EP 37: Mark Cuban Talks with Us About How He Succeeded, Advice for Young Entrepreneurs, Buying the Mavericks & Cost Plus Drugs

In the 37th episode of Cartoon Avatars Mark Cuban joins to talk about his life story, how and why he succeeded, and his best and worst business decisions. Plus advice for young entrepreneurs, his experience buying the Mavericks, crypto, the Internet bubble, fame, Cost Plus Drugs, and his biggest issue with the SEC. And somehow even more. (0:00) Welcome Rashad (1:20) Ghostwriting tweets (16:18) Mark Cuban backstory (17:24) Introducing Mark Cuban (18:23) When Bill Gates stole Mark’s girl (19:24) Making his email public (20:49) Mark’s superpower (22:29) Advice for young entrepreneurs (25:52) Growing up in Pittsburgh (30:27) Owning the sales process (35:18) Mark’s journey (41:10) Retiring at 30 (44:00) Broadcast.com (47:50) Recognizing the internet bubble (50:25) Crypto and early Internet parallels (58:28) Buying the Mavericks (1:02:50) Create your own narrative (1:06:08) Fame (1:08:37) Cost Plus Drugs (1:26:30) Rapid fire questions (1:31:25) Problem with the SEC (1:40:24) Outro Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Produced: Andrew Nadeau and Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music: Griff Lawson 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/three-cartoon-avatars/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://instagram.com/cartoonavatars 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/cartoonavatars 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@cartoonavatars About the Show A Saturday morning podcast hosted by Logan Bartlett (Partner and Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures) covering the tech news with his friends and other people with industry expertise. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the 37th episode of Cartoon Avatars. I'm your host, Logan Bartlett, and I am joined today by Rashad Assir, producer, occasional guest, regular TikTok guy.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  What's up, Logan?

• 0:21Logan Bartlett?

  How are you doing, Rashad?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  I'm doing well. How are you? How's San Francisco?

• 0:24Logan Bartlett?

  Good. Do you like my attire? I'm dressed up, for people that are listening, I'm dressed up in a blazer, looking much more formal than normally the hat and t-shirt look that I normally rock. We have dinner with much of our limited partners tonight, and I'm doing a little presentation on the state of the market that maybe next week I'll talk through. I don't know if we'll publish it or what. I haven't really thought about it. Been sort of finishing it up. But yeah, I was actually wearing a full suit and I felt like an asshole. You know, I sort of forget what attire is appropriate, and so I switched into jeans. So I'm rocking like blazer and jeans, which feels appropriate, like kind of, you know, not trying too hard, but also looking professional.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the classic, the professor look.

• 1:12Logan Bartlett?

  That's right. Yeah, I'm a liberal arts school professor, or a boarding school like English teacher.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  You look great.

• 1:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, thank you. So in addition to the market getting routed, one of the things that's much more in our sweet spot of talking about this week was a Business Insider article about VC and ghostwriting of tweets. And it was written, to the extent people saw it, it was written like first person from this anonymous ghostwriter, and Business Insider went through and confirmed that this person, they know their identity. And they confirmed, I think with wire receipts and bank account statements and stuff, that this person was actually doing it. The person said that they were a former venture capital principal,

• 2:03Logan Bartlett?

  and that they are now a founder, and they're doing this as a side hustle, making, they said last year they made 200 grand. Doing it, spending about five hours a week. So I, I guess a funny little inside thing. I got pinged by a Washington Porsche post reporter. Two months ago or someone, something, someone that like had heard something about this and they were asking if I, if I knew anything about it. So a handful of reporters has, have been, I guess sniffing around this topic here. Um, I can't say, like, listen, I'm not going to undermine the, the journalism credentials of insider. Uh, I, I assume this happens, right?

• 2:45Logan Bartlett?

  There's people with a lot of money that want to look cool and sound smart. And then there's people that, uh, have time and, and are cool or are smart. And I think there's obviously a marketplace that can exist between the, those two things. Uh, so I don't want to doubt that it, it, uh, it, it doesn't happen. I, I will say that a bunch of the, there, there were a handful of things that we can kind of talk through that, that sort of threw off my, threw on my bullshit detector. Uh, and just, just little things that like sounded a little off in it. And so I don't know if the person was embellishing it or what, but, uh, there were like enough little, uh, instances that just seemed a little bit exaggerated or untrue,

• 3:29Logan Bartlett?

  or just like implausible for me to believe that it did make me pause and question it, but I have had it sent to me by like seven people this week or something. And so it's, it's right up your alley.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, uh, it was definitely like a Yeah. The thing that jumped at me was the 25 to 50 clients. I don't know what is reasonable of this, but like,

• 3:48Logan Bartlett?

