Mark Cuban

Mark: There's three big ones that control 85% of the market. They're able to go to the big brand manufacturers and say, "Look, we have 85% of the market. If you want all the 150 million people who get their insurance from their employer to have access to your medication, pay us. The more expensive the drug, the more they can get paid." So we started Cost Plus Drug under the premise that we're going to change that.

Daniel: I feel like the Mavericks are part of your identity.

Mark: Obviously trading Luka and a bunch of other things, I felt like I let Mavs fans down. There's being wealthy and then there's being, oh my God, I never imagined. And that shapes you more than anything. After I sold MicroSolutoins, I bought a lifetime pass on American Airlines, partied like a rockstar, just went everywhere.

Daniel: Let's make some news today. What would it take to run for president? Mark Cuban, welcome to Build or Break. I'm so excited to be here at Mark's digs. He allowed us to stay in this place. And I have to say, we started the whole podcast Build or Break just so we could make the excuse to come and ask you questions meant to ask.

Mark: Right.

Daniel: I got to know Mark over the last eight or so years and I observed a bunch of about you that I love and I'm very curious about. So unlike other podcast episodes, I'm actually going to try to learn some things about the method to your madness. And I want to start with processing speed because when I was asked what's the difference between the sharks, what I was always explaining about you is you saw the patterns and recognized them and processed faster than any of us. Almost always, not always, but it's like crazy. Always,

Mark: Always.

Daniel: Almost always. It was crazy how within seconds you already understood the story behind the story. And my question is, is that something as a kid did you notice that you had in you or is that something you developed over time?

Mark: No, I noticed it as a kid. I'd be in a theater watching a movie and there'd be a funny scene on and I'd be laughing before anybody else. And I'd be like, "That's really weird." I would hear it and I could process it and start laughing while everybody else was still processing it. It just stayed that way. So you

Daniel: were born with it.

Mark: I think so. And then the key was having the knowledge to use it. It's one thing when you're just, it's a laugh line and you process and you laugh and all that. It's a whole nother thing in business when somebody walks in and I can put myself in their shoes. And that's something I worked hard at my first company because my first company, Micro Solutions, in order for us to be successful, I had to be able to put myself in the shoes of my potential customer and understand what they were trying to accomplish and then understand what I could do to make them more productive, more profitable, more effective, et cetera.

Daniel: In preparing for these, I read that also when you were as a kid selling garbage bags, you learned about the importance of solving problems rather than selling.

Mark: Yeah, always. I mean, always put yourself in the shoes of someone. I mean, I was 12 years old selling garbage bags door to door and it was like, "Hi, my name is Mark. Do you use garbage bags? Yes. And so I'll bring them to you so you don't have to carry the little box." And so that plus just having the confidence, walking up to somebody's door that you don't know and just knocking and just being able to in real time figure out what you're going to say, that was a huge skill. And then after that I sold magazines door to door. And when you learn to sell magazines, they train you to deal with objections. "Well, my husband's not home. "That was way back. "Are you going to tell me that when you tell your husband you spent 75 cents a week for the entertainment and enjoyment of your family, that he's going to get upset that he won't put education first for your kids? Well, if you put it that way, I killed it. I learned how to sell."

Daniel: When you were as a 12-year-old taking that initiative to start those jobs, did you need the money or you just wanted the experience?

Mark: No, I needed it. Yeah, my dad was really clear. What led to the garbage bags was a bunch of his buddies over playing poker at our house and I'd go in there, pick up a donut or whatever. And I was like, "Dad, can I get some new basketball shoes?" And he looked at my feet, he goes, "Those shoes look like they're pretty good. When you have a job, you can get whatever you want." And I was like, "Dad, I'm 12 years old." And he's like, "Well, when you get a job." And it was because one of his buddies who was playing poker was probably drunk said, "I got all these boxes of garbage bags. Why don't you sell them in the neighborhood?" I was like, "Dad, can I do it?" And he was like, "Sure." And that was the start of it.

Daniel: The more that you succeed, the more that you validate that you're a fucking smart guy, the more that you're in danger that you might think you have the answers. What do you do to keep questioning yourself, to keep staying curious and not assuming that you have the answers? Yeah. I

Mark: Mean, you get humbled early in business. Early on, I might have thought, well, I'm smarter than them. I know what's going on. But then you make enough mistakes and miss out on this deal or screw up this business or screw up that deal. You get humbled very quickly, but I'm also very competitive. And so the curiosity and the competitive nature just means I'm always trying to learn more, learn more, learn more to give myself a competitive advantage.

Daniel: Do you talk to yourself like, oh, I got too cocky, just because I'm always criticizing myself. I'm always in a debate with myself, oh, I went too far here. Yeah,

Mark: Of course. I mean, because you don't never know the answer until you get into the room. Oh, I think I know what they're going to need or I think I know how I'm going to create this company or run this company. And then stuff happens where I call it always questioning my hole card. If you ever play blackjack or poker, you know you've got a six underneath there, but you still got to look 15 times. It's just human nature to keep on looking and that's checking your hole card. And so even though I might think I know something and have an edge, I'm always going to check and recheck.

Daniel: Did you develop the instinct to check your hole card on your own? Did it come naturally? Was there something in your childhood that your parents taught you that you observed? If people want to learn to be critical thinkers, to question assumptions, to do that. One of the things that I noticed is not everybody has conversations with themselves.

Mark: Yeah. I don't know why not.

Daniel: I don't know why not, but how can you, to the extent that people are watching, they want to learn from you, how can they develop that? Does it just come or did something that you can think of happen that helped you start having those conversations with yourself?

Mark: I mean, I remember my mom telling me, every time she would read to me, I would ask her why, why, why, why, why? And I would never let her get through a paragraph. Why are they doing this? Why, why, why, why, why? And I think it really depends on having a goal.

Daniel: Was your mom okay with it or was she like, shut up or?

Mark: No, no. She was okay with it because she knew I'd just fall asleep in a minute. And she was kind of the same way, very cynical and questioning, whereas my dad was not, he was the opposite. But if you have a goal and you're trying to accomplish it, again, it's a lot like sports. So it's a lot like music where in sports there's another team and you might have a goal to win, to make a basket, whatever it is, and you might think you have the right play, but you have to ask yourself, what could they possibly do? And it's the same thing in business. It's the exact same as a sport. And I think that's why you see athletes do really well in business a lot of times because they're used to always having to prepare, to always have to optimize how they're preparing and then always be prepared to respond to whatever the opponent does. And whether you're playing tennis, whether you're playing basketball, whether you're playing soccer, whatever it is, you're always going to have to respond. And I think they go hand in hand. And if you've never been in a... And I think when you look at Silicon Valley, and it's a great question, Danny, when you look at Silicon Valley, they think they're so much smarter than everybody that they don't have that internal dialogue. They don't question what everybody else is going to do. They just presume they're right. I think that is creating a lot of problems as it relates to AI and people understanding AI and what the expectations are, and it creates problems for them.

