Reflecting on 2024 with Mark Cuban
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Hey everybody. Welcome once again. It is the final weekly show, uh, Potapalooza, uh, at the end of this very tumultuous 2024. Uh, we've been delighted that you have stuck around and that you've, uh, listened to these fine conversations as, as much as you can. And, and I hope that you've enjoyed it and we're going to keep going. We're going to be on ourselves, uh, a little bit of a break, uh,

some rumors that I am taking a few weeks to soak in the Juan Soto signing. No, that's not true. That's not true. I knew it was coming. I don't, you know, listen, when you're a Mets fan, you expect the best. You expect it all to go your way. You're like a Gatsby. No, it was a complete and utter disaster.

Shock and joy. But we are going to do our our final conversation for this year with our with our go to dude who does our our final conversations, Mark Cuban. As you know, we had Bernie Sanders on last week. We like to do we like to go from Bernie Sanders to Mark Cuban. You go from the Democratic socialist to the billionaire and you hope that the audience does not sustain a groin pull.

uh, in that transition, but, uh, a really interesting guy, really smart guy. And I'm really looking forward to the conversation and I hope you guys are too. Uh, so let's, let's just get on damn to it. Ladies and gentlemen, it is our annual, uh, weekly show pod wrap up, uh, as per tradition, Mark Cuban will be joining us. Uh, he is the co-founder of cost plus drugs.com.

Mark Cuban, welcome to the weekly show pod year-end roundup. From now on, I am only going to introduce you as co-founder of Cost Plus Drug. As far as I'm concerned, Mavericks, Shark Tank, Billionaire, none of that. It's co-founder Cost Plus Drug. That's all I care about. That's all we care about. Mark Cuban, the year has ended. This has been a tumultuous year.

A tumultuous year. For you personally, you've changed in terms of you're done with Shark Tank now. Have you taped your last episode? I have taped my last episode. I'll have to do some updates for some of the companies I invested in. Okay. But in terms of sitting in the chair, done.

Now, did they throw at the end of it? Was there like a dog pile? Was there like a, what was the type of celebration that was done to end your reign? There was cake and alcohol and a little going away party. So it was fun. All right. Fair enough. Fair enough. No nudity. I'm assuming it was all above board. It was all parental consent and that type of thing. I have an NDA. And absolutely a wise choice. The one thing I want to ask you about, you stepped into the political arena.

in a way that you have not in the past, what was your experience like there? Did it leave you wanting more? Did it leave you cynical? What was your experience being a surrogate on the political circuit? - I mean, it didn't leave me wanting more, that's for sure.

But it wasn't cynical either. I kind of enjoyed it. I mean, it was a unique experience. I love going out there and talking to people about America and what I'd hope the future would look like, how businesses would impact them. And the Harris campaign had me talking primarily to small to medium-sized businesses who were not Kamala Harris supporters.

So I got to respond to their questions and talk about the economy and businesses and starting companies. And I really enjoyed it. When you talk to small business and medium business, what are the frustrations and complaints that you hear the most? Are they anything that surprised you about that? No, there were no surprises at all. I mean, it was, you know, small business people are just trying to get by for the most part. And, you know, I had my...

kind of got into my approach where, you know, I talked about the fact that there were 33 million businesses in the country. 98% of them are small businesses that are passed through and 98% of them make $400,000 or less.

And the bottom line was, the hope was- Profit or is that, are you talking about that's net or that's- No, that's net. That's what you earn because if it's a brass tool business, that individual entrepreneur or the entrepreneur is making $400,000 or less. And that's a magic number because remember Kamala Harris-

said, if you make $400,000 or less, your taxes weren't going up. They potentially were only going down. So that was an important component of the discussion. And then we talked about potential tariffs. And I tried to project out and say, look, if it's a year from now and it's December of 2025 and you're in the retail business, as an example, if there are 60% tariffs on products from China, how's that going to impact your Christmas selling season?

Right. And for nobody, you know, nobody said, oh, that's a great thing. And how does that impact you as a family? You know, now all of a sudden all your Christmas presents or most of your Christmas presents cost 60% more. You're going to be able to not buy as much. You're buying less. And so not only are you not going to be happy as a family, but the vendors that you deal with, the retailers, the online, by whatever it may be, they're not going to sell as much either. So there's a cascading impact. Yeah.

And then I would go into immigration. And, you know, and I was honest, I would not let the Harris campaign tell me what to say. You know, they would try to give me notes and I would say, I don't care. You know, you...

That's what they love from, that's what they always want from a surrogate is for them to go like, Hey man, screw your notes. I'm just going to say what I'm, were you able to have any influence on policy at all? You know, I know there was some discrepancy between unrealized gains and that was something you thought was a kind of a non-starter. Did you have some influence on policy there?

I think I did. I mean, I talked a lot about unrealized gains. And, you know, when I went out there and said, you know, for the first time, it was ridiculous. And I went back and spoke to them and said, you know, I'm not hearing you guys challenge me at all. And they're like, well, you're saying things that we'd like to say, but we can't say. So I kept on going with it. So I took that as tacit approval and went with it. So that was one area. Another area was crypto.

I mean, I was very clear early on that there was data from Pew Research that said, you know, at least 40% of young men were into crypto. And the way I explained it to them wasn't a big picture crypto thing at all. I was like, look,

For a 21-year-old kid, particularly men these days, they're not like we were when we were growing up, where it was a rite of passage to open up a bank account or to get a savings account. Now they download Robinhood or Coinbase or some app, and they live in an app economy. And if you downloaded Robinhood or Coinbase, you're buying crypto over stocks.

And you're buying crypto not just because you want to see it go up, but because it makes you part of a community. You know, Dogecoin is a meme stock and everybody talks about it, Bitcoin, whatever it may be. And so if these young men have their entire network tied up in crypto,

And you've got an SEC head, Gary Gensler, doing everything possible to reduce the value of their net worth. And everything they read in those apps about what's happening to the price of their crypto is driven and talked about relating to Gary Gensler.

They're not going to vote for you. And I said it to Gary Gensler directly. I said it to Kamala. I said it to her team that Gary Gensler could cost her the election. And there's an argument to be made when you look at the numbers. You know, a whole lot of young men voted against Kamala Harris. And I think crypto had a lot to do with it.

