what new technologies and remixing it to apply to something different Did when you bought the maps? Did you have a sense that 20 years later?

35:31It could be you know worth of order magnitude more. No, it wasn't a business. No, no, no In fact like I paid 285 million for the maps in 2000 and 2010 the NBA couldn't even sell the New Orleans franchise really there were no buyers and the valuation had gone down. Wow. Not out. It wasn't until... See, those are bad purchase from a financial perspective. From a financial perspective, it was awful. Right. Plus, I was losing money every year. So, it had nothing to do with money. But I loved it, right? That was the key part. And it elevated your profile in a way that helped your other businesses. Oh, yeah.

36:01For sure. Yeah. And then Shark, that got me to Shark Tank and the rest of the history. But, you know, I just, the way I looked at it back then is I'm having fun. I'm blessed, right? I'm gonna make the use of my time, so I enjoy every minute of it. But what changed the economics of the MBA was, you know, linear media being competitive. Yeah. And that goes back, you know, things I look for. I always look for death wars, right? Well, you've got competitors that one's gonna win and one's gonna lose, right? And they have to go all in, just like with AI right now, right? They all, they're spending tens of billions of dollars a year.

36:38They're making obscene amounts of cash flow and they're spending it at all, right? They're paying a billion dollars to people to come over. right? What does that tell you that anything you can sell to them that really differentiates them, they are going to buy. And so, but you know with the maps, it was, I didn't see it as an investment, but it wasn't until the death wars here at linear television. Right. And then all the TV deals went skyrocket. So that's what made it, you know, the difference between 2025 and 2020 in 2010 in terms of why the NBA teams have got so much more valuable is TV. Yeah, a little bit of real estate so you can build around, But it's 100 % streaming slash TV.

37:15The question becomes what, you know, how long does this sustain? Right. You know, if you look at, so like, Major League Baseball didn't get a deal done with the ESPN and saw their rights start to decline. But it was right around the time I think it was peacock who bought just one NFL playoff game. You know, and got like 100 ,000 new subscribe, or a million, 100 million new subscribe. Something ridiculous, right? That all was said instead of benchmark. So this season, right, starting with the MBA season, how well that does in terms of driving subscriptions and reducing churn, that's going to make a break, everything that comes forward for all sports.

37:53I also wonder if, you know, when this is I have is that, you know, value capture will reflect value creation. It's just when the market gets more efficient. And so, and MBA players, it seems like don't have equity in the league. I wonder if in the future they're gonna band together and just say, I don't think you can, right? Because father time's undefeated. You know, so what point do you stop? Right. And the price of the franchises now are so high. I mean, how much can you give them, right? And I'm not gonna say it's never going to happen, but I think it could be a question. But the other point is that there's only like two players that fill in arena.

38:32Yeah, yeah, stuff and LeBron. Like when Luca played for the Mavs and I had nothing to do with the trade, when Luca played for the Mavs, we'd have played to sold out buildings at it. He would draw fans, don't get it wrong. But not every building was sold out. When Janus would come to Dallas, didn't necessarily mean we were going to sell out. But the whole concept of what drives attendance has changed dramatically. And what drives viewership on television, in particular because now fans are fans of the players. Yeah, more than they are the teams. Right. Like when we grow up, it was like you were, I grew up in Pittsburgh.

39:06So you're a Steelers fan. You're a Pirates fan. That's why I wonder if they're going to team up and say, hey, you know, Wimbledon Yammer, the new generation, you know, we could start a new league and get Cooper Flags. Yeah, exactly. It's expensive. Right. It's starting to new league. Yeah, it is a lot of infrastructure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. MVA's its own. And even with Caitlin Clark, I don't know all the WMBA numbers now, but most of them aren't making money. Right. Even in the NBA, most teams aren't making money before revenue share. Right. the, I know that you were dismayed at the Luca Trey, we were sort of in the group chat, went at the moment, but I just wonder if like, yeah, I was so devastated by it that it seemed so unfair for the maps not to get picks back or Austin Reeves or whatever.

39:42I don't really, I can't plan into my girlfriend at the time. You know, like many people were, and I even remember reading this conspiracy theory that it was on purpose to fill out the value of franchise to then move to, you know, Las Vegas, yeah, no, and I was like, oh, this is the only way it can make sense. No, how do we not get more for Luca in this trade? I wish I knew. I wish I knew. But then the Cooper fight, I mean, it's the world works. Yeah, that's what guys were looking for. The family upon us. Yeah, world works in mysterious ways. But so I have a dream to be a part owner someday as well.