  I agree a hundred percent. That was one of the things that I, you know, you would think, let me be fully transparent. I, I don't know a single person, uh, that is, you know, actively working with a ghostwriter on per tweets, uh, and that's doing this, let alone 25 to 50 clients.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  It's also, it's a funny range to give. Like it's a, it's a hundred percent Delta range. You know, like, is it 25 or 50?

• 4:16Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. It's a it's a full standard deviation apart of like, it could be, you know, it could be 25 or it could be twice as many. Yeah, it's interesting. I I agree with that. Like, the the number was, and you would think that if the number were that high, right, and this is just one person doing it. I would think that I would know that this would be like a very liquid market that we that that there would be a bunch of partners and M Ds could log into this portal of like ghostwriters for tech Twitter or something. And, you know, and so I'm a little skeptical on that in general. But, yeah, I mean, the the tone, if you blend it out, like, they're making about $800

• 5:00Logan Bartlett?

  an hour, which is obviously quite high, doing five hours a week and making about 200 grand. I thought one of the funny things was that that they have a special CRM they use for ghostwriting, a dedicated laptop, a dedicated phone, and a separate email address. And it's like, dude, you're managing 25 to 50 clients. Like, why do you have this? Why do you have a CRM and a separate phone for this? It's not like you're working with, like, the NSA or something, you know? It's like, it seems like you could probably get by on your, like, normal cellphone or something. So I don't know.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny. I I think hourly rate, $800 an hour, I think I I've I've talked to some, like, LinkedIn influencers that will do this for a few friends, and they say that they charge, like, $5,000 a post. I also know a ton of creators on TikTok and stuff like that.

• 5:48Logan Bartlett?

  He didn't say charge, he or she didn't say charging $500 or $800 an hour. That's five hours a week into $200,000 a year, right? And so I assume this is much more performance based than it is, you know, actually that. I mean, that's an insane hourly rate. That's like top end of lawyers trying to get out of, like, white collar crime or something, right?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 6:14Logan Bartlett?

  I uh, I do think like one of the other things that they uh, they said in this, I agree with the, obviously in some ways, like even starting this podcast was originally, I was kind of fucking around on Twitter was kind of the means of me doing this, right? And I, I will send, as you see, I will send things to friends and stuff and be like, hey, is this funny? Or like, should I post this or whatever? And we'll talk through uh, different ideas. But uh, one of the other claims that just seemed a little outlandish here was that uh, the person said, most VCs who are playing the content game employ a bunch of ghostwriters. I know people who make almost seven figures doing this. And, and again, like ghostwriters have been around for a while and like these long blog

• 6:59Logan Bartlett?

  posts that VCs will do oftentimes in market maps, generally they're done by in large part, an associate or an intern, or maybe an outsourced writer, a tech writer in some way, right? But like, one, I know for a fact that most VCs who are playing the content game are not employing a bunch of writers. Like that is factually inaccurate in my experience. And so again, it's just one of those little things that like undermines the credibility of reading this post to me. But I will say, the distribution, one of the points that did ring true, and I guess this sort of goes to the reason to have a podcast at all, is like, there is this, it used to be this

• 7:40Logan Bartlett?

  cottage industry that was very built on like one-to-one relationships and rooms. And now with social media or whatever, there is an opportunity to cultivate uh, brands and awareness in a much more one-to-many uh, way, right? And so again, I can't say it's like, I'm sure this is happening. And I'm sure it's happening in, in different parts, but I just find it hard to believe in terms of like how some of these things are characterized here.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, the parasocial relationships thing and the part about like being able to communicate your thoughts and have a following and then Have people feel like they know you before you actually get to meet them for the first time? Like, that, that stuff all rang true as, as it gets towards the end of the post. I think that's true.

• 8:23Logan Bartlett?