Daniel: I really like how you combine curiosity with that competitive thing because that combo I think does a lot of what you said, forces you to be questioning yourself and think how the other side thinks and put yourself in other people's shoes. I also like when you're talking about your mom reading you, I think one of the things we do wrong in society today, and I'm trying to learn from it, but I get it wrong, sometimes we don't want our kids to ask us a thousand questions, but the fact is we should encourage them to think outside the box. We should encourage them to ask why asking why is probably one of the most important tools for an entrepreneur because then you ask why not and then you -

Mark: Right, of course. I mean, you're looking for holes and what can I solve? What can I do better? How can I optimize? What are they not thinking? What can I come up with that somebody hasn't come up with? And then you got to do the work to figure it out because everybody's got a good idea. That's the American dream, right? There's nobody in this country, once you get to the age of 21 who hasn't thought, oh, I got this business idea. And then they go to their friends, "What do you think?" And the friends go, "That's not a bad idea." Then you go on Google or Claude or ChatGPT and you ask about it and then you think, "Oh, maybe I can do this." And then most people just stop. It's not that people aren't considering or trying or thinking, it's hard to make the commitment to do something. And Daymond on Shark Tank a lot of time talks about the power of broke. And I think when people are comfortable, it's harder for them to make those choices. But when they're uncomfortable, sometimes you got no choice. When you're broke and you got nothing to lose. When I got fired from a job here in Dallas, I was living six guys in a three bedroom apartment. I was like, "I'm starting my own business now because I got nothing to lose." And

Daniel: You got fired because you had the temerity to close a deal or something like

Mark: That. Yeah, because I wanted to go out and I was living in the that I lived in with all these roommates and I was like, "I need to get this commission check," which would've been $1,500, which would've got me out of that place. And so the owner of the store that I worked at, the software store says, "No, I need you to come in." I'm like, "But Michael, I got this all configured and it's all taken care of." And I made the executive decision to go out and pick up the check, fired my -

Daniel: Was he intimidated? Why did that -

Mark: I have no idea. They didn't stay in business very much longer. And

Daniel: It was also a blessing that -

Mark: Oh yeah, that's amazing that it happened to me just because at that point it was time to go and create micro solutions. And I mean, I had no money literally, and I had to pretty much beg this company called Architectural Lighting to put up enough money to pay for the software that they needed because I had no money to buy it. I had somebody who had come into the retail store I worked at and after I got fired, I went to them and said, "Look, I know you needed this software and if you'll front me the $500, I'll promise to make it work. And if it doesn't, I'll wash your car, walk your dog, whatever." And fortunately they said yes, but now I had the $250 margin. I had to find another customer and another customer and another customer, and it was all out of necessity.

Daniel: So it wasn't like you wrote that 30 page business plan just starting.

Mark: What I wrote was I had to come up with the name and I was just like, "Well, I need to make it so it's very descriptive." And then I found out afterwards that's called a one-inch name where it's very descriptive, micro solutions, microcomputers solutions. And I still have this, I wrote up a one-pager, actually two-pager on what we can do for your company so I have a drop off. We're going to make you more competitive. How old were you? I was 24 and we were going to make you competitive. We're going to make you more productive, more profitable by showing you, because at this point in time, it's the early 80s, people didn't by default have computers. It was new to everybody. And so I can walk in and if people wanted them to get a competitive advantage and I could show them and if I didn't know how to do it, I would stay up all night, literally stay up all night and teach myself. And so that I think was the other big takeaway for me that when it came to technology, I didn't major in computers or anything like that, that if you had the time, if I had the time, I could teach myself. And it's kind of like a ball of thread is the way I would describe it. Once you got that ball made, then you could just add new things and learn new things. And I think that was the takeaway for all businesses. Once you get into it and start understanding the elements of business and technology and the different types of businesses, they all have a lot of the same underpinnings and commonalities. You just then have to build on that for some specifics.

Daniel: I've heard you talk about how if you were young today, you'd get in on that AI thing and you'd go and basically you give people the advice to do what you did with microsoltions.

Mark: Yeah, exactly same thing. Yeah. And

Daniel: It's weird because my son who's 17 took your advice and he's now providing AI solutions for other small businesses. And he's, I guess, something like you, he was very much into basketball. He woke up and did basketball. When he was done with basketball, he'd do basketball. And then when he was done with that basketball, it was basketball, basketball, playing. And just in the last few months, all of a sudden he's just so in love with entrepreneurship and he's doing the AI stuff and literally following

Mark: The

Daniel: Model.

Mark: Whenever you have a transition in technology, the way I would describe it back then and now is most people that run companies, no matter what the size, they're just trying to be competitive and make some money, pay their bills, pay their employees bills. And there's so many stress levels and stress factors that go into running any kind of business. It's not their job to have to understand every technology. And some people try, some people have employees that try to do all that for them. But if you can come in, particularly with a new company technology, back then it was PCs and software, now AI, and be able to understand their business and show them how to apply it so that they're more competitive, more productive, more profitable. They're going to listen.

Daniel: Right now I still can keep up with it, but is your personality such that you will never have that problem or as we get older, eventually some new technology is going to dump? No,

Mark: I'll always do it. But there's always stuff like with AI or any programming language, I'm not going to be the all-time expert and know all the nuanced elements of doing a harness on AI right now and doing security analytics, all that kind of stuff. No. But

Daniel: You're learning enough

Mark: To - I'll learn enough to know how it applies to business. So I can sit and talk with the foremost expert in AI and look at a business and understand here's how you can use that AI to help the business or where not to use it because AI is a lot more complicated when you try to implement it at a high level in a business than just doing agents or basic prompting.

Daniel: I sold Kind, my final stake in Kind a year and a half ago, and I'm very blessed, but it's harder than I thought because I miss it. And sometimes I think they're doing a good job with preserving the quality of the products, but it's hard to preserve that entrepreneurial zeal.

Mark: Of course.

Daniel: And with the Mavericks, they

Mark: Traded - Oh, drive me crazy.

Daniel: Yeah. How did you deal with that?

Mark: I don't do not very well. Not very well at all. But

Daniel: Also for a while you were not saying anything.

Mark: Yeah. After I sold Micro Solutions, I sold it to CompuServe owned by H&R Block, and they did a lot of things that I didn't agree with and it took a couple years for me to get past it. And then with broadcast.com, same thing, Yahoo just tore it apart. And then with the Mavs, it was like, okay, I'm not going to get into the details of what I expected versus what happened, but obviously Trading Luka and a bunch of other things. And I literally would remind myself that inner dialogue, look, you went through with MicroSolutions, you went through it with broadcast.com. The Mavs are one more example, and it's not necessarily a bad thing because Cost Plus Drugs is just blowing up and changing healthcare, and that's more important than basketball. But I felt really bad because I felt like I let Mavs fans down. It wasn't so much the Mavericks per se, it was how Mavs fans feel about the Mavericks and the expectations they had and just some of the stupid that went down.

Daniel: I feel like the Mavericks are part of your identity.

Mark: They were, and that's an interesting point because David Stern, rest in peace, David, was the commissioner of the NBA. And he used to always, after I got on Shark Tank, which was like 2010 and he died in 2020, and in that interim period, we were doing this event at the New York Times.