40:11And I've wondered if the strategy is either to compete for a championship or do the Oklahoma City Thunder where you trade for picks. So what do you think? I think the Thunder methodology is better now with the new CBA. right? Every new CBA creates transitional issues where your decisions were made in a legacy environment and they just changed all the rules. And now it's even more difficult with the second apron because the problems of being over the second apron are far more draconian than anything we've ever seen. And so I think the patient's approach that San Antonio and O .K .C have taken is going to lead the way.

40:53Whereas with me, I was never patient. And that worked against me a lot too. You know, I wanted to win now, we now we have jerklets get there. And now, um... What some of you would have done differently? We kept Steve Nash, but... Drafted you honest. Drafted you honest, yeah. I think I just would have been more patient and waited guys out to see how they turn out. Yeah. Rather than, okay, I'm gonna throw in a draft because at the time, you could say, If you didn't have a pick from below 15, the odds of them being a player was minimal. And so if I was getting somebody, I could all reevaluate that work to my favor.

41:29But now draft picks have become so much more valuable. And so that's changed the valuation approach. I had one argument that was somewhat sympathetic to, which is, hey, the argument for how you can understand the look of trade is obviously legendary iconic player, but so expensive. And with the way that the contracts were structured is if you gave, you know, kept giving him the Supermax, how much room do you have to build it? It's kind of like the tray young, like somebody's players are so expensive, but are you really going to win a championship if you don't have? Yeah, it's not, it's like, can you have two max players?

41:56Yeah. And that's the challenge. Right. You know, in the past, you could reward somebody with a max contract. Yeah. No one you had some wiggle. Right. And more importantly, you can always find a way to get off that contract. Yeah. Not anymore. That, if you have your one generational player, you pay him whatever it takes. Right. Because of the max contracts, they by definition are undervalued. So the generational player, you always pay whatever it takes. It's the next person, if they're not a generational player, how do you deal with that? That's the hard part. And when you see, like you saw with certain players, that teams couldn't get off of them.

42:32Either because of age or they were maxed player by the rules of the game eight years ago, four years ago, but they're not any longer. That's where the challenges happen. Right. If you were making decisions for the maps now, given where everything is, what would you be thinking about? What are the big questions or? Develop Cooper, goes to foremost. You know, we've got AD, we've got Anthony Davis, we've got Kyrie, we'll be coming back, but just in Clay, just having those holler famers there, you couldn't ask for anything better in terms of development support. And so I think we have to focus on staying healthy, getting Kyrie back.

43:05It's interesting thing with two timelines, you know, worries try to do it, but they couldn't exactly put it off, although they've done great. But these sort of older players and then, you know, coupes. It's hard like where the warriors are now. Yeah. You know, father time is undefeated and you're trying to stay committed to the guy who's got you there. Yeah. You know, um, and he's, the players aren't dumb. Right. You know, so they know they only have, you know, a finite number of years left. Yeah. And so they're trying to maximize their earnings and that point and that during that period. Um, it's just hard.

43:34And so, you know, the whole second apron restrictions really just kicked in last year. And so now teams are having to deal with it. And so you're seeing players get stretched, you know, not just way, but stretched. And I think the strategy is changing right in front of our eyes. I think there will be fewer max players coming up. Interesting. And it used to be this thing where in order to win a championship, you had to have one of the best players in the league. You know, the pistons were an exception to that. You know, I'm wondering, my name is Nick's fan. I wonder if the Nick's have a possibility to question that.

44:08But if you're playing for a championship, you think that you have to have, one of the five best players in league. Sure helps.

44:17It depends on the skill set. So what's changed a lot in just six years, seven years. Certainly, last 10 years, is there used to always be one guy on the court who couldn't shoot. That couldn't get a bucket. They were there for defensive purposes, or they protected the rim. them. Now they all can score offensively at some level. And so, you know, whether it's the nicks or anybody else, if you have enough guys who can put pressure on the defense, and that's why, you know, the nicks made the deals that they did. But if there's one guy that you're playing against that's always the best player on the floor.