  What do you think about, like, you're in the world of content creation, uh, you're thinking about this every day, right? And you have relationships with other creators and, uh, people that are, uh, comedians or are trying to make it and also make money while they're trying to, to make it, uh, i- in general. What do you think about, like, this relationship that exists? Is this just an efficient market? Does it feel disingenuous if people are, um, leveraging other people's voices to help them come out with different things? Like, what, what's your sentiment in general about the relationship that exists

• 9:04Logan Bartlett?

  between, like, individual creators and the people that are creating and all that? Like, uh, is it bad? Have I seen examples of creators that hire writers to help them scale and make more content, you mean? I guess, I mean, Rashad, you live, you live this every day, uh, in terms of, like, making content and producing stuff. And you were obviously doing it as a side hustle. And now you're, you're helping us with a bunch of different stuff. What, what do you think about, there are certain industries, I feel like, in which it's totally accepted to have other people writing your words for you. Politicians, for example, like, have speechwriters. And I don't think anyone would ever question, like, did a politician sit down and write those words? But then, like, Drake, as a rapper, gets crushed all the

• 9:49Logan Bartlett?

  time for having ghostwriters coming up with the raps and that it's disingenuous and all of that. So it's interesting, um, different people. And I think comedians often fall in the, the middle of, of some of that. Like, obviously Jon Stewart, or whatever, when he was doing The Daily Show, or Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, like, everyone knows that they kind of have a writer's room behind their voice. Uh, but then, I think in stand-up, right? Uh, people... Dane Cook or whoever, like, there's always been people that have been taken down for having not their own ideas or like having writers write on their behalf. What do you, what do you think that is? Is it just that we, we accept certain areas of people having their own voice and in others, you know, it would, uh, less so?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  I think so. And also like when you're putting on a show like Jon Stewart or Trevor Noah, like The Daily Show, this is every day and you have to come up with like unique takes. Like it's completely unreasonable to think that that person could come up with all the jokes themselves. From my perspective, and I, I don't even know that this is the right way to think about it. Like I could probably produce way more content if I thought more strategically about how to, deploy different people and different minds to doing this. But content is such a, like authenticity is such an important thing to me and content. But even when I do workshop things with other people, I always find myself just rewriting the thing in my own very unique voice.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  And that's kind of like the only thing that I have in my videos is like my very unique perspective. And when I feel myself deviating a little bit from that, I don't know. It just, it just doesn't feel good to me and I, I don't do it. So I don't know. That's my, that's my perspective.

• 11:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I, I will, uh, at times, like there's always, people will recycle tweets that they see like fairly regularly. You'll see something that you know you saw like a year before from someone else, right? And it just gets redone in a different way. And I, I don't know why that always makes me, it always bothers me, right? That like someone is getting credit for something that they actually didn't come up with, right? But I don't think it would bother me to the same extent if, uh, if they paid someone $500 or something for, uh, that joke and then they published it, right? And so there's something about like,

• 12:11Logan Bartlett?

  Creativity and also like acknowledgement for it and the capitalist market. And so when you're stealing something, it's kind of like, fuck you. But if it's fair market working with it, then I don't know.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, as a writer that's getting paid to do that, I think you you kind of accept that even if this joke turns into a banger and and tons of views and all of these good things come from it. You've accepted that you're not going to get credit for that joke the second you sort of go into that sort of agreement or business agreement.

• 12:46Logan Bartlett?

  But you've had situations where like you've given ideas to other people. I know we talked about it this week and like, you know, it's different when, I guess, what's your sentiment when you give an idea to someone else and they run with it? Do you? Do you just want to see it succeed?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe just like if you're like, ultimately, you're going to be, the goal is to meet these people in person. And so when someone finds out your Twitter personality and your real life personality are completely different. Like, that's one thing that I'd just be wearing. Yeah, I guess something that kind of throws me for a loop with this whole ghostwriter thing is like, eventually, your goal as a VC, if you're building a brand, is to, you know, meet these founders in real life and be in a room with these people like.

• 13:30Logan Bartlett?

  Unless it's like crypto, unless you're doing like pseudonymous funding, but yes, for the most part.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:35Logan Bartlett?

  In the normal world that I like to operate in, funding human beings. Yeah.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  In the world that I've observed so far. Right. And so then my worry would be if I'm hiring a ghostwriter to do all my tweets is that once I get in the room with the founder, you know, are they going to notice that my personality is completely different than what my brand is online?