Daniel: 2020. Wow. I love David Stern.

Mark: David was a good man. Yeah. I can't believe

Daniel: It's been already that long.

Mark: That long, yeah. And I was doing an event with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times and they put David up in the balcony and just to scream at me. And he was like, "I made you. I made you." And it's true, he did, because it was our conflicts and him fining me and me doing it my own way as opposed to the way other owners had always done it is really what made people pay attention to me. And so it was a big part of my identity, but then I got to the point where pre-social media was fun. And then I'm not Tom Cruise, B level, whatever it is, but it got to be, it's annoying. Enough people recognize me that I can get tables and I can get in places and I can show up places. But yeah, in terms of identity, I think it's just not the same as it was and not as important as I thought it would be.

Daniel: The third thing that I noticed that I want to bring up that I really like and admire is how lean and mean you are. In Shark Tank, some of our fellow sharks bring a coterie of people. I'm in the middle. I bring two or three team members. Some of our fellow sharks bring eight people. You were there with one person.

Mark: Yeah, Steven.

Daniel: How the hell do you do that? It's not that I'm a snob, but for me to operate and try to build different things, I have a team.

Mark: It's all simple. It's all simple stuff, right? Steven sits there, then he does due diligence. They give me the feedback. I say yes or no.

Daniel: Who's they?

Mark: If the entrepreneurs, when I do a deal, told the truth and we're accurate in their numbers, then we do the deal. If we do due diligence, you know how it works and they're not always telling the truth or accurate, then we don't do the deal. It's really simple stuff.

Daniel: Is there any tip you can give me and others about how to do things in such a lean way?

Mark: So my organizations are very flat. I don't have managers managing managers ever, because that just creates scenarios where people want to create their own little fiefdom. And so who has more reportees and who's managed more whatever, who has a bigger budget? And so I don't do a lot with budgets. I don't do a lot with managers, managing managers. It's can you do the job? If you're the person to do the job, do the job. Let me know what you got to do and just send me an update. Cost plus, I get a daily update.

Daniel: I'm a big believer in flat organizations, a big believer in empowering people and working directly with them, not having people in the broker to phone. But at some point when an organization gets big, is there any

Mark: As you grow, then you want to bring in people again who can just do the job. Just hire somebody who's qualified to do the

Daniel: Job. Who rolls up their sleeves.

Mark: Yeah, rolls up the sleeves and does the job.

Daniel: At cost plus how many team members do you have right

Mark: Now? Oh, it's only 70. I mean, we are solely, because we use AI and automation a lot, robotics and AI.

Daniel: Can you walk us through your org chart?

Mark: It's me and Alex, my co-founder, and I do more of the business side and the marketing and strategic side. And he does the AI and the robotics side. And he's literally a doctor, a radiologist. So he understands this drug, that drug, what'll work for a patient, what won't work for him.

Daniel: So below you and Alex, how many direct reports are there for you and him?

Mark: Maybe six.

Daniel: What would be the core function?

Mark: So partnerships, operations, manufacturing operations, financial CFO, Aaron, who does our partnerships with pharmacies.

Daniel: What are those things called that are part of the problem, the pharmacy benefit?

Mark: Pharmacy benefit managers, yeah.

Daniel: Do you work with them or you bypass

Mark: Them? We bypass the very big ones and we work with the small ones who are trying to take on the big ones. So if they're transparent and do it the right way, there's like 40 of them that we work with and partner with. If you are part of the problem, there's -

Daniel: Can you explain briefly the problems? Because it was a really big pain point the way they -

Mark: Still is, yeah.

Daniel: Can you explain it briefly?

Mark: Yeah. So when you pick your insurance plan, you have your medical benefits and your pharmacy benefits. And when you need a prescription, your doctor gives you a prescription and you tell them what pharmacy you work with and they send it there. Hopefully it's cost plus drugs, but if not, you send it wherever. Then that pharmacist, you come to the counter or it's mail order and the pharmacist checks to make sure there's no problems and they have a claim where you're saying, okay, I have this prescription. And the claim manages the economics of the prescription. And that pharmacy sends it through these intermediary switches and hubs that are just part of the transaction. But the company that sets the pricing and sets all the reimbursements and the charges to the employer or the out-of-pocket to the patient, that's called a pharmacy benefit manager. And the pharmacy, there's three big ones that control 85% of the market. And because they control 85% of the market, they're able to go to the big brand manufacturers, the Lillies, the Pfizers, the BMS and say, look, we have 85% of the market. If you want all the 150 million people who get their insurance from their employer to have access to your medication, pay us.

Daniel: So it actually is almost like a-

Mark: A mafia.

Daniel: A mafia. They're actually making it more expensive because they have market power.

Mark: Because they benefit the more expensive of the drug, the more they can get paid via rebates and fees from the manufacturers. So what we said, and then on top of that, to make matters worse, nobody knows what the actual price is. The employer, for your employees, when you do this through your insurance plans, you have no idea what you pay for either medical or pharmacy, none. The pharmacy benefits do it on the medical side, clearing houses and the insurance carriers do it. I'm sorry, the pharmacy benefits do it on the pharmacy side and carriers and clearinghouses do it on the medical side. You have no idea what you pay for anything on either side. Neither do any of your employees or their family, your members, right? Nobody has any idea. And because of that, you get a lot of people who find themselves in situations where they can't afford their medications or they have to ration it or ration other things, can't pay their rent, whatever it may be. So we started Cost Plus Drugs under the premise that we're going to change that. You go to costplusdrugs.com, you put in the name of the medication. If it's one of the thousands that we carry, it comes up and we'll show you our actual cost. And then we'll show you that we only market a 15%.

Daniel: So transparency.

Mark: Transparency, right?

Daniel: It's hugely important.

Mark: Right, because that's what builds trust. Trust equals transparency divided by self-interest. We're showing you our cost. We're showing you our markups only 15%. Whereas the pharmacy benefit managers that companies work with, they don't tell a cost at all. Cost Plus Drugs started shipping in January of 22, so we're four and a half years old, and we're still the only pharmacy that publishes a price list. We're still the only pharmacy that has an API, so you can pull our prices on a daily basis so that you can help your members, employees, families make a determination on the best way to buy or the best price for that drug.

Daniel: So here's my next question. And you and I have had many of these conversations, how do you change society for the better? And I for sure also prefer the market, but sometimes I think you need to change the regulation or do civic work and you're very allergic to, you want to do the market and here you did it really well. But my question is, do you still need legislation to change the PBMs?

Mark: Oh, it'd be a lot easier, right? There's a breakup big medicine bill from Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren. The big insurance companies, they own the biggest PBMs, or in one case, CVS owns Aetna. And so if you broke them up, it'd be a whole lot easier.

Daniel: How would that impact your business?

Mark: Oh, it'd be great for our business, but more importantly -

Daniel: It would be good for your business?

Mark: Yeah, because right now there's a lot of brands we can't sell because those big PBMs owned by the big insurance companies tell those big brands -

Daniel: Those are the mafia.