44:52And you don't have that player, it's going to be tough. Totally. Well, I think the nicks are asking his bosses, that's the dude somebody is like, can offense win championship like if you just stack the, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the nicks have got some defenders, you know, but Brunson and Kat are weak defenders. It's going to be tough. Yeah. It makes it tough because, you know, once you get to, like, even against Indiana, you know, Indiana didn't have, you know, Halley, we tried to get Halley so hard, right? Yeah. Halley is not a top five NBA player. He's good. Yeah. Maybe top 15, but he was better in that moment.

45:28because because you can do matchups over and over and over again. Of course, across the up to seven games, you can play certain players off the court. Yeah. So you saw Kat, right? Not even even being out there in certain times. Totally. Yeah. If he was one of the championships, that would have really questioned, you know, and they took them to seven games. I know. And their best player gets hurt. You know, and we the math injured and all without Luca beat, um, OK, see three out of four games. Yeah. Well, that was one of the deepest teams right now too. Oh, really deep. But you're a mid -stage.

45:59Yeah, yeah. But yeah, there's so many teams like the Raptors, the Bulls, the Kings, kind of like in perpetual, what I would call mediocrity and their expensive and their old. And I'm like, you just got to rebuild, just admit the rebuilding. And there's a number of teams like that. Yeah. And part of the problem is that there's a salary cap floor, right? You have to spend up to a certain amount because that's like competitive against that. Right. Well, it's just, that's the deal we do with the players. They want more money spent. And so 90 % of the salary cap is a lot of money, right? So it's like $153 million, right?

46:34So yeah, $770, give or take times nine. And so spending up to $153 million, that's 10 million average. That means you're overpaying a lot of people, you know? And so I might have the cap never wrong, but in any event, you're paying a lot of people a lot of money, but if you keep them short contracts, you'll get guys wanting to come just to get overpaid. Yeah. You know, and you almost have to tank and you just... I have a theory that there's guys like, you know, maybe I'm being a fair, but Kuzma, RJ Barrett, Brandon Ingram, who are sort of like built for losing, for getting a lot of money and a lot of points on a losing team.

47:10Yeah, I mean, and we're seeing more of that. Yeah, they're, yeah, they're on a losing team and they do it to get paid more money, right? but teams are smarter than that. But at the same time, their teams need scoring. And if you fall into that category, you're gonna go after those guys if you have the space for it. But I think what's happening actually now, we're seeing all the salaries kind of revolving around the middle -level exception, which is $14 million, I can't ever take, right? And so that, if your guys now realize with the second apron, things have changed. So if you get paid more than a mid -level, you're a good player.

47:49If you get paid at the mid -level, you're a decent player. If you get paid below, you're a roster piece, unless you're young and you're on your way up. For advice for me as a future owner, what are the biggest ways an owner can influence winning? Is it sort of a personnel selection on coaching GM? Are you always looking for an edge? Always looking for the edge. Personnel selection is hard. It's more art than science. right. You don't, you know, like I told Jason, I did it. Um, Jaylen brush the one I did his blog is he was just some chubby guy, right? You know, I'm sorry that we took him from you.

48:23No, 30 game away. Yeah, I was not happy about that. Yeah. Um, but, you know, we picked him 33rd. Right. 32, you know, chances to draft him and they did and we liked just his pedigree of winning at Villanova. Um, but it's his effort. Right. Like when he was with us, his go -to move was either a spin or a move to the left and he'd fall away doing a lap. And he never got the foul because he was always falling away. Now his mid -range shumper is money, but he worked on that. Totally. And that's what you don't know when you draft somebody. Right. What mental capacity do they have? You know, they're athletic ability.

48:59Right. But will they work hard to improve their skills? Will they work hard to improve their basketball IQ? Yeah. If the answer is yes, and they have the athletic side of it, you've got a chance, but you really know that because no one comes in and works out and says, okay, I'm an idiot. I suck, right? And shows you they suck. You know, they've all been trained on how to work out. So, you know, and they're in college maybe one year. Yeah. So, you know, and then if you're going to a college and they're getting paid now, right? They may be that they're just doing what the coach needs them to do there, which may not match what they need to do in the NBA.

49:33You've got the hardest part for players that aren't superstars coming right in is you've got to learn how to fit in. Even with Luca, we didn't know he was going to be a superstar. We thought it was going to be really, really good. And we thought he had superstar mentality. But I was terrified because I made a trade, right? I gave up a pick to Atlanta. And I remember we played in China the first game of the preseason. And I had Sean Marion that was an ambassador of the NBA. I'm like, Tricks, what do you think? Tricks, what do you think? What do you think? Like, I'm terrified, I'm terrified. But we know how that turned out.