• 13:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, you know, it's funny. I mean, that's an interesting observation, and I agree. And it's something that that I found where I I sort of for a while played a character on Twitter during COVID. And I was kind of like. I don't know, Colbertish in on the joke a little bit. Like, the person in this article actually said, it was somewhat familiar, they said, "At first, I used Twitter like anybody else. I was a principal in the VC world. I developed this sardonic, in-on-the-joke voice, a kind of parody," right? And I would say I kind of did the same thing. And in starting a podcast and talking more and more, where people, I think, have gotten more of a breadth of, like, perspective on how I think and how I talk and all that, you realize

• 14:38Logan Bartlett?

  some of these things are, like, just one-dimensional, right? And I don't think anyone ever thought that I was only gonna joke all the time, and I got to where I was in my career, right? That would be kind of a weird promotion path, if I was, like, cracking jokes in every meeting, you know? Just like, at some point, someone would be annoyed with me if I was just, like, playing an act. And so, but there is that, there is that congruity between the two, right? Where you need to make sure it's, it is somewhat consistent with how you're gonna operate, or at least the brand that you want people to perceive. And I think

• 15:19Logan Bartlett?

  we've probably both been in the world of, like, you meet someone online that's very different than, than, or you meet someone, you have a perception of someone, then you meet them, and they're, like, totally different, which I think people will hear on the backside of this episode. Like, Mark Cuban, by the way, in all my interactions, exactly the same person. And I had people reach out to me after I published that, and, like, every single person said, in every situation that they'd been around him, he is 100% the same person of who he is. But there is that element of, like, trying to make sure it's, it's consistent across the board. And so...

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it can be a little exaggerated, but when it deviates completely, and it's, like, orthogonal to your personality, like, you're just setting yourself up for failure. I already feel like, when I go on a date with someone or something that's, like, seen my content before, that I have to show up and be, like, this funny person, and, like, you know, there's already that added layer of pressure. To do that with someone else's jokes on my page, like, no, no fucking way.

• 16:17Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Cool. Well, what you're gonna hear now is Mark Cuban, a person that is consistent in our interactions here, as well as, as well as every story I've heard about him, as I alluded to. Mark was great. Super interesting conversation. He was very gracious with his time. We blocked an hour and we ended up going, I think 90-ish minutes or whatever, an hour and 20 minutes. I tried to sneak in a little bit of getting like Mavericks tickets at the end and we'll see. We'll see. I think we had a good thing going on, but by the end I was really like shooting my shot. And I was like, oh, Knicks, Mavs, December 27th. And he's like, oh yeah, you know, sounds good. So I think I opened the door enough, but not enough that like

• 17:01Logan Bartlett?

  I'm gonna show up in Dallas and try to get tickets from him. But you know, maybe this was the start of a budding friendship between me and Cubes.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Were you always attracted to European white men?

• 17:11Logan Bartlett?

  I was proud of that. I came up with that in the moment, too. I write down my thoughts.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  That was a good one.

• 17:16Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, we'll let people hear that.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  I think you caught him off guard a little bit. It was great.

• 17:19Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I caught him off guard a few times with some of the questions. So, all right, good. Well, you'll hear Cuban now. Where in the world are you?

• 17:25Speaker 02

  I'm in Dallas.

• 17:26Logan Bartlett?

  Nice. Yeah, I like the backdrop.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, you like that? Got a little NBA trophy work in.

• 17:31Logan Bartlett?

  I gotta give you the full disclosure here and you can drop if this is a problem, but I'm a Knicks season ticket holder. And I don't know what your relationship with the Knicks are right now, but.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  No, like I say, it was just another team.

• 17:42Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, good, good. That's what I like to hear. Well, I was going to the preseason games and, and you know, I'm appreciative of some of the guys that have come over of late, so.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Love Jalen. There's no question about it.

• 17:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, he's such a good, he just doesn't look the part, but he certainly, I mean, I don't want to get you in trouble, but he's, he's such a talented, like, I don't know. I mean, it's been 15 years of not having a point guard.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, he can play for sure, for sure.

• 18:06Logan Bartlett?

  Well, thanks for doing this. So I'm gonna take you in a bunch of different directions, if that's cool, and play, play some of the hits. I've gone back and listened to you. I realize this isn't your first rodeo of doing podcasts, so I, some of the stuff that maybe you've talked about in the past, some of the stuff you haven't, if that works.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Let's rock and roll.

• 18:23Logan Bartlett?

  Awesome. Cool. Well, maybe bad lead off. So, so Bill Gates stole a girl from you one time.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, back in the 80s. It was at Comdex. Comdex was like the biggest computer convention in Vegas and we would work hard and we would play hard. And I was hanging out with some friends and talking to some girls. They went to get a drink. They never, I went to get a drink. They, you know, they never came back. And so. Then talking to him later, talking to my friends later, found out that they went to hang out with newly minted IPO zillionaire, um, Bill Gates. And, you know, I thought I was better looking, but sometimes money matters.