Mark: Yeah. The mafia tells the big brands, the Lilly, the Pfizers, et cetera, don't do business with cost plus drugs because think about what happens, and we saw this with high-end generics. Once people see that we only market a 15%, our price is going to be a whole lot less. And so if our price is a whole lot less and every employer gets to look and see what it truly costs, because they just look at our price list and see a cost, all their margin goes away.

Daniel: So you have these gigantic industries where a lot of dollars - Multi-hundred billion

Mark: Dollar

Daniel: Company legislators buying them off in industry after industry and their industry, preventing what's in the interest of citizens. Do you think one of my ideas with builders is to create a... For me, what's fascinating is that throughout our 250-year history, every industry has a special interest. The pharmacy association, the insurance association, the this, the that. But guess who doesn't have a group that wakes up in the morning, goes to sleep at night thinking about citizens? Citizens. We don't have a movement of citizens that look for the

Mark: Citizens. But citizens get

Daniel: To

Mark: Vote.

Daniel: We get to vote, but we don't -

Mark: There's all these, the women's voters of America things or whatever.

Daniel: But there is no movement that says, "Okay, where are the conflicts between trade groups, politicians, third party industry groups and citizens? Let's advocate for the citizens. Let's put them first."

Mark: It's not homogenous group, right?

Daniel: Correct. The problem in my model is that we need to be smarter to unite as citizens on all issues. So let's say that I work for - But

Mark: What I would tell you, and we've talked about this, most people just want to get through their day. They don't want to have to think about who's representing them.

Daniel: I know, but consequently, day in, day out, over 250 years, you have all these inefficiencies and they start eating up gerrymandering. Yeah, but the problem is just getting worse and worse because we're not as citizens uniting to demand accountability from the politicians.

Mark: For the whole 250 years, there's been some really messed up times, right? And unless the Civil War was in your front yard or backyard and comparable times you're getting drafted, whatever it may be, you just want to put food on the table, have your kids have a better life and focus on that. You're not thinking about gerrymandering.

Daniel: That's 100% true. It's a big challenge to what I'm trying

Mark: To do. Yeah. And I think that's where particularly the Democrats get it completely wrong. They extrapolate what's going on to the worst possible situation. And the Republicans do that too. Oh, Mamdani gets elected, so we're all communists now. Oh, Trump did this, democracy is over. And you can argue intellectually whether either of those things are true, but 99.99% of people in this country are more worried about the price of beef, the price of chicken, the price of gas, and how they're going to deal with that. And where I think almost every politician goes wrong, they don't sit down and try to come up with a solution when they can and when they have leverage. When you talk about affordability, affordability, let's talk about affordability. Everybody's an issue for everybody, right? Sure. Okay. What impacts affordability? Groceries. Groceries are too high. Beef. Okay. How do you get the price of beef lower? How do you get the price of this lower or that lower? Well, and it stops. I'm like, okay, let's go to the slaughterhouses. Let's go to the farmers that have the beef. Let's go to the farmers that are growing the oranges. Let's deal with the people who are actually involved with the issues that impact affordability. And let's bring them in to Dallas, Texas and sit down with a bunch of citizens and just say, okay, explain to them, explain to everybody why beef is so expensive and is there a path for us to fix it? Or is there a better alternative to beef, fried chicken or whatever it may be that puts food on people's tables at a price that's affordable? Nobody focuses on the solution. And it's the same with healthcare. Every survey that comes out now, what's the biggest challenge to affordability in your household, to your budget? Healthcare. 40 plus percent of people. So the Democrats say Medicare for all. And I'm like, I'm all for universal coverage. And then they'll say, well, every Western country has universal healthcare. Well, how did they get there? What do they do to get there? And you read the legislation and it says, first of all, everything is done at the discretion of the Secretary of Health and Human Services. How would that be working out right now? If you don't agree with whoever the secretary is, it's going to turn into a disaster. Number two, they talked about Medicare for All and all this is in the legislation from Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Jayapal. It's all going to be done basically in two years. I'm like, how are you going to convert Mayo Clinic to take only Medicare rates? How are you going to take Cleveland Clinic, Cedars-Sinainai, pick any high end hospital that spent billions of dollars on equipment to do no other country can do and get them just to take Medicare rates? How is that going to work and they're going to stay in business? Have you talked to any of them? No. Do you have a plan to get from here to there? No. But we have this model that says we're going to save $3 trillion. Have you done any behavioral analytics as part of your model? Meaning that if you cut the price that they're getting paid from A to half of A, how's their behavior going to change? Have you done any of the behavior analytics? No.

Daniel: So let me just separate this conversation to two pieces. One is the problem of capture and the other is the Mark Cuban factor. So on the first one is, in my opinion, because I've seen this, I've been studying this for many years. On every issue, the special interest wakes up in the morning, goes to sleep at night trying to advance its special interest.

Mark: Of course.

Daniel: All of us citizens have as a concentration of society, very, very important value, but it's dissipated and we're worrying about just making ends meet so we don't unite. We did a rough study. About 30% of our economy and income is captured by the special interest and all of this PBF, whatever. We would all of us be richer, 30% plus if we could unite to make sure that special interests don't hold us captured. So in my opinion, ultimately we need to create a citizenship. Yeah,

Mark: But you're not going to get them just to go away. They're not going to say, "Well, Daniel's got the builders and so we're out of luck."

Daniel: You mean the special interest? Yeah. I think one sexy issue, go one, build a win and build

Mark: Another. No, but the reason I like your builders movement is because people who build things are the ones who break the incumbents. Just like Cost Plus Drugs. All these big pharmacy benefit managers are trying to copy us now. But like Bezos said, their margin is my opportunity. They can't do it on a cost benefit analysis. And so now because they're all vertically integrated, they just move it to different subsidiaries. And so going down to the local level and saying, okay, how do we make it more affordable for pick a town in Kansas or in Pennsylvania, in Boswell, Pennsylvania, how do we turn around the economy there just in Boswell? Not worried about special interest groups, but just in Boswell. How do we make things more affordable for people in Boswell? Could be the hospital that's there or just a clinic instead of a hospital. It could be how do we help the farmers? What should they plant? If they're only making soybeans and they're trying to sell the soybeans to China, that ain't feeding nobody in Boswell, Pennsylvania or Dallas, Texas. What is it that we can do to support them so that they can make things that push them, make things more affordable? Coming up with solutions that start small and grow.

Daniel: You have an incredible brand recognition, great processing power, incredible work ethic, and you really care. You authentically care and you're very solutions oriented. What would it take? Let's make some news today. What would it take under which circumstance would you say, okay, I'm throwing in the ring, the hat in the ring and I'll run for president?

Mark: You have to convince my family. They're all out. None of them want me to do it. And honestly, I don't want to be president.

Daniel: I like that because we want somebody that's doing it to benefit the nation. But I'd rather

Mark: Healthcare, when it's all said and done, if I can fix this, then the whole country benefits. So

Daniel: It would take convincing your family and

Mark: That's it. Yeah, but put aside, I don't know if I could change healthcare as easily as president as I can right now because I got to kiss babies. I got to show up to events. I got to worry about Iran. I got to worry about all this other stuff. Now I can be focused. And by changing healthcare and we've already had a big impact and we'll have more, then that helps everybody.