So you're saying the conventional wisdom, which is she should have gone on Joe Rogan's podcast, is wrong. She should have gone on Gary Gensler's podcast and told him what was happening there. Now, as someone who is – I understand slightly about blockchain and I certainly understand the utility of something like that.

In terms of crypto, look, if you talk about young men and on apps, as far as I can see, they're also on FanDuel and all these other gambling apps. So explain to me, help me understand why this isn't just a random gamble for these young men that isn't going to come back and bite them in the ass. What's the underpinnings of it? And why is it?

better than just jumping on FanDuel and trying to hit a parlay on Saquon Barkley, which we won't get into. Right. Well, there are a lot of analogies. I'm not going to argue with that. Right. But think about gold. I mean, all that gold we have in Fort Knox, it's not because the United States government is betting on how much jewelry is going to be sold at Christmas. I

I hope not. Right. I mean, there's no intrinsic value to gold other than we say there's intrinsic value to gold. I see. Gold is a store of value. And so people hope it goes up. There are some people who think that, you know, if there's a catastrophe and the economy craters, then gold will retain its value. But it's not like you can walk around with a bar of gold and, you know, like it's 1822 and you slice off a little sliver and you weigh it. Well,

is just going to knock you out and take your bar of gold. That's how I've been getting at the supermarket. I've been slicing my gold, getting my eggs. For you, a little schmepo for you. That's what I'm talking about. So let me translate that to Bitcoin. Yeah. Okay. Right. Bitcoin has become a store of value. It's marketed that way and has been marketed for the last 15 years or whatever it is. And it's gotten to a point of acceptance.

just like way, way, way back when gold got to a point of acceptance as an alternative for legal currency or as a foundation behind legal currency. Bitcoin has kind of taken that place and it makes more sense in a lot of respects. You're not going to carry around that bar of gold, but you can carry around your phone, as an example, that has Bitcoin on it. And if you need to transfer value to somebody else,

It's easier to do it right now, particularly if you're 21, with Bitcoin than it is with gold. So there truly is an economic value there. But now we have between gold and Bitcoin, there's this other thing that we have, which is currency. And is this meant to augment that, to replace that? What are the transactions that are made there?

better by using either Bitcoin or crypto or those things? What need is it filling, I guess? Well, it's faster and cheaper, particularly for international exchanges. So, you know, if you're in pick a country, right, and you're like, Mark, I need, you know, I need some something to spend, right? I need some money. It's a whole lot easier for me to send you, you know, $100 in Bitcoin or Ethereum or USDC than it is in cash.

Now, is the idea then that like what would happen with like, say, an Apple Pay or something along those lines, that stores will begin to adopt a technology so that its use becomes more convenient, even at like if I'm running down to Wawa and I want to grab myself an iced tea.

So let's talk about two different things. That's two different things. Okay. Okay. But by the way, I apologize for making you do this remedially. No, that's okay. But I really don't know it so well and I would like to know it. So just think of Bitcoin like digital gold, period, end of story. Oh. It's just built on supply and demand. Only the difference is people are still mining gold and it's physical. You have to pull it out of the ground. There's a lot of costs associated with that.

Bitcoin is all digital, but it's limited in the number of Bitcoins that will ever be created to 21 million. Now, who limits that? Is there an overseeing body that makes sure? That was part of the original plan. That's the way it was designed originally. So right now, there are about 19.8 million Bitcoin out there minus what's been lost along the way. How do you lose it?

So, early on, you might have bought a bunch of Bitcoin in 2012 for 10 cents each, didn't think twice about it.

threw away that phone and you had 10,000 Bitcoin on it. Oh, dear God. Yeah, so there's stories about people literally who hit hard drives into trash heaps and lost it. And now we're searching in trash piles looking for. So, but that's Bitcoin and it's just supply and demand that finds what it's worth. So right now the price is near $100,000. That means a lot more people are buying it than selling it. Very analogous to gold. And so then there are other companies

Cryptos there aetherium is one that I also own a bunch of and the difference with aetherium is it really takes advantage of the blockchain But it adds something called smart contracts and what a smart contract is it allows? Activity to be triggered by other activity. So for instance, you know, I won't go into deep details but if I want to

create an NFT and use that for books, right? Just this state for textbooks, right? That smart contract associated with that NFT has specific features about it. One of the unique features that are part of Ethereum and smart contracts and NFTs is they can pay royalties. So if Jon Stewart writes a book for a college, right? And it's a textbook on accounting,

Right now, it's got to be physical. And then you go to the bookstore and you buy a used copy. Or an e-book that they would download or something along those lines. Right. The physical copies, you don't make another nickel in royalties as it's sold and resold.

If you do it as a digital version using Ethereum and a smart contract and an NFT, the royalties can be paid on and on and on and on again as that digital textbook is resold. Is this something that's been applied yet to music publishing? Because that seems like it would cure an awful lot of the difficulties in the royalties of music publishing. Yeah, in all IP for that matter. But the reality is it's only been done on a small scale.

The challenge for crypto right now, in all candor, it hasn't had its Instagram moment. If you remember going back to the original App Store in 2009, I think it was, there weren't a lot of people downloading apps for their smartphones.

I mean, unless you were really geeky and into it. But then all of a sudden, Instagram came along and grandma and grandpa and mom and dad needed it. Then Facebook had an app. And so that really got people into smartphones and using and downloading apps. We haven't had that moment with crypto yet. That's still something that's an

that has ultimate utility for everyone and anyone that doesn't exist yet. And that's kind of the ongoing hope. But now let's tie that back to Gary Gensler. Right. So all these people trying to come up with apps that run on smart contracts on top of Ethereum, Solana, whatever it may be, whatever form of crypto it may be. Gary Gensler wanted to call all forms

of that a security. Right. He wanted to regulate it like you would regulate stocks for those that are... Okay. And in some cases, they were securities. If you're selling them to raise money for a business, that's a security. Nobody's arguing that. But if you happen to buy...

And NFT as a textbook, he wanted to call that a security as well. If you use your Solana or Matic or not Ethereum, but let's say Solana or Matic, two smaller cryptocurrencies to purchase something online, he wanted to call that a security as well.