• 19:00Logan Bartlett?

  People think of this like charitable kind of dorky guy, uh, that he is today, right? Uh, giving all the money philanthropy and all that. But back in the day, I mean, there was a little bit of a party culture and all. Yeah, he, he had a good time.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  I, I don't know. I don't know him well at all. So I, I couldn't speak to his, um, proclivities, but all I know is what happened.

• 19:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I guess we can look at the scoreboard on that one. What are the questions I have for you? You, you seem to respond to email, uh, super quick, uh, quickly. Your email's been out there for a long time. How do you actually do that? How are you able to process? I assume you get thousands of emails a day. I have a hard time with whatever the tens a day I get. Uh, but how are you able to respond so fast?

• 19:40Speaker 02

  It's really easy. First of all, Gmail works really well because they have the AI-generated responses. And so they, it's, it's really taught itself a lot of my responses. So typically what I'll do is, um, I'll just read the, the first line or first paragraph. And, you know, I'll know almost immediately if I want to read anymore. And if I don't want to read anymore, I just hit the delete key. I don't promise to respond to all of them, but they'll at least get my attention. Um, and then if I read past the first paragraph, then Google's probably got a response if I'm not interested. But if you get me past the first paragraph and I am interested, then I'll start peppering you with questions and see where it takes us.

• 20:18Logan Bartlett?

  That's good. I mean, it's a, it's a very, um, uh, I guess humble way to, it sounds like you're doing this all on your own and don't have people managing it and all that stuff.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  No, I'm the only one that sees my email.

• 20:30Logan Bartlett?

  And once upon a time, you actually published it, right? On a, uh, for the Mavs, right? You published it?

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. When I first bought the Mavs, I put it up there so that, you know, they were my customers and I just bought the team. I wanted them to know that I was responsible. And I cared about what they thought. And so I put my email up on the Jumbotron and, you know, I responded to every single fan's email.

• 20:49Logan Bartlett?

  It's impressive. Now, I think, what do you think of as your superpower, the thing that you do uniquely well, that's allowed you to succeed as well as you have?

• 20:58Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, it's hard to ever know for sure, but I think one, one of my strengths is I can, I can drill down on something in seconds, things that other people have to go research and figure out. I mean, you know, it's like on Shark Tank, because someone comes on and pitches me, I know exactly what their business is, you know, two minutes after they, they've started talking, if not sooner. Um, I, I just have a good understanding of different types of businesses. And I, and I'm, it's pretty simple for me to put myself in the shoes of the entrepreneur and what they're trying to accomplish. So that's first and foremost. And then I'm just, I'm always curious. I think curiosity is my second superpower, where I just continuously try to learn because that's probably, you

• 21:40Speaker 02

  know, they always say knowledge is power, and I truly believe that. But it's a continuous search for that new knowledge. You know, Bill Gates, not Bill Gates, Steve Jobs said everything's a remix. And I truly believe that. Where there's always new information coming. And if you have a solid foundation, and you add more to it, you come up with new things in better ways.

• 21:59Logan Bartlett?

  Everything goes back to Xerox PARC, uh, in some way, right?

• 22:02Speaker 02

  I mean, people don't realize AT&T, Bell Research, and Xerox PARC. I mean, you know, I was, I was around selling in those days. And, you know, the mouse and word processing

• 22:14Logan Bartlett?

  GUI interface.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, the GUI interface is part, I mean, you talk about one of the greatest giveups of all the time, you know, even Wang, like Wang went up Xerox and then Apple came along and just took it all and did a better job of selling it.

• 22:29Logan Bartlett?

  It's amazing. It's one of the things I'll ask entrepreneurs when we're investing, like, no idea is unique. Like even Uber, right? There was whatever taxi cab, or Taxi Magic, or whatever the things were. And so there's the why now of something, right? Like, everything has been tried before in some way, shape, or form. It's like, nothing is actually unique in some way. It's what is the unique moment in time that allows that to exist and work in a way that it hasn't in the past, right? And this, these windows open up for like, a year, two, three years at a time.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  And I think one of the things that today's entrepreneurs suffer from is they don't have a sense of history, so they're repeating mistakes. There's not like a guidebook, like there used to be a site called Fuck Company, which I loved, right? If you remember it, where it showed a few companies that blew up.