Daniel: Is there a circumstance which gets so bad in our country that you and your family say, "All right, we need to get this done." I

Mark: Mean, you can always hypothesize about something, but it'd have to be really bad. Running might be fun just because of the competitive side of me, but I wouldn't want to be president.

Daniel: The other thing that you and I had a conversation along these lines one or two years ago, and what struck me was how ahead you were in terms of social media savviness and awareness. And you were like, Daniel, you're doing it all wrong. How do you focus your time to stay aware culturally? What do you do?

Mark: I go on social media and I'll pay attention to what I see. I read a lot. It's not hard just to pay attention. And if you go on Instagram, if you go on TikTok, if you go on YouTube, once you see certain things, you can tell what the feed thinks about you. And then you can even set up other accounts.

Daniel: What does that mean?

Mark: I mean, you get more of what you pursue in social media. It just gives you more of what you're interested.

Daniel: Doesn't that terrify

Mark: You? Yes. That's why I told you before that that's more important. Whoever controls the algorithm controls the citizen, controls the voter.

Daniel: That terrifies me because every time I get fed what I want to hear, I'm like, holy, whoever's the other side is getting the precise opposite.

Mark: No, exactly. And you have to recognize that and you have to be able to counter that. That's why people talk about flooding the zone. That's why Trump is so good at what he does. That's why Mamdani is great at what he does. Mamdani, it doesn't matter. I said this on Twitter and a bunch of his fans got mad at me. I'm like, he knows social media cold. He knows how to drive people to like him on social media. It doesn't matter whether his policies work or not because people are still going to vote for him because they see it all positive reinforcement of Mamdani on their social media feeds. If

Daniel: I believe that Mamdani's policies are dangerous, can I defeat him or no?

Mark: No. No, you're not going to beat him by saying his policies are dangerous any more than -

Daniel: Defeating Trump.

Mark: Yeah. Harris beat Trump. Donald Trump was brilliant when it came to social media.

Daniel: So what are

Mark: You saying? If you want to build

Daniel: Builders, if you want to help builders get elected -

Mark: You have to be great at social media. You have to be able to connect to people. You have to be able to sit and talk to them.

Daniel: But when you say you, honestly, you need the right candidates because no matter what, if you support people that don't have what it takes -

Mark: No, but have what it takes is social media now. Look at James Talarico, school teacher. He knows the Bible inside and out and he was able to use his knowledge of scripture to get involved with social media so that people who truly understood it knew that he was a good guy and people who were abusing it, he went head to head with.

Daniel: But to your point about James Talarico, I notice that the people on the red are only being fed stuff about how people -

Mark: Well, that's why it's a social media battle.

Daniel: So it's almost like you're just preaching to the choir. I don't know that -

Mark: No, that's the whole point, Daniel. That's what algorithms do in social media because the economic incentive for Facebook, et cetera, is to just get more engagement because then they put in more ads and they make a whole lot more money. And the

Daniel: More scandal and partisan and extreme, the more that they're going to

Mark: Make. Exactly, right? So the question becomes, how do you connect with real people? How do you connect? And somebody who can connect is going to be successful. So what steps do you have to take? Too many politicians want to give a speech, a stump speech and talk about this and that. No, that's dumb. You go and you sit at their house and you talk to them and you let them explain and then you come up with something that you can do and you go there and you do it. You go in and you bring in all the farmers and said, "Okay, what if I can get subsidies to switch you from soybeans if the ground supports it to something that we could sell economically here in your state or in the country that makes things more affordable for people?" That's going to get people's attention because it impacts their here and now.

Daniel: Besides cost plus, do you have another area where you dedicate a lot of time besides checking all those emails and staying aware of the universe? So you were going to say about claimable.

Mark: Yeah, get claimable. A guy named Morris, I connected with him and he's got a company that when you get denied care, which happens all too often, they've got the technology and the knowledge as doctors to go to the insurance company and always. And I'm able to help them because 60% of employees that get their healthcare through their company work for self-insured companies. We had a lady that had a heart transplant and she switched insurance companies and the new insurance company wouldn't give her her anti-rejection medication. So fortunately she saw that it was on cost plus drugs and instead of being thousands of dollars she though she was going to have to pay, it was only a couple hundred dollars. But I found out who they were claimable, found out who the employer was, found out the CEO, found a connection and said, "For this insurance company that you hired, that you're responsible for choosing, it's your company and for all your employees and their families, they chose not to spend $200 a month for anti-heart rejection medications. Would you please do it or we can have a conversation with the Wall Street Journal?" Yes. I mean, name and shame all day long. I had another one. But

Daniel: That's a business model?

Mark: Yeah.

Daniel: What is the business model? The

Mark: Business is when an insurance company denies a claim, and usually it's not an issue with drugs as much as it is with Medical procedures. We had this kid whose parent worked for a company that I won't name because they fixed it and they needed this intravenous stuff that effectively would save his leg. And if they stopped doing it and it was $18,000 a month, he was going to lose his leg. And his brother who's younger has the same genetic disease was facing the same prognosis. And so through a connection, got to the CEO and said, "Come on, it's $18,000. You're a big company. I know you didn't know about us because CEOs don't know this stuff. The insurance company isn't telling them." And so they said, "Of course we're going to pay for it." And they paid for it and I didn't have to name them and shame them. And so a

Daniel: Big - But how do they make money?

Mark: So where the provider or the pharmaceutical company is now getting paid because we got them to get paid, then we can make a percentage of that.

Daniel: Got it. I really like how you very often think outside the box and how you ask why. Do you have any tips for anybody on how to do so more?

Mark: Use AI. Don't be afraid to talk to Claude. I use Claude at ChatGPT, Gemini. I got them in my car so I can have a conversation. So I was like the other day I wanted to check my whole card on Medicare for All. And I was like, "Tell me what's happening in Canada, the origination of it." And as I'm driving, it's telling me and I'm asking it questions. And it takes a lot to get over the hesitancy of talking to your AI large language model. I think that's one way. I use it all the time to ask you questions about various things.

Daniel: To learn.

Mark: To learn and not presuming that it's always right. It's like talking to a professor. They're going to be wrong 30% of the time or to a consultant. They're going to be wrong 50% of the time. And so it's a good start. I always ask for sources and then I check the sources, which is how I learn so much more quickly than I did before. Because think about what we did two, three years ago. You go to Google, you try to formulate a search query, it comes back with 10, 15 blue checks. You're trying to go through them and have to click on them and just to see if they're valid or not. Half of them are misinformation. Half of them are trying to sell you something. One of the beauties of large language models, even though they hallucinate and get things wrong, is you can ask for the source and you can check the source to make sure it's right.

Daniel: Beyond the AI, which I get it, I also feel like you go to podcasts and news sources that you are not necessarily in agreement with because you're authentic.

Mark: Oh no, I love when people disagree with me.