And as a result, that sent a lot of developers who were trying to create these new smart contract apps out of the United States to other parts of the world, Singapore, Japan, Korea, you name it, to China.

start companies that otherwise would have been in the United States. I had two companies that actually left the U.S. to do their development because they could just sell to crypto enthusiasts and users in other countries and not worry about it here. I feel like this is turning into digital currency for dummies where it is. And unfortunately, I'm the dummy. So we've got to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

Adelassian.

We are back.

So in my mind, and this is perhaps, you know, rigid thinking to a larger extent, what can we put in place if it's not a securities regime that has regulation? What do you put in place that can protect people who want to invest in this, but like in the way that the government would put in FDIC protections if you had a certain amount of money in there?

Are there protections that you think would be worthwhile? Well, yeah, for sure. At what level would those regulations become too onerous and start to stifle the creativity? So, you know, I have this company called Lazy.com. So all it is is a place for you to show your NFTs. So if you go to Lazy.com slash M-Cube and you get to see the NFTs that I own.

I wanted to register it with the SEC to make sure they didn't come after me in the event I decided to raise money. When you go and start filling out the forms, you find out immediately that it's apples and oranges, that it doesn't, you're trying to fit a, you know,

something that you know the round into the square and it just doesn't work and so all the crypto industry is asked for is to modify the um the forms and the regulations to be suitable to crypto it's not that you know we don't want to register

It's just like oil and energy has got their own special set of forms with the SEC. Finance has got their own special set of forms. Crypto needs a special set of forms. That's all anybody's asked for. You don't want somebody to start regulating it that doesn't understand it as a commodity. And this gets into the larger question that maybe ties together the two things that we're kind of talking about, which is your experience kind of in that political arena and also your experience within these sort of new markets.

more higher tech financial industries. And that is with democracy being at best an analog system, you know, sort of designed for the slow temperance and the idea of chewing on these checks and balances and all these things. It is so outmatched by this new digital economy. And was there ever a thought, I've always kind of in my mind dreamed about this

kind of almost bureaucratic moonshot, a kind of Manhattan project to help. And I imagine you saw this when you talked to small businesses. Regulation is typically the domain of larger companies. They're the ones that make regulations complicated. Poor people don't. Middle class people don't. Small businesses don't make it complicated. It's people that have two floors of lawyers that bring in all these loopholes. Do you see a pathway through

to create a governmental moonshot like that, that, that can clean out a lot of these regulations that are hurting the small businesses, but still protect them. So that's,

That's a deep, deep, deep question. Or is that doge? Is that what the doge is? That's a deep question. So regulatory capture is a real thing. The bigger companies can introduce regulations that make it harder for the smaller companies to compete. They can introduce friction that makes filling out forms and all these things very much more difficult to even get started. And state and local that you pile on top of that. I mean, it kind of...

really rolls like a snowball down a hill. Yeah, and that's where AI more than crypto. Look, just to wrap up on the crypto side, there's this thing called DAO, D-A-O, right? Distributed Autonomous Organization, I think is what it stands for. And with DAOs, it's really easy to set it up so that

For anything to happen within that blockchain or within that organization with those smart contracts has to be voted on. And it's voted on by people who actually own the cryptocurrency, which could be, well, it's not Doge, but there's other types of cryptos. So this is crowdsourced, it's a crowdsourced regulatory idea? Yeah, I wouldn't call it crowdsourced, but it's a progressive's dream. We don't, from each, according to their ability to each, you know, it's just, you know, it's everybody gets an equal vote.

And whatever the crowd, whatever the group decides, and it's up to the DAO to set up the principles of it and what's voted on and what, you know, is it a majority, a super majority, whatever it may be. And then you get to decide. And that goes into evolving that digital currency or the digital applications that are there. So that's on one side. Those haven't really taken off. I really thought they would a lot more than they did, but they have not. Then there's using AI.

And so there are things like NEPA, right, which go into the environmental protection stuff to try to find out that there's a little frog or whatever before something's built. In my opinion, and the conversations I had with some of the Harris folks is that's where AI really, really can apply.

Because there's a process designed for the people in NEPA who go through and determine what should be approved and what data is required and how it's, you know, what friction should be added or what friction should be removed.

Artificial intelligence is great for that. All the rules that the individuals on those councils and boards make those determinations, they have rules that they follow. They have guidebooks that they follow. It's onerous. Yeah, it's onerous. There's tons of bureaucracy, but tons of data there. You put that into artificial intelligence into a large language model, and you let...

use that to train the large language model. And then when a new project comes along, you set up agents, which then feed the questions and the answers and the answers to the responses to that new organization, whatever it is they may be building. But is that, does that abdicate our autonomy? Because I almost look at it like common sense, like

If you remember in Pennsylvania, right, this was not very long ago, there was a huge fire on 95 and the highway collapsed. Under the typical regulatory regimes, you're talking about five or 10 years of incredibly expensive bureaucratic red tape that's going. And this really important artery for interstate commerce and all these other things would have been closed down at some level through common sense. The governor just said that fuck it.

We're just going to build it. And it was done in 10 days or something like that. And it really demonstrated how government could be more agile. And do we need to rely on some large language model or should we just look at things and go, oh, we need housing and we're crushing our ability to create housing?

allow the markets to create this or to do those things through these other regulations. All the above, right? Because there was the bridge in Baltimore, there was a bridge in Pittsburgh where the same things happened, they turned around quickly. The challenge is who makes that decision? When it's obvious, it's easy. When it's not so obvious, it's far more difficult. And so that's where the AI comes in in large language models because across the breadth, however many instances of

evaluations that need to take place across the country, you don't want individuals having to make those decisions. But I thought that's the whole point. I thought the whole point of people running for office is that they've got a vision for, and they earn our trust as opposed to AI. And this, again, may be more of the Luddites view of not understanding of AI. I'm nervous about

abdicating that at least with people, there is a certain regime of accountability that we can bring through. I can't vote out a large language model. No, this is the soiling green thing, right? Because wait, what we got to, we're eating people now. Oh no. Because it was the people that the politicians that made those decisions who got us where we are right now. Right.

And so there's never, in my mind, a question that if you give somebody power, they're going to take that power and want more. If you're using AI, you wouldn't use it for the final decision. You would use it for all the administrivia that happens between the application being made and the point where a presentation is made to a board of some sort who would make the final decision. You're not removing people.

So let's put it in sort of an athletic analogous model. We're talking a little bit about analytics then. It's really more about here are the analytics, here are the different metrics that we're going to plug into this, and now we're going to hand it over to the GM or the managers or whoever it is that's responsible for these things. And it's a tool to help them make more informed decisions. Right.