• 23:14Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  And you know, you could read and find out why. And that, you know, I learned, I learned more from companies that I was involved with that failed or that I worked for that failed than I did from companies that were successful because sometimes learning what not to do is more, is just as important as learning what to do. And, you know, people, particularly young entrepreneurs have this sense where I can Google it, right? Or I'll go TikTok and look it up. And if I don't find it, it must be new. They don't, you know, they forget to recognize that when a company goes out of business, they don't keep on paying for their servers to be spidered. You know, there's just, there's no sense, there's no understanding of why companies that came before us didn't work.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  And I think, you know, on one hand, being an entrepreneur, ignorance is bliss and it can really, not knowing what you don't know gives you the, can keep you moving forward sometimes, but at the same time, not knowing what you don't know could also stymie you. And I think entrepreneurs today don't really recognize that.

• 24:11Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, there's this balance between like having a prepared mind of like understanding what's going on in the ecosystem, but also a beginner's mind to ask the first principles questions. And it's like, when you see these big discoveries, oftentimes it's like people porting logic from one field into the other, right? And actually apply some way of thinking that hasn't been brought to drug discovery or government procurement.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  All the time, right? I mean, and then, you know, and then it's also hard sometimes to know what's a product and what's a feature. Because the 900th Uber of something, and we all got pitched the Uber of whatever 100 times. You know, Uber got into Uber Eats, you know, and get got into other things as well. And so, you know, It's hard to know what direction to take unless you're prepared. Like Bobby Knight, the old coach at Indiana University said, everybody's got the will to win, but it's only those with the will to prepare that do win. And you know, that's another one of my little truisms that I hold close because you gotta do the work.

• 25:10Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. Yeah. Bobby was there when you were at Indiana, wasn't he? That must've been fun.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Bullshit fucker. Yeah.

• 25:16Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. I, you know, I'm a big Tennessee college football fan and I feel like Indiana basketball and Tennessee football have been sort of kindred spirits of like, you know, programs that were very elite back in the day. And so, yeah.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Johnny Major than Bobby Knight, right?

• 25:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I actually went to Pitt a few weeks ago and they did the whole Johnny Major's classic thing because he won the national championship there and.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  What took you to Pitt?

• 25:41Logan Bartlett?

  Pitt, Tennessee.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Oh, that's right. We just.

• 25:43Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, we played those guys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was a, it was a fun game, but no, it's, it's, uh, it's interesting, right? Uh, to have all those experiences to draw on and stuff. Now, now this is actually, nice segue. You grew up in Pittsburgh, right? Father was in the upholstery business. How, um, was he first generation immigrant or were his parents first generation?

• 26:02Speaker 02

  First generation. My grandparents came from Ukraine and Lithuania.

• 26:06Logan Bartlett?

  How did that upbringing influence you? I've heard you describe you were like a chubby kid with, with bad teeth or repurposed teeth and your dad lost his eye growing up. And so I guess, how did that experience sort of growing up? I don't know how you characterize it, if it was working class or whatever, but how did that influence you today?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's certainly working class, you know, blue collar. Um, my dad went to work every morning at 7:00 AM to go work as an upholsterer and, you know, lost his eye, you know, when I was 11 and, um, it's, you know, my mom did odd jobs and she was trying to find some new thing to do every month. It seemed like, um, you know, it was, it was a great upbringing. I can't complain at all. Neither of my parents went to college, but they, they were very clear that I and my two younger brothers were all going to go to college and we did. Um, my dad would take me to where he worked at Regency Products and he would have me sweep the floors and help clean up and carry stuff around, not because he wanted me to learn that business, because he wanted me to learn that

• 27:08Speaker 02

  it was backbreaking business. And then if I didn't, you know, Get an education. That's what that's that could be my future. And he wanted to scare the shit out of me and he did.

• 27:19Logan Bartlett?

  It it seems like even at that age, you had like this entrepreneurial hustle thing going on. I mean, what were some of the businesses? I've heard you talk about this, but it it sounds like at all times you were scheming or had some idea of what, you know?

• 27:31Speaker 02

  You know, it was interesting. Um, you know, when when you're young and you're fearless, like my dad, I wanted some new tennis shoes and my dad, you know, was like playing poker. And one of his buddies was like, well, I've got these garbage bags you could sell door to door. And I'll never forget them. You know, a box of 100 cheap little thin garbage bags. I bought them for three, sold them for six, but literally I would. Hi, my name is Mark. I'm your neighbor. Do you use garbage bags?