Daniel: How do you develop the thick skin? Because I saw when you were fighting with Elon and others and you were just saying what you wanted to say and taking the hits.

Mark: That was during the presidential campaign. And so there was a lot at stake. And my rule was and is I only punch up. I don't have a problem going after Elon or somebody who's in a lot of power, a Ted Cruz or whoever. I'll go back against them. If it's just somebody who's trying to troll me or whatever, every now and then I'll make a funky comment or whatever.

Daniel: Is there something that you have in your personality to be strong against people like lying about you? For me, what drives me is when people lie about me. I can't stand

Mark: It. Oh yeah. Well, I mean, no, because I'm competitive, you're competitive and you want to respond on that. And it just depends on who it is because then I just tell myself, look, on X, it'll show you the number of views, the number of times someone's seen it. And if someone makes up some and two people have seen it -

Daniel: You ignore it.

Mark: You ignore it. And

Daniel: If it's significant, you'll

Mark: Respond. Significant depends on who the person is. If I think they're smart and will engage, then -

Daniel: So you're very strategic about

Mark: It. I try to be strategic. Yeah.

Daniel: Do you ever get emotional or you - I

Mark: Get mad sometimes, but that's what I said. I'll delete. I'll write it, feel better, hit delete.

Daniel: The last two quick things. First day I showed up on Shark Tank, you gave me a piece of advice. You don't remember what it is, right? I had all these ideas for things that I wanted to share, all these ideas for business advice.

Mark: Oh, then I told you don't preach?

Daniel: No, you said, Daniel, just be in the moment. Just don't be looking at your notes. Just listen. Yeah,

Mark: You had all those notes of things you wanted to say, right? And you

Daniel: Just said just be there, just be present. Yeah. Use

Mark: Your business experience to help. And

Daniel: Just let it happen. Don't be preparing yourself. Is that advice about life? Is that how you approach everything or do you sometimes-

Mark: Sometimes you have to be prepared, right? I would write the early years of Shark Tank, I would come in with a bunch of stupid things that I wanted to do or sayings. Oh, what was it? I

Daniel: Did that this last one. I couldn't get one in

Mark: Because - No, but they're all stupid, so it's easy to get in. So it was like, that's about as good as a melting snowman, I think was when I got in. Daymond and I would crack up about this old YouTube video, not my chair, not my problem. For a while, we would do bets between the sharks. Whoever could get in, shut the front door, the quickest, got $100 from everybody.

Daniel: He was never invited to that park.

Mark: Yeah, it was early days of Shark Tank. It was a little bit different. Then we all get like, okay, we're so used to doing it. But yeah, because I always tried to respect the entrepreneur and that's why I would try to get help. I'm like, "This person's got their whole life on the line more often than not, and they're on that carpet and they had to fight off a whole lot of people just to get there. And I'm just going to try to help them where I can, unless I think they're

Daniel: Scam." The one thing that I borrowed from you this last season that we just finished recording, sometimes when you wanted something, you just did it. And I'm always like, my negotiating self is trying to get the best deal. And there was a really, I think it's going to be a killer business. And I did a Mark Cuban. I was like, "Okay, what's the number you want?" That's it. They jumped and everybody was just watching. I'm like,

Mark: "There you go. Mark Cuban." Yeah, because if it's like $250,000 for 10% versus 15%, if it's a good deal, you're going to make a lot of money. But my problem was I would just get bored, like listen to Kevin talk about royalties and listen to Lori, who I love. Well, tell me about yourself.

Daniel: Rashaun and I were talking about, I had him on for build or break and he and I were showing how we've not earned the right to sit like Mark Cuban because towards the end of the day, you're filming 10 episodes sometimes. You're starting at 7:00 AM in the morning, 6:00 AM you wake up and it's 8:00 PM and you are sometimes very comfortable like this. And Rashaun and I are still at this stage where we're behaving really.

Mark: That's because my back hurt or something hurt more than anything else. But we're doing emails in between the minute I'm done with them.

Daniel: Last thing I learned about you that I didn't realize that you and I have in common. I also graduated a year early and took night school courses and went to college a 17 year old. Am I right that that happened in your story? You

Mark: Just dropped out.

Daniel: What?

Mark: Yeah. I started taking night classes my junior year of high school and just never went back and then transferred my credits from Pitt back to high school to graduate.

Daniel: How did that happen?

Mark: Just didn't go back to high school.

Daniel: You were bored?

Mark: They wouldn't let me take a business class my junior year and I was like, "But I want to learn business and da, da, da, da." And they're like, "Well, you're not a senior yet." And I had done well in these classes at night. What did your

Daniel: Parents say?

Mark: They didn't really understand. It was just like, "Okay, I did this. I'm going to college early." They're like, "Fine, you're going to college early." So they were happy because they had never gone to college.

Daniel: So you challenged this stupid system.

Mark: Oh yeah. But it was even stupider because I took Russian in high school and I was like, "Okay, I want to see if I could handle a grad class at Pitt." And I couldn't. It was way over my head. But I had snuck in. So I get to Indiana and I transfer there. And my freshman year, this was way back when you had to stand in line to register for a class. It wasn't online. And I'm looking to register for a business class. And then over here, the line for this statistics class, K-501 was like three people. I'm like, "I'm going to go stand on that line and register." Well, it was the MBA class. And I'm like, "Okay, well, if I can do well in this MBA class, then I'm going to kill college. I'm going to do great." So I took it and got an A, and that's not even the best part of the story. The best part of the story, the professor was a guy named Wayne Winston, who I loved, and he always used sports examples to teach statistics. Fast forward 20 years later, give or take, I just bought the Mavs. I'm at Mavs versus Indiana in Indianapolis, and I'd just gotten done watching my old stats prof win on Jeopardy. And all of a sudden I hear this guy, Mark, Mark, Mark, out of the stands. And I never would've remembered him from way back when. And it was Wayne Winston, and I only recognized him because he had just won and killed it on Jeopardy. And we started talking about stats and he literally became the first analytics guy for an NBA team because I snuck into an MBA statistics class when I was 18 in Indiana.

Daniel: That's an amazing story.

Mark: Yeah, it's great. And it gets better because -

Daniel: And he helped.

Mark: Right. Well, I took that class and I got an A, so they all assumed I was in the MBA program. So I just started taking MBA classes and finance and other business classes, entrepreneurship class, which I loved, but it was all MBA level. And I was literally doing tutoring for some people. And I was 18, 19 years old. So by the time I was finished with my sophomore year, I had almost a year and a half of my MBA done. And then I come back from my junior year and the head of the MBA program saw me on campus, walked up to me and just started pounding me in the chest. I don't know how you did it, but you were going back to undergrad. You were not in the MBA program. Oh,

Daniel: Upset, founding you upset.

Mark: Yeah, because I had snuck in and I was just paying regular tuition and I had snuck in, but I was - And

Daniel: He was upset.

Mark: Yeah, because I had gotten away with it and I was doing well because think about it, some 18, 19 year old kid that just snuck in and was just killing it.

Daniel: But why was he upset about it?