Right. Because, you know, you're all using the same data and the same precedence. There's nothing that all of a sudden just presented itself. So if it's replicated over and over with the same data within that same realm, that's perfect.

application for AI, but you don't want to be completely dependent on AI because it's hard to know the genealogy of the decision, meaning what exactly went into the final determination that the AI set out, right? So then that's where you have your board who says, okay, this is what the AI recommends. We have these additional comments to make on additional concerns.

And then the board makes the final decision. But you consolidate that review process from what in some cases could be years, a decade. I get it. You're talking about condensing a bureaucratic process through this new tool that allows you to make these decisions at a much more rapid pace as opposed to just abdicating to the computer goes, don't rebuild the bridge. And you're like, yes, master.

No bridge, no bridge. - Yeah, you still want some human intervention. You need some common sense and AIs can do a lot of things, but they're best with repetitive things and the best with taking vast volumes of data and information and applying those to processes. And so let the AI do what the AI can do, but leave the final decision to people who understand the context. - Here's the $64,000 question then.

As the AI condenses that, you're talking about a great deal of human legwork and sweat equity that goes into these things. What happens to that labor? Is the speed of that worth the cataclysm that you're going to have in white collar? In the way that, let's say, industrialization changed the economy over 100 years, globalization changed it over decades, but it had...

as we saw, a devastating effect for the manufacturing base. Does AI devastate white collar work, but in a very condensed form? So if your job is answering the question yes or no all the time, AI is going to have an impact. If your job requires you to think,

AI won't have much of an impact. Really? Yeah. So in this particular case, let's go back to the NIPA type example. Right. Somebody's got to make sure the model is getting all the information and that it's structured correctly. It's all data entry. We all become data entry people. No, it's not even just typing, right? It takes intellectual capacity.

So somebody who understands what the goal is, somebody who's been doing this for years has got to be able to input feedback on everything that the models collect and are trained on. You don't just assume the model knows everything. You want somebody to check, to grade their responses and make corrections. And so while that model is being developed and trained, there's a

huge need for people to contribute value. You know, the better example is if you want an artificial intelligence that talks about Shakespeare and, you know, spits out things about Shakespeare, somebody's got to teach it, you know, contribute the nuanced things that you're not going to find just from reading their book.

Don't you think it's already got I always get the sense that the AI models have already sucked up whatever 15,000 years of human existence we have and they've already moved on that I feel like the AI models are like what else you got man? No, no, you got songs. What do you got? No, it's exact opposite right now. Here's the real problem Glad you brought this up another great question. John Stewart. Boom. Come on end of year, baby. Let's do this. Yeah. Okay, so

IP, you've seen the New York Times and others sue different creators of large language models like OpenAI, Meta, et cetera, because they just automatically went out and spidered and input their text and their intellectual property into their models. That intellectual property is still owned by the creator.

And so you're not going to find the models being able to just go out and get everything, everything that was on the internet up to this minute, whatever it is that was openly available and stuff that's added that's openly available. Yes. Wait, AI cannot get past a paywall? Is that what I'm hearing? A little bit, yeah. I'm hearing that AI, it gets to a place to go, oh, I can't read this article. Yeah, and I didn't read my credit card. Oh, I'm not a subscriber. The AI is going, where's my credit card?

But think it in terms of medicine, you know, and so your MD Anderson or your Stanford medical or, you know, pick all the different, you know, UPMC and you have a doctor or research that's really good in this specialty. You're not just say it's a meta or open AI or Google. Hey, you just take it for your medical models. You just go ahead and take it. You're going to say, no, I'll do my own.

I don't need you. And I'll take my specialty. Let's just say my specialty is oncology and cancer. I have all these experts and I'm going to create my own model. I'll go out and, you know, use an open source model that spidered everything on that's open and free on the internet. But I'm going to add all the expertise that I have and all the expertise that I create in the future so that it is specific to me and I can charge for it or use it however I deem fit.

And what's going to end up happening is within medicine, some of the models will pay. If you pay the Mayo Clinic enough money,

They'll let you have that stuff and others will want to retain it as part of their brand. Right. On a bigger picture, there are going to be millions of models. It's right now we see it as open AI. We see it as Gemini, meta, whatever it is, these big foundational models. But the reality is there's going to be millions of Jon Stewart's going to have a model. Oh, I've got I've got like five of them in the backyard right now. So we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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We are back. Let's use the flip side of this. So you've got people looking to use AI models or analytics or to shorten the bureaucratic space between making decisions or to increase productivity or efficiency.

Just recently, we saw the anger erupt in this country. This young kid assassinates a healthcare executive. And underneath that, the big surprise is the level of anger, the level of sympathy for the kid and the level of anger against these algorithms that are now being deployed nationally.

Not to make things more efficient, but to help them deny coverage or to not pay certain things. And that's the counterweight, is it not? Well, yes and no. Right. I just did this big post on Blue Sky. Right. MQbin on Blue Sky, if you want to read it. I don't even know how to log onto it. Right.

I know I'm supposed to migrate there. I have no idea how to get on it. Yeah, it's actually a great platform. Just download that app, Blue Sky App. All right. But in any event, the bigger question is, why are we putting insurance companies in that role?

Why are you is that the role of denying? I thought that's the preauthorizations. Why would why would anybody hire an insurance company who tries to make money by reducing the amount they pay out? That's their interest. Why would we ask them to do preauthorization? That's the whole business. That's what we're trying to get out of. I completely agree. Right. But the whole point is probably half the people who are covered in this country are

The insurance companies are involved, but they don't really act as insurance companies. Well, they're adversarial. Well, no. What I'm saying is there are 50 million lives covered by self-insured organizations, from companies to unions, whatever it may be.

And they use insurance companies for their network, all the hospitals they put together and for their apps. But they also use them to do the pre-authorizations. And my question to them has been over the past four or five months has been, why are you using insurance companies for pre-authorizations when you are the CEO of that union or company are basically the ones that make that decision whether or not you're willing to pay for it or not?

But there's so many different ways that money is sucked out of that system. You're talking about money out of your paycheck to pay a premium that has a deductible. So you're still paying this large- Let me just tell you how insane our- It's truly insane. Right. It was mind boggling to me. I was almost this many days old when I found this out. Okay.