50:04Yeah. And by the way, so funny, just the basketball gods. Lakers made all the wrong moves for so many years and we're such a tough spot. You talk about warriors. They're in a tougher spot going forward trading all their picks, being so old. And then Luca falls into the lap just to keep it. Keep it interesting. I don't know we've done enough of this. Yeah, exactly. Matt's got coop and don't trade him. No, you'll be good. The zooming out, Gerranger's closing here, how have you thought about how you want to spend time? Like, you know, for example, kind of your own aces in the big venture firm doing all these investments, all the staff.

50:37You seem to run kind of a lean up up, up a reasonable, flexible. Yeah. How have you thought about the efforts that you want to get involved with? Not want to get involved with? How thin to spread yourself, so to speak? Well, I mean, I got out of shark tank. Yeah. I got out of the maps, so I could spend more time with my kids. You know, that that's number one, because they're 16, 19 and about to turn 22. Yeah. They're heading out on their own. Yeah. So I just want to spend that time that I came with them, but I think the difference is from me versus everybody, I'm not looking. I mean, my goal is not to make as much money as I can.

51:08Like, I do investing. Yeah. But honestly, it's just people email me. Yeah. I mean, like I saw a list of who has the most unicorns. And I was like, I had like 11. Yeah. And all of them were just from email. Somebody emailing me saying, check this out, check this out, check this out. Like, Synthesia, you know, I was their first investor, you know, gave them a million dollars. And now, you know, so I can get 20, 25 % of a company sometimes more and then help them grow. That's what I like. Taking long shot tries as opposed to, okay, let's raise a fund, let's get a team together. We'll put in 10 to 25 million.

51:44And then if they're doing well, we'll put in more and do follow ups. And we'll have these big scores. I like it better when it's dude wipes. Right, comes on Shark Tank. I give him 200 grand for 15%. Now they're worth a billion dollars easy. They're a primary brand and they never had to raise another cent. Yeah. You know, helping a company never have to raise more money and making them profitable right? So that they're insanely profitable. Yeah. I had this company, a list of cookies. Guy Doug was living in his car with his family and he sent me these cookies. Wow. They were the big, they were the best cookies I've ever.

52:19Because I always do like the nutrition thing first, what's on the back? No added sugar, lots of fiber, etc. I'm low -knit carbs. But when I took it out of the plastic, it all fell apart. So I said, I'm gonna give you money, right? And I got like a third of the company, but I'm gonna guide you through what it takes. So we changed it and I told them to make them into bites instead of cookies and put them in a plastic container and go to stores and we'll sell them. I'll do a tasting, you know, where I'll go to grocery store one time and hand out. Now, no more money in, right? We'll do 25 million this year, but that's not the important number.

52:55Because we don't spend money on advertising or anything. Right. right. It makes 12 to 14 million a year. And we just added whole foods, we just added Costco, we're adding a more and more outlets, he can get to 100 million and make 50 million a year. That stuff's fun, right? So if you could clone yourself a few times or when you look into the future, are there other businesses like Cosbus Drugs that you want to start or incubator? Yeah, education. If I can do what I want to do with healthcare, which I'm saying a lot, right? Yeah, don't know that's a big amount of effort. Yeah, but it would be education just because, like AI first, K through 12, or what kind of thing?

53:33Yeah, I mean, more secondary education, right? Simply because the cost structure is all fucked up, right? And it's all built on accreditation. Yeah. And that's kind of a mafia. And when I see a mafia like that, I just ignore the accreditation and just go do it anyways. And if you get the results or guarantee your results, yeah, you'll get plenty of. We talked about your healthcare platform. We talked about your messaging. Are there any other policies that if you could, you know, be in charge of Democrat Party or sort of running America that you would be most excited about in terms of its transformative potential?

54:03Like, what? Yeah, you know what I would say? I would say a focus on entrepreneurship. You know, that right now, whoever the candidate is, particularly if it's for president, takes credit for everything. Yeah. And that's ridiculous. They do less to impact the startups and the start, the building of businesses than anybody. You know, and so I think what's missing, definitely missing with Biden, maybe less so with Obama and definitely missing with Trump. Like, when you hear Trump talk about tariffs, he never talks about small businesses. It's always, hey, I've got this company investing $500 billion, $600 billion when you've got all these shark tank companies that are getting crushed.