Mark: Because I wasn't in the MBA program because -

Daniel: But I think also because you were not following the stupid system rules. Well,

Mark: Of course, right? I didn't apply. I didn't get in. But that

Daniel: Reveling you is the fundamental lessons of how you've built so much.

Mark: Yes, everything I've done. Everything I've done. I mean, by the time I was a senior, I wasn't even 21 and I was opening up a bar on campus. And then we got shut down because we had a lot of underage drinkers because they were my friends, which is also a great thing that happened to me. I was fortunate because who knows, I'd still be working in Bloomington, Indiana. It's crazy.

Daniel: If your bar had worked out.

Mark: Right, right. When I go back there, I'll see people working at other bars that used to work for me when I was a junior and senior in college, which is just

Daniel: Crazy. Thank God you got shut down.

Mark: Exactly. Exactly. Motley's Pub. All

Daniel: Right. We're now going to move to the Mexican Inquisition. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions and you need to choose between what I would think are tough choices and you need to make a choice. An unsung hero who helped you get here, Todd Wagner or Martin Woodall?

Mark: Probably Todd. Yeah, Todd Martin. Martin was smart. Both of them, I always partner well with people who are very anal perfectionists because I'm not either. And Martin helped me get started, but Todd really took it to the next one. Martin was - He was my partner at Micro Solutions.

Daniel: And then Todd was at- At Broadcast.

Mark: Broadcast. And Todd was the one who came and I had lunch with that originated the whole broadcast idea.

Daniel: Broadcast, we didn't get to talk about it, but it's a company that you sold for $5.7 billion.

Mark: Yeah, in stock. Yeah. It was the first streaming company, so it was a big accomplishment for us.

Daniel: Who'd be a more interesting dinner guest? Michael Lewis or Michael Jordan?

Mark: Michael Lewis. Michael Jordan's fun and I've had a lot of fun times with Michael, but we both know basketball. We're probably tired of talking about basketball.

Daniel: What historical figure would be more fascinating to have lunch with? Sam Walton or Bill Veeck?

Mark: Yeah, Bill Veeck. I could tell you wrote these questions. He owned the Chicago White Sox back in the 30s, I think it was. And his idea of trying to win games was to bring in a midget, Eddie Gaedel, I think his name was, that was like three foot six, and the strike zone was that big. And so it was smart and it was fun. And actually when I first bought the Mavs, people compared me to Bill Veeck simply because he would try anything and so would I.

Daniel: What's one thing that broke you and eventually helped build you into stronger leader, getting fired from your business software or being boxed out of the Mavericks basketball operations after the sale?

Mark: Probably the second one. Yeah, I learned some hard lessons. I'm a really trusting partner. If I shake your hand, I mean it. So yeah, that was a first for me.

Daniel: What shaped you more? Selling broadcast.com or 15 seasons on Shark Tank?

Mark: Oh, selling Broadcast.com.

Daniel: Really?

Mark: You wouldn't know who I was if that never happened to me.

Daniel: No, what shaped you more? No,

Mark: Selling broadcast. Yeah, because that changed my life more than anything. And from selling kind, there's being wealthy and then there's being, oh my God, I never imagined this. And that shapes you more than anything.

Daniel: What do you do to stay grounded and to make sure that that doesn't prevent you from being a builder?

Mark: I've been broke and I liked my life, loved my life when I was broke. So I drove up in a Kia. I mean, it's just like I'm not all about the trappings. It's not like I'd rather eat at a 7-Eleven or just then go out to someplace fancy. So I'm not all that much worried about that. I still work out at the same gym, play basketball with the same people. And I got three kids in their teens and 20s who humble me by the minute.

Daniel: I think that's probably the number one thing I like your kids. What was harder to reach your first million or your first billion?

Mark: First million. Yeah, because I was broke sleeping on the floor and I just remember thinking I remember thinking I have $15,000 in accounts receivable. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. And then I remember before I was worth a million dollars, we had like $84,000 in the bank and I got a call from the bank, Republic Bank, which was long gone, saying, "Sir, we have somebody who went through the drive through and cashed checks in her name." I'm like, "What?" And they're like, "Yeah, she whited out the payee and wrote her name on the check." I'm like, "You didn't cash them, did you?" And yes, we did, sir. That's what we do. A girl named Renee Hardy took 82 of the $84,000 we had in the bank. And that money that she took, she was supposed to just go to the post office and put it in to just send them. And she did the whiteout thing and we had to go back to all of our vendors because they were our payables. Had to go back to all of our vendors and work something out.

Daniel: And did you find her?

Mark: No, I've never seen her since.

Daniel: Never found

Mark: Her? Yeah.

Daniel: Did you look for her?

Mark: No.

Daniel: Really?

Mark: There's no point.

Daniel: I had two or three like that in my life. Not too many, right? But I fought crazy. I can't stand what people do that. We had one group steal a container, a trailer of kind bars, and the insurance was going to pay for it, but it's not just that you lose the product, you're losing the sales, you're losing control, you're losing the quality potentially. The product can end up being discounted and hurting the brand. I called my friend Tim Sperry and I said, "Pose as the buyer," because I knew whole trailers, like a million dollars worth of kind bars. It popped up somewhere and the minute it popped up, team's like, "Yeah, I want to buy your product." And we work with the California Highway Police and it took me a little bit. We intercepted the product. We caught them all. Good

Mark: For you.

Daniel: If you had to invest in today, which league would you invest in? MLB or National Hockey League?

Mark: MLB. Yeah, I just think they finally figured out to put the fans first and speed up the game. And I think relatively speaking in valuations, they're a little bit more sane than even the NHL.

Daniel: What is more critical in business? Luck or a hard work ethic?

Mark: Depends on where you are. If you want to be a billionaire, luck, all day, every day. If you want to make your first million, and even then it's hard, but effort and persistence.

Daniel: What creates more lasting change? Billionaire philanthropy or systemic reform?

Mark: Probably neither. It goes back to what I said earlier, just boots on the ground, but design action items. Actually doing something, that's a better way to put it. Doing something. Politicians like to talk about things and think legislation changes everything, but there's no service level agreement on legislation. If I were president, one of my signature legislations would be any law that's passed has to have a service level agreement. Meaning if you say this is what it's expected to do and the budget office says these are the numbers after year one, okay, you get one mulligan.

Daniel: I still think you should run for president. We're going to move now to the last segment of our conversation. It's very quick. It goes build or break. Okay. If you think it's good, build, if not break. Ready? Build or break, NBA fines.

Mark: Build.

Daniel: But you were off the subject too.

Mark: Still the king of getting fined. Yeah.

Daniel: So why build?

Mark: Because it means that you're saying something the NBA doesn't like or doesn't agree with or is concerned about. And you're only going to say it if there's a real good reason and you think, or at least for me, and think it could have an impact.

Daniel: Did you follow these NBA semifinals? Not withstanding that Adam Silver and I are very dear friends and he just texted me something very nice earlier today. But do you agree that the way the Thunder was flopping was completely out of control?