When you think about your deductible, your co-pay, and your co-insurance, right? What it is you have to pay up to before the health company kicks in. Your co-pay, a specific amount to see a doctor, or your co-insurance, like on original Medicare where you have to pay 20% or some percentage of the total. That's right. Do you know who accepts the default risk on all of that? I would assume the patient. No. The hospitals and the doctors take that credit risk.

And they literally, yes, it's insane. But then why are patients going bankrupt when they can't? So that's what happens. So we're turning hospitals and doctors into subprime lenders without assets against them.

Oh, Jesus. Okay. I see where you're going. You're a hospital. When I talk to hospitals, a lot of them, they have default rates of 50 to 60% or more, depending on where the hospital is located. So now this hospital, half the deductibles, co-pays and co-insurance that they are supposed to be paid by the patient, they don't collect on it. So a couple of things happen downstream from there. One, they turn into like a mortgage servicer where they try to collect it.

You know, and it makes them look bad. They hate being put in that position, but there's no upside. You know, maybe you collect some money, but on the downside, the patients hate you. The whole world hates you because of all the patient debt and medical debt and bankruptcies as a result. But when you can't collect them, what do you do to compensate for that lack of revenue? You jack up your fucking price. Right. Right.

Right? So now all of a sudden- So we're all subsidizing this system of-

delinquency to some extent. No, but it's just the hospitals accept that risk. And I guess you could say we subsidize it when you cash pay a higher price at the hospital. Well, that's what I'm saying. If they're jacking up their prices and either insurance pays it or you pay it, that's subsidizing this much larger default rate in a system. But it gets worse. And so now these providers, the hospitals and doctors, they negotiate with the big insurance companies.

And it's fascinating if you walk into a hospital to pay for an MRI, as an example, and you don't mention your insurance, you just say, I want a cash price, they'll probably say it's $350 to $450, depending on where you live. That same hospital will negotiate with what they call the BUCAs, the big insurance companies, right? For that same thing, they'll negotiate a price of $2,000. Right.

What? Yeah. So you would think that big insurance company negotiating with the hospital and that insurance company covers millions of lives. Why wouldn't they negotiate that if there's a bulk thing to $100? Why would it be higher? Because the hospital needs the insurance company as a sales funnel to bring patients in so they can pay their bills. And the insurance company...

wants that price to be higher, particularly for things like the ACA, because the ACA requires for all the plans they cover that they spend up to 85%. So how is this not collusion then? If both sides need it to be higher, that's colluding on a certain price and beyond that. Well, but it's by law the way the ACA works.

So think about this, John. So somebody who gets an individual plan on the ACA, say one of the bronze plans, which is the least effective, right? And it has a $9,000 deductible. So this individual can't afford much in premiums, decides they want a 9,000 deductible. You know who's truly subsidizing that deductible?

The fucking hospital. Wow. And when you get your insurance or anybody gets insurance from a big company and they show you five, six, seven different plans and one of them is a $1,500 deductible, but you're 25, you know, and so you take the $5,000 deductible

Who takes on that risk of the $1,500 versus the 5,000? The doctors in the hospitals. But you still pay the price on your credit score and on a bankruptcy. Like you pay the price. Now there's a limit. Like only if it's above 500, they change some of the rules. Right. And for some of the lost money by the hospital, there's this thing called dish payments that the government will give the hospital to try to make up for it, but it doesn't. But isn't the whole fucking system, Mark, isn't it all, especially with the ACA, a bra

Isn't it a governmental bribe to give to hospitals and insurance companies to say, as a way of saying people with preexisting conditions have to be able to get themselves some coverage? The whole thing is almost a trillion dollar deal.

bribe. And when you look at the levels of profits that are rolling through these insurance companies, clearly we find ourselves in an unsustainable moment. Clearly, clearly. But it's worse than that because it

It's the government making the determination of which insurance plans that they approve for Medicare and Medicare Advantage. Well, that's when they tried to privatize Medicare. I don't understand, you know, with the satisfaction most people had with Medicare. Now they've gone to privatizing that that Part D or whatever they call it. And that's starting to this. Let's back up for a second, because this brings us to a very interesting point that I want to ask you about. All right.

It seems to me that with all the checks and balances within the government, legislative, judicial, executive, all those different things, the one thing the founders didn't really add into the equation is corporate power. This idea that there has to be an entity that is large enough to in some ways be a counterweight to

to unfettered. The system we've chosen for progress and money is incredibly efficient at creating wealth, but it has a lot of collateral damage. Yeah. So here's the thing. Yes. The government can work okay if it's an efficient, transparent market. If it's not efficient and transparent, even though it's big and you would think it can negotiate well, it

It doesn't. But it doesn't because the lobbyists and the money and the billionaires that are putting their money to lobby against the government. No, the government just isn't smart enough sometimes to make the obvious decision. We want you, we're only going to do business with you, pharmacy benefit manager, if you publish us exact prices and we're not going to allow you to use rebates if you want to do business with us because we'll just go to the pass-through PBMs.

Right. The government has choices. They just don't choose to make the obvious and best choice. And you wouldn't you wouldn't say that big money influencing politicians is the largest driver of those bad decisions? No, it should be for sure. Yeah. OK. OK. Yeah. That's what it seems like. There's no innocent. There's nobody with clean hands in any of this.

Right. Everybody has the role. So then the question that Bernie was on here again to be like, well, single payer Medicare for all. That's where we're going. That's that's what he would suggest. And I tend to agree with him or at least a governmental system for all that allows for private insurance outside of it. The question is, how do you get there?

How do you get there and who are the participants that are making it work? AI with a team of experts. AI would be better than the people we are negotiating right now because AI

Every because we are in this form of government with this republic that we have and there's so many influences and so many, you know, constituencies that have to be appeased. You're not going to get an optimal system. Right. And so the only way to get through that is to educate the people who have an influence. So, you know, for instance, I'm going out there and talking to CEOs and I'm saying, look, you self-insure.

And you're hiring this insurance company to do preauthorizations that only make your life more miserable because your employees are upset, HR is upset, when at the end of the day, you're paying for it anyways. But that's not how it's incentivized. Like even that guy, you know, the big thing about that guy that was killed was he turned that company a giant profit by putting in those algorithms that were denying coverage. Who hired him to do that is the question.