• 27:58Logan Bartlett?

  It's a big market.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  You know, but I learned to sell and that was the key, you know, because once you can walk up and knock on the door and just roll out a sales pitch and deal with objections. If you could do that at 12 and 14 and 15 and 18, you're set for life because once you can sell, there's always a job for you because no company's ever succeeded without sales. And so that gave me confidence as a kid. And so, you know, I went from selling garbage bags to selling magazines door to door, to selling candy, to selling, buying and selling stamps. You know, it was cool. You know, I learned a lot buying and selling stamps too, because it was a very inefficient market. And I remember going to trade shows. You know, it started off as a stamp collection because my mom as a kid collected some stamps.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  And she had this stamp book where she had stamps from all over the world and everything she had collected. And, um, you know, we would talk about history and geography and different countries. And I thought that was cool. So I started collecting stamps. And then I started realizing that as a collector, there were other collectors who made value assessments on the value of those stamps. And I literally remember going to a stamp show.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  Excuse me, and starting off and buying a stamp for 25 or 50 cents one place and selling it for 25 bucks somewhere else. And it was all because one dealer valued it at this grade quality and another dealer valued at a higher grade quality and thought it was a completely different stamp that was worth more money. And I'm like, well, shoot, it's just a matter of me finding the people who are under, you know, grading them and finding the people who are over grading them and making some money. And that's literally how I helped pay for my freshman year of college.

• 29:38Logan Bartlett?

  That's funny. Young Mark Cuban learning the arbitrage and inefficiencies of market.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  So true, but it's applicable everywhere to this day, even with AI, machine learning, and people, you know, high frequency trading, there are still inefficient markets. And the most, you know, exemplary exemplary of those times is how we, how each of us value our own time. You know, we're getting to a world now because everybody's reachable where we are of our own time. And, you know, you might value your time at X, I might value my time as X plus one or X minus one, right? And then it's just a question of who can I hire because that's more efficient? Or who can I work for because it's a better use, better value of my time? And I think that's a real direction that we're seeing everything go towards. You know, how do you value your time?

• 30:27Logan Bartlett?

  Now, you touched on sales as one of the unique things that you learned, and it's something I've, that, that I've seen in some of the companies that we invest in and work with is how the founder needs to own that. I think early lesson from Mike Kumeke back in the day for you, right, of not actually owning the, the sales process.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  First person to ever brought that up proactively without me having to bring it up.

• 30:50Logan Bartlett?

  Listen, I did my homework, Mark.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Yes, you did. Um, and thank you for that, Logan. And so, you know, again, talking about the lessons I learned, but what not to do. These were guys who were more interested in where I bought my suits. And I would tell them, you know, these were two for 99 specials. And, you know, I bought my first work shirts used at Retreads. And they wouldn't go on sales calls, would not go on. And literally those first few jobs I had in sales, the CEOs didn't go on sales calls. And then when I finally started my company, it was like, I'm selling everything. When I got to the math, I'm selling everything, costless drugs. I'm selling everything, right?

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Because if I can't, if I'm not so committed and understand my product and its market placement so well, you're better than anybody, I'm in trouble because I'm not going to be able to train. I'm not going to be able to enlist a confidence. You know, there's just so many issues with CEOs that don't sell.

• 31:50Logan Bartlett?

  It informs the feedback loop in such a meaningful way. We'll all invest in very technical oriented, you know, computer science background founders. And they've used sales in the same way that the go to market heads view engineering as like kind of black magic. Right? They're kind of like, well, you know, that's, that's this art form. I don't understand. And it's something that it informs all the product related decisions and it informs all the engineering and informs how you hire people and all of that. And so one of the things that we spend a lot of time on is just like, no, you have to, everyone sells, right? You got me to give you money. You sold me on your vision. You can sell, right? Like you can do it. I promise you, you got people to believe in what you're doing. And so this is just a slightly different form of that.

• 32:35Logan Bartlett?

  And then you don't have to do it forever, but it does inform your ability to build product, different features.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  You're always selling one way or another, right? You've, you know, because when it comes to hiring, if you don't know how you're selling your product, then you can't really set the vision because there's no way that they'll go vision and connect that to product market fit, right? Or service market fit. And if you do that, then it's hard to hire your first employees to get them aligned with what you're trying to accomplish. And if you can't do any of those things, what you see happening in companies, you know, we all invest in, is they try to do home run hiring where because the CEO can't do something, particularly as it relates to sales, they, you know, because their sales aren't high enough for whatever reason, they try to do home run hiring where they go out and say, I just need a new head of sales.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  I just needed a new head of marketing and then whoever they hire, no matter who it is, oh, this person's amazing. How many times have you heard that from hires?