54:43You know, you increase, you know, from a 2 .5 % average tariff to a 15 % tariff? That's the profit margin and it's gone. So I would put a focus on recognizing and encouraging and rewarding people starting businesses and using AI, you know, kind of as government as a service where you simplify all the friction that's involved in starting a business, you know, from the paperwork to get all the requirements, the incorporation, and et cetera to a bank account, all of it, just simplify all of it so entrepreneurs can be entrepreneurs. Because I think that is what Joe Biden told us to, and we have all people, when during the Obama administration, they invited us from Shark Tank to go do a thing for entrepreneurship at the White House.

55:33And he gave a little speech, and what he said was, I've traveled around the world, And there's no Chinese dream, there's no French dream, there's no UK dream, there's only the American dream. And people come here to live in an experience it. That's what makes us unique. And on that note, what advice, what advice do you have for us in Silicon Valley or just tech more broadly, we're building with AI on how to make it more popular so that we don't have this big backlash?

56:06You have to get with either party and communicate to people the upside. Yeah, because they see the down, they see, hey, maybe my job is being taken away. Yeah, and that's, that's, you know, going back to what I said earlier, there will be disintermediation, but I don't think the net number of jobs is going to decrease. I think everything gets reinvented because AI right now is not smart. right? You know, it's statistical in a lot of respects. Robotics, on the other hand, is getting smart. You know, robotics, if you, you know, clean my bedroom, it has to know, you know, to pick up the sheets and all this stuff.

56:42But I think the combination the two will create unique opportunities for jobs. Yeah. I think domain expertise is always going to be necessary to train models. But I think bigger picture when like we look at a house, everything is designed for the human form. And right now robotics is trying to emulate the human form because that's what we've always done with software. We just emulated what we already did and tried to optimize it. You don't, if you can create devices, robots that can look like anything and you want them to be domestic in some way, You don't build houses the way we do now. And I think there's going to be a lot of jobs that go in different directions.

57:31And I think Silicon Valley has got to do a much better job demonstrating those jobs, hiring people for those jobs, supporting people that are concerned about their jobs. Even teachers, you know, now when we look at AI tools, you can read papers faster. That's not going to change anything. thing, you're just doing it the same way. But if a teacher can use AI to customize responses to kids to help them learn, like you said, AI tutors, right, but in a classroom, you're going to keep your job longer. We need more teachers, not fewer teachers, but AI doesn't, I mean, Silicon Valley doesn't communicate that at all because when you're raising money, it's about what you're going to change, not what you're going to sustain.

58:17But there's so many unique opportunities. I mean, I'm old enough like I would walk in selling PCs and I saw you're out of work, you're out of work, you're out of work, but as it's all turned out, the economy just keeps on growing. And I think the same thing is going to happen here. And I think the other side of it is going to, inner cities, I have this thing called the Mark Human AI Bootcamp. And all we do is go into, you know, under -privileged schools, you know, and encourage kids to sign up for the bootcamp. And it used to be just machine learning, right? Where we taught you that. Now it's, you know, learning how to use AI the way it with models and everything in agents for 15, 16, 17 year old kids.

59:03And it's great, right? Because they're going back and they're coming up with new ideas. Right. Valley needs to go out there and engage more in middle America. So people see, totally worthy upside is. Yeah. You know, you're getting this rejuvenation of San Francisco and all the spending is pointing there. Yeah. How is anybody else going to understand that or see that? Right. You just, they don't at all. Yeah. When in reality, if it's open to them, and that's why I did the boot camp, more things are going to happen. People don't realize like when the internet first hit, we used to think kids who can do HTML coding were geniuses.

59:39Yeah. Right. And when they moved up to JavaScript, they were even smarter, right? because they were building all these websites that were getting ready to go public. And AI's kind of the same thing. It's not hard to build agents. And it's getting easier. But knowing an application that you can use to start something and improve something, everybody can do that. Every kid, every mom, every dad, but Silicon Valley is making it sound like, this is the Jetsons and we have no chance. And I think that has to change. That's a great note of advice and optimism to Mark, you mean, thanks so much for coming to the podcast.

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