The question, he got that opportunity to do it and he's grabbing all the money he can, but who hired him to do the preauthorization process? That's the question people aren't asking and that needs to be answered. So when you talk to, like you've talked to Vivek Ramaswamy, he's on the doge board and Elon's doing the doge board.

What do you think their mindset is about? Is their mindset to go into government and say, look, we need government to make better decisions? I think for a long time, people have felt

That, that feeling that we're not getting value for the money and that there's inefficiencies there. I think we look at it as a system that's been co-opted and corrupted. So what is the mindset going in there? Is it a Silicon Valley efficiency model? Because government does have this responsibility in a way that business never would for people's well-being. Yeah, it's to be determined. There's a couple elements there. Number one is the deficit.

You know, and Elon and others on both sides have rightfully said it's a threat, right? It's a problem. Even with interest rates coming down, you think it's still? That's exactly where I was going because even if interest rates come down a little bit, interest rates are the majority of the ongoing annual expense.

And interest rates will come down some, but they're not going to come all the way down because that will inflate the economy again and create other issues and create more inflation. And Donald Trump, I don't think, is going to want to see that during his term, which is why Elon at one point on Twitter, someone said, you know, we could see a collapse in the first two years. And Elon said, most likely or something to that effect. A collapse of what? Of the economy.

of the economy. Because if the economy collapses like we saw during COVID, what happened to interest rates? Interest rates collapsed as well. Sure. I mean, no economic activity, then everyone's going to want that. But in 2008, the government collapsed the interest rates so that the people at the top could get that free money. Well, whatever it is, whatever it is, that's the only way you're going to have a dramatic impact on the debt.

Well, let's look at it this way. Let's flip it to, you know, there's a lot of people and it's, you know, this modern monetary policy where they talk about that the deficit doesn't matter because, and I tend to be sympathetic to this, you can print money and why are we selling this debt to other people anyway? Why don't we buy it ourselves? I mean, it's all kind of a shell game

to begin with. Why not make it easier on ourselves to pay that down through the minting? Yeah, just playing more money. But now all of a sudden more money's in the economy and the economy re-inflates and you start then having to pay- You think MMT does not, you're not a proponent of that? No, actually I read the books and I talked to the people behind it. When interest rates were zero or near zero, it made 100% sense.

When interest rates skyrocketed to where they are now, it doesn't make sense because even if you just printed all that money, the government can't just print money. They have to borrow money to, you know, even in a fractionalized environment, there has to be some reason to do it. It's not like there's a printing press that just goes brr, brr, brr, brr, brr. I'm going to blow your mind here.

We've created this new market of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin and all these other things that kind of has, in some respects, out of nothing, made something.

What if that was utilized to bring down those more troublesome aspects of deficits? Because we do need government to spend to help stimulate certain things, to stabilize people, to do things that have real value in people's lives. Sure. But there's still, you know...

But debits and credits still have to balance. And I'm not the economist who can give you a detailed analysis of all this stuff. By the way, they can't either. They just do it in a really like smug, shitty way. But I just look at it just as a business guy. And when if we were just, you still got to balance things, right? And so in order to print that money, we got to borrow it from someone, even if it's ourselves. And that inflates the balance sheet and that creates other problems with inflation. Right, right.

Because think of it this way, John, look at all Zimbabwe and all these other third world countries that tried to do the exact same thing. But that's different. They were coming out of a place from very little stability. I mean, I think what undergirds our financial system is the stability of our political system. And if you start to undermine that stability, I think it's

by paying that off, you continue to reinforce the infrastructure and stability of your system, which creates in and of itself. I mean, so much of this is perception and Zimbabwe is in a, like, look what's happening in Argentina right now. Okay. So Malay goes in there and he's got that more libertarian. He's got, you know, four dogs named after Hayek and whoever other economists are going that he goes and he dives into an austerity program.

They plunge their inflation rate, but drives them into a recession and creates a political crisis. And more poverty, et cetera, right? And he probably argued the opposite, but still- I understand. If you're going to print a lot of money, you are going to have a lot of inflation. And that, again, I'm not the economist, but I don't see that as being a significant positive.

I think, you know, if you have 26, 30, 50% inflation, your stability goes out the door. Even if you did a one-time reset, like you, you looked at it, like this is not going to be an ongoing thing, but you know, as Krugman would say, I've got a trillion dollar coin and it turns out, I'll just flip that thing over there. And we're, we've cleaned it out a little bit and we're going to give ourselves a little bit more of a fresh start. I don't think that works, but again, maybe there's an angle there where that I don't know. Right.

And you won't, you know, cause I know you love to spend your time thinking about this and it's always, and I thank you so much. Uh, we probably went off the rails on crypto, but I've learned an awful lot. You still don't consider yourself though, a viable political player. No. Right. And having that experience, do you think being on the trail for the Harris campaign really dissuaded you of that ever as a possibility? No, I loved it. Right. It wasn't that it's my family.

I mean, look at all the shit they're doing to, that they did to J.D. Vance. I don't want my kids hearing me about me fucking a couch, you know, or, you know, when I was. That's really a you issue though, more than anything. It was a nice couch. Yeah.

I took it to dinner, you know, it was nice. But listen, man, do you really think that as a viable political candidate, you would take more shit than you take today? I mean, there's no question the amount of shit you take today. Just getting involved with the Harris campaign was extraordinary. I mean, they went after you like crazy as, as everybody. Look, I take it just from being on fucking basic cable. Yeah. It's extraordinary. The reach of that now.