Mark: It's awful. See, that's where the NBA misses me because now they have no reason to listen to me, but I would race on that. I literally went back and looked. The Mavs beat the thunder two years ago, back when we still had Luka and a much better team. And I went back and looked at one of his games against us. All of his shots never fell down. Not one time. Not one time. But it's the way the NBA looks and runs their officiating program. I mean -

Daniel: It's almost like you can't blame him from doing that if he can get away with it.

Mark: Yeah, because it works. But the way -

Daniel: But Adam Silver had instituted a rule that if you did that, they could give you a technical foul.

Mark: It was the dumbest rule ever.

Daniel: Why?

Mark: So that

Daniel: If you flopped,

Mark: They could give you a technical, right?

Daniel: Why was it the dumbest rule, by the

Mark: Way? So most refs aren't capable of being able to identify a flop when they're also looking to see if a foul occurred. A couple senior ones are. But prior to that, there was and is a rule that says after the game, they could look at a flop and assess a fine for that flop. And so when they were having the discussion in the board of governors meetings about this new rule that they want to add technicals for flopping in game, and they showed these examples, and obvious flops. I was like, raise my hand for a question. "Hey guys, those examples you showed, did you fine any of those players after the fact? "And the guy who was up front who knew the answer and was making the presentation said no. And Adam just dropped

Daniel: It. You just enforce the existing rules is your point.

Mark: Yeah.

Daniel: We had a solution happen. And you think that's a solution?

Mark: Yeah. If they would find these guys, but they come up with excuses because part of it is they don't want to make the refs look bad. And if you're fining these players,

Daniel: It

Mark: Implies that they weren't doing their job.

Daniel: Build or break asking AI for medical advice.

Mark: Build as long as it's only interim advice. Always check with your doctor. But yeah, because you can't call your doctor for everything. And I'll just tell you, so I take thyroid medication, levothyroxine. And I also had for a while, low ferritin, low iron levels. And I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get my iron levels up. So I just put it into ChatGPT. This was a couple years ago. And I'm like," Is there a conflict between the two? "Yes, there was. Don't ever take them within four hours of each other. I had no idea. But then there's other apps like openevidence.com that I invested in, which is just - You

Daniel: Invested in open a while back?

Mark: Yeah. Why did you

Daniel: Never invite me covered on? I think it's a great company. Yeah. And the CEO is insane, not the founder.

Mark: Yeah. I mean, I don't really know him that well, but in any event, so I asked a question on OpenEvidence. I asked a question on Claude and then I looked at the sources. OpenEvidence had New England Journal of Medicine, da, da, da, da, da. All the responses on Claude for this medical question was Wikipedia. And so I'm not taking Wikipedia as the answer. Yeah, be careful. I'm not taking Reddit as the answer.

Daniel: Definitely not that one. Build or Break. Full contact, WWE Wrestling.

Mark: Oh, I did it twice. I loved it. Yeah. So they reached out to me in 2003 after I just bought the Mavs. And they said, "We have WWE coming to Dallas. And would you like to participate because we'll get celebrities come in and do cameos?" I'm like, "I'm happy to do it, but I have two rules. One, I get hit and two, I get to hit somebody." And so I got RKO'd by Randy Orton, and so we had to practice it and do this stuff and it was still hard. It still hurt, but that was my rule in 2003 when I did it the first time. Then I did it again in 2009 and I did this whole thing. It was WWE Live and I did this whole thing with John Cena and everything. And there's this guy arrested named Sheamus. And they were like, "Okay, Sheamus has never hit the canvas. We know your rules. You get to put him down so he hits the camera. I hits the canvas, but on the flip side, he's going to put you through a table." And I'm like, "Okay, that's going to look cool on video forever." And so it was a real table, a regular table. I have to

Daniel: Watch

Mark: This. Yeah, just Google my name and WWE, but it was a real table. And they told me, "He's going to put you right in the center of the table. It'll just crack in half, but keep your head down because if your head's up and you hit, you'll break your neck." I'm like, "My head will be down." And so he puts me through, I guess I ate too much that day because he got me a little bit high and we broke the table. I did my whole pretend I'm dead thing and got out of the ring and all that stuff. I was sore for two weeks. My back hurt so bad. Those guys deserve so much respect because it may be orchestrated, but it's still athletic and it's still painful.

Daniel: Build or break Dogecoin as actual currency break. Build or break, federal crypto regulation.

Mark: Build.

Daniel: Build or break hedging.

Mark: Martin Woodall came to me and he said, this was 1999, right after we had sold to Yahoo. And he said, "There's this house available where this guy spent three years and $25 million to build this house and he has to sell it." I'm like, "Why?" And he's like, "Because he never sold a share of stock in his company and the stock of his company just cratered for a variety of reasons and it went from tens or $20 to pennies and he needs money and he needs to sell his house." And I'm like, "Well, how much is it going to cost?" He goes, "You spent 25, three years, only lived there eight months with three kids and it'll cost you $12 million." I'm like, "Beautiful house." Said, yes. Still live there today 27 years later.

Daniel: But two lessons from that. Number one, you got a house for half of what it was worth. And number two taught you about hedging.

Mark: Yeah, he never protected himself. He just always assumed that it's his company, things will be great. It goes back to what we talked about early on, that you can't just always assume that you're right and smart, that things can and will go against what you expect.

Daniel: Build or break, retiring at 35.

Mark: Build. Yeah, build. That was my mission. I bought a book by Andrew Tobias, How to Retire by the Age of 35 when I was in college. And the whole thing was, if you save enough money, you can live off of the interest rates if you live like a student. And at that time, interest rates were like 15%. And so it made perfect sense that I was just going to save as much as I could, not have to live fancy, and I could just have fun and just do whatever I wanted. And that was my mission. And I think that also got me in the mindset that I don't need fancy stuff. I have that house for the reasons I mentioned, but I drive a Kia. Obviously I'm not about getting all dressed up, all that stuff.

Daniel: But I think for me, my favorite part about the way you've explained this to me in the past also is that what you and I do is not work. It's fun. You solving problems, you're solving puzzles, you're creating value. That's

Mark: A

Daniel: Hobby.

Mark: Yeah. I mean, that's why I'll never quote unquote retire. I retired a long time ago. I literally, after I sold Micro Solutions, I bought a lifetime pass on American Airlines, partied like a rockstar, just went everywhere, moved out to LA, got a house on the beach, shared it with two flight attendants, took acting classes, acted in B movies whose names I'll never mention. And your

Daniel: Teeth were already better at that point.

Mark: Oh yeah, I had fixed my teeth by then. But yeah, I was just going to just love life. And then I went back to Dallas because I wanted to get back with this girl that I had dated, which didn't work out. But then I met with Todd Wagner and that's how AudioNet, which turned into broadcast.com was born.

Daniel: Amazing journey. Yeah,

Mark: It's been crazy. Thank

Daniel: You so much.

Mark: Just getting started. Thanks, Daniel. It was fun.

Daniel: Thank you. We want you to become a builder with us. So subscribe to Build or Break Now and leave us a comment or our review. We're trying to build a movement and you can be part of it by hitting the notification bell and telling us what you think about this episode and by telling all your friends to watch too. Thank you.