Yeah, I mean, but it was mostly on Twitter. I'm fine with that. But if they go after my kids and my family and dealing with that, my kids are 15, 18, and 21 now. Right, right, right. And more importantly than that, I want to be around them. That's the key reason why I sold a big chunk of the Mavs, why I got out of Shark Tank. Shark Tank films June and September. My kids get out of school in June, go back in September. I miss birthdays. I mean, that's fucked up. And it bothered me to no end. And, you know, like our conversations,

I get into this stuff. I always want to, you know, going even back to Elon and Vivek, there's a difference between just deficit reduction, which seems to be their focus, and problem solving. In between there is efficiency, right? You always want to be more efficient with whatever tools, you know, people or AI, whatever it takes, you want to be more efficient. But the question becomes, how do you solve problems? And what problems are you start trying to solve? Because at the end of the day, that's what we're trying to solve.

give our taxpayer money to the government for to solve problems that we need solved. But that's the kind of thinking, though, that's so crucial because there's two sides of the coin. One is profligate spending from the government that doesn't consider, you know, I had a conversation with the deputy secretary of defense where we were talking about the $850 billion budget. And you would have thought like,

I asked what underwear she was wearing. Her response to being questioned about the lack of passing an audit on $850 billion- Multiple times. Multiple times. Just went like, how dare you? Do you even know what an audit is? And I'm like, I thought I did, but maybe I don't. But the arrogance of it was wild. So the idea of connecting spending to value, but the flip side of that is the idea of

cutting spending with no discernment for value either. It's one thing to say, I'm getting rid of the Department of Education. It's another thing to say, here are the aspects of the Department of Education that are viable. Here's the aspects that are wasteful. Hopefully, do you think it will be that considered a process or will it be just a giant reaper that goes through? Here's what I think happens, and this is just my guess. I think they go in trying to have

have a big PR impact, right? We're cutting this and we're cutting that. And they'll find the things that have always been, um, about, have always had notoriety, you know, the $1,200 toilet type things, you know, the $800,000, you know, mice experiment, whatever it may be. And we'll chop those. And then from there, they'll have to actually think.

You know, they'll have to actually dig in and they'll have to find ways to measure what they're evaluating. And that's going to be the challenge. Efficacy. Yeah. Yeah. Because how can you determine if it's efficient or not or if you've improved efficiency unless you measure and you come up with benchmarks that everybody agrees on? Because they're going to be taking money away from Republican districts as well. Right. Or.

Or maybe they won't. I mean, maybe this will be another one of those like, how can we fuck New York? How can we kill them? It's a whole different conversation.

And so and they I think they understand that they've only got two years to do something. Absolutely. And it's already listen, it's a it's as tight a squeeze in the House of Representatives as you could ever imagine. I think they've got a little breathing room in the Senate, but that's designed in such an undemocratic way that it can present a difficulty to begin with.

But Mark Cuban, my God, I know you're a busy man. I'm going to let you go. Next time you're in town, you got to come and let me get some face time at a pizza joint, learn more about all this crypto and everything else. I appreciate it so much. You're our end of year go-to and I can't thank you enough. As always, really wonderful to talk to you. Thanks for having me on, John. I love it. I love our conversations. All right, man. Good to see you, brother. You too. All right. Take care. Talk to you later. All right.

Final, final pod conversation of the year. We are joined, of course, by our great producer, Lauren Walker, Brittany Mimetic, and Jillian Spear. What a good first date. Not even a first date. That might have been a third date with me and Cuban. I think, did we consummate? Every first date, somebody brings up crypto. That's just the world's really thing. Aw.

It's definitely on mine with all the fine-tooth bros. Are you saying that that date was a cliche? No, it's just that it was a very modern date, I would say. I guess I'm looking for a man in finance. And boy, did you find him. And boy, did I find him. Do you understand any of that, by the way? I hated to have him walk me through it like I'm a –

crypto kindergartner but it was helpful for me to sort of understand what the the the idea of it is and it's it really does seem to be just an agreed upon the idea that it's been agreed upon we've agreed upon that this has value we've agreed upon a system in which it will be uh traded and

Right. And we're going to keep the innovation going. Are you guys into crypto? No. Are you finance pros? It's going to be a no. I have Beanie Babies. Does that count? See, how is it not Beanie Babies is my question. I'm with you, John, where to me, it still seems like a solution in search of a problem. And what Mark was saying about, you're in a foreign country and somebody needs to send you money. It's like,

I'll go to an ATM. I have a credit card. I don't know what sums of money we're talking about. I don't know if this is like a Liam Neeson and taken situation, but I just can't find a use for it. Jillian, you're dead on right and I swear to you and thank God I didn't go there, but I was like, "You mean like Western Union?"

You go there in a telegram and you tell a friend, telegraph me a cashier's check for $150. But it really is one of those things where at its heart, and I understand that it's popular, but you really are like, it's kind of a mass illusion. And then when he starts talking about your gold, then you're like, oh, the whole fucking system's a mass illusion. And maybe it's nice that they're kind of creating a new one.

And maybe that, you know, supplants it or just injects more wealth into what can only be considered the bro podcast world. Maybe that's... Business is booming. Exactly. What he was saying about AI really stood out to me. The fact that no one in the white collar world is going to be affected by AI, but it's just not true and it's already happening. And, uh,

I was just thinking back to back at the problem. We had talked to someone who works at a helpline for people with eating disorders and her group tried to unionize because they had been overworked and they got replaced by AI. At a helpline?

And when they called in, the AI that the place had started using was not working properly and within a few interactions was suggesting calorie counting. And that was years ago. Holy shit. So you understand how quickly this all develops. I know friends who have lost jobs.

It's already happening. It's so crazy. I feel like so many of these tech people, they'll point to these historical examples of technology coming along and people losing their jobs and how they were then redistributed into other parts of the economy. And it's like, yeah, I get that. But you're also the same people arguing that this is the biggest technological innovation since fires.

So you don't get to have it both ways where you're like, this is the biggest thing since fire, but also ATMs, they didn't ruin bank tellers. Do you think fire, when fire came out, people were like, I'm going to lose my heating job. Remember, I'm the guy who walks around and rubs everybody's hands. Now fire is going to fuck it all up for me. And those people never recovered, John. Well, even that, like the dystopian aspect of like, oh yeah, no, you got to plug into AI whether or not to fix the road. And you're like, hmm.

There's an accountability in government that, well, it'll be a tool to help. But yeah, you're right. I think they haven't quite figured it out. And there's, I think when you are on that cutting edge of innovation, there is an exuberance, irrational and otherwise, that comes along with it. And it's hard not to get swept up in that enthusiasm. I'm assuming that that's what

you know, angel investor meetings look like, but at some level stepping back and going like, hey, just so we're clear here, you're saying that the computer controls the entire hospital and decides like what oxygen to turn on and turn off through analytics? Because it is that algorithm is what was denying everybody insurance. Yeah, absolutely. So crazy. Yeah.

Um, you want some listening questions? Let's hit a man. This is end of year. Come at me, bro. Whatever, whatever they got, man. I'm handling it. We're, we're getting out of here. We'll have a few weeks to recover. Let's fucking do this. All right. Um, this one's a come at me, bro. Yeah. Um, John, it seems like you're projecting a little bit. What do you think you did wrong this year?

That you mean they're asking for self-reflection? Perhaps. Well, you guys know this. I always, you know, I get annoyed at myself for being like a little high horsey and, and, you know, you get a little of the sanctimony in there. So I try to, try to relax sometimes on the certainty of my opinions, you know, and I, and I can, you know,

And the contrarian thing I could like, I really do feel like if you threw me in a room with somebody who wanted to argue AI was going to destroy us all, I'd be the guy who'd be like, it will save us. And then you throw me in a room with a guy who's like, it'll save us. And I'll be like, it will destroy us. Like that's, I think I have a fucking fiddler on the roof problem, which is that on the one hand, but on the other hand. So yeah, I've, I've done, I've done a lot wrong this year, but

I've had an awful lot of fun doing so. That's all that matters. All right. What else? What else we got? Anything? Other than our lovely guest that we've just had on, who is your favorite billionaire and why? Oh, a favorite billionaire. You know, I'm trying, I wonder if I know more than one. Like I've, I've talked to him. I've talked to Elon. I don't know. I'm trying to think if there's another billionaire. I probably do know them. I just don't know.

You know who I would say? Seinfeld. He's actually pretty close to probably being a billionaire and funny as shit. He might be the funniest billionaire. Okay. Yeah. And he generally doesn't try and chip us or he doesn't try and like do other billionaire shit to us. Yeah. So I give him credit on that. You know, he could. Well, Steve Cohen just did something really nice for you. Oh.

Oh, yes. And he's listening, waiting for you. That is my favorite billionaire. I didn't even think of that. He got me Juan Soto for my birthday. Yeah. Wealth redistribution. Yeah. I don't really know. I've met him a couple of times. I met him once. We did a

boy, this ties together the whole thing. We did a charity dinner at, it was Stand Up For Heroes and they bid on different things. And one of the things was you could bid on a dinner with myself and Jim Gaffigan and Seinfeld and Louis CK pre thing. So Steve Cohen bid on it. And normally when people bid on something like that,

They never fucking, they never like, it's just a way for them to just give the money. Yeah. Cohen was like, you're coming to Rao's. So he made us go. And I remember we went and it ended up for obvious reasons being Steve, Seinfeld, Gaffigan and me. Oh. And I remember making the joke to Jerry saying, geez, I can't believe the lengths that Louie went to to get out of this dinner. Yeah.

But that's, yeah, that was my experience there. Yeah, good to have a billionaire owner of a team you like. Well, that actually ties into this next question. All right, let's bring it. How many World Series do the Mets have to win to consider Juan Soto deal a good investment? Any. If you could just give us five years of good investment.

You don't understand. The Mets are not – this isn't the Yankees of like a tradition of 26 championships and every year we're in the playoffs. Like in – we come out – we suck and then every now and again come out of nowhere. Like suck, suck, suck. Championship in 69. Got to the World Series I think in 73 but didn't make it and weren't very good that year. Had a miraculous recovery. 86. Suck, suck, suck, suck, suck. Then all of a sudden 84, 85, 86, they were good.

but never got back there again. We're good through like a little bit of the 90s, got to the World Series again in 2000. We're not a history of like steady accomplishment. So if this dude just comes in here and raises the baseline level of our team to non, I used to take the kids to the last game of the season every year at Citi Field because you had the run of the place. That's what I'm going to miss. Yeah.

I'm going to miss cheap baseball tickets in New York. Do you think he'll raise the prices? I just think more people will go. Like I could go on StubHub and get like 15 bucks, not bad seats. Really? That's a really good deal. I always wait till the last minute to buy tickets to the Mets games because people have gotten depressed at a certain point. They're just giving them away. They'll pay you to go there. Yeah.

All right. What's the better holiday, Christmas or Hanukkah? Oh, that's just not even... We're not even in the same ballpark. That's...

That's like when Tracy, you know, when I got married and when we had kids, we're like, what are we going to do? She's like, oh, we're going to celebrate all the holidays. But she knew how, like, I was about to get swamped. I'm literally saying to the kids, like, all right, everybody who wants to light a candle? She's just like, look at all the presents under the tree. And, you know, when there's little kids around, like when my kids were little, like Maggie with Elf on a Shelf.

I will forever be grateful. We once got one and we got a stewardess on a plane to, we had brought Maggie's Elf on a Shelf. We were traveling somewhere and the stewardess came out of the cockpit going, does anyone know who this is? And we have a picture of Maggie's face. She's just going, oh.

The magic of it. Yeah. I mean- Pretty special. I thought she'd be like, how did that narc find me here? You know, at six, she was not darling. She didn't have a stash. So there was no- But that's a fine point. But you guys-

I hope you have a great holiday, but let me just say, boy, the work that you guys have done. And I hope that the listeners understand that I have the part, like I stand on the shoulders of real workers, like you guys put together such phenomenal work this year and allowed me to just really, you know, it was the best part of it. I think because you all are so diligent and thorough and curious, it allows me to have that backing that I can just be present and

in the conversations, which is the best gift for somebody who's interviewing somebody is to feel like the work that's been done for you is so thorough and interesting that you can just then

plop it out and let the conversation and let the conversation flow. So thank you guys so much and enjoy your holiday. Brittany, what are the socials? Twitter, we are Weekly Show Pod. Instagram threads and TikTok, we are Weekly Show Podcast. Drum roll, please. We are on Blue Sky, Weekly Show Podcast.

That's what Cuban was talking about the blue sky there. Exactly. We're on it. And then you can like and subscribe our YouTube channel, The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart.

Boom. All right, kids. Uh, Lee producer, Lauren Walker, producer, Brittany, video editor and engineer, Rob Vitola, uh, audio editor and engineer, Nicole boys. And to the two of them, top fucking shelf. Uh, you guys have been crushing it all year and Rob congrats on the, the baby's first, uh, holiday. Enjoy that. Uh,

researcher and associate producer, Jillian Spear. And as always, our executive producers, Chris McShane, Katie Gray. That is all for the weekly show pod 2024. We will see you guys on the flip side on 2025. And thanks again for everything. The weekly show with Jon Stewart is a comedy central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.

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