• 33:32Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, totally.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Oh, this person's amazing.

• 33:35Logan Bartlett?

  The silver bullet hire.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  The silver bullet hire, right? If they're so amazing, why did their previous employer let them leave? If they're so amazing, you know, why didn't they start their own thing? And look, I get it where it just makes sense and it's a good move sometimes. But the silver bullet hire, the home run hire, it's a fallacy, you know?

• 33:53Logan Bartlett?

  People don't appreciate oftentimes when they want to be CEOs. It's actually kind of a, I mean, there's all the glamour associated with it. But at the end of the day, like 90% of your time spent, you know, selling and HR, right? Or some.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  You're, and you're fixing, if you don't know how to sell, you don't know what problems to fix to fit what you need to sell. Like I was just in a meeting, um, to early this morning and they were like, okay, we're going to do A, B, and C for cost plus drugs. And I'm like, we can do that ourselves. I sell this shit all day, every day. I know what we can do. I don't need you, you know, if you don't sell as a CEO, if you don't sell as a founder, even if you're not the CEO, you're in trouble, right? Because you literally, you can't control your own destiny. And that, you know, not to get too far afield, but it's like, do you go to college or not go to college as a young kid? Right? The benefit of going to college is, you know, in business in particular, you get to learn all the blocking and tackling and checklist items

• 34:49Speaker 02

  so that you're not dependent on somebody else. I learned accounting. So I think that last week in their current assets, that, you know, they're trying to tell me business is good. In their current assets, they put market development. I'm like, what the fuck is this? Right? Like you can't snow me like that. Whereas, you know, if, so having that broad-based business background is so valuable, so valuable. Um, yeah, anyway.

• 35:18Logan Bartlett?

  No, a hundred percent. And one of the things I wanted to ask you about, so broadcast.com was, uh, well, maybe, maybe for people that don't know, can you give your, your quick journey from, uh, from, you know, uh, Mike Humecky not, not, uh, firing you or whatever it was back in the day to, to starting a, a systems integrator to broadcast.com and collaring stock and all that? Can you give your version of it?

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Well, I'll give you the quick and dirty.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Came down to Dallas, lived six guys in a three bedroom apartment, got a job working at night as a bartender. During the day, I was applying for jobs, went to this computer store, the first retail computer store in Dallas called Your Business Software. I didn't really, I mean, I bought a $99 TI 994A computer. Then I taught myself some basic programming or that was my computer experience.

• 36:04Logan Bartlett?

  What year is this?

• 36:05Speaker 02

  This is 1982.

• 36:07Logan Bartlett?

  Okay, so Dell is, I mean, Texas is the place to be for computer, but Dell isn't really taking off in the way and...

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Well, Dell was just, Mike was just starting, that's a whole nother story. We did business together when he was still in his dorm room, not knowing, you know, what would happen, but um... But yeah, so I got a job selling software and it was a retail store. And there weren't a lot of people walking into retail stores back in the early 80s, but you know, I got the chance then to read every manual from every software product, you know, I U S accounting, Peachtree accounting, WordPerfect, WordStar. I would just sit there, Lotus, one, two, three, and read the manual. So it was like a front rate, you know, education. And I was growing, then I would have time during the day to go out there and make sales calls.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  And I would go to the local retail computer stores, you know, the IBM computer store, Nine X, Entree, you know, all these, just to pull names out of a hat that people don't remember. Um, and one day I had a chance to make, um, to go, I closed a deal and I had a chance to go pick up a check for $15,000 and my commission was going to be 1,500, which was huge, huge for me. This was like middle of, it probably May, June 1983. And so, but part of my responsibility was to sweep the floor and open the store. And so I got someone to cover for me and I figured, and I called my boss and told him, he said, "No, I need you in the store."

• 37:35Speaker 02

  I'm like, Michael Humecky, I need to pick up this check. I committed to it. And I made the executive decision to go pick up the check, figuring if I hand him a $15,000 check that I knew the business needed, then he'd be all smiles and happy, fired me. And so from there, when I started a company, MicroSolutions, didn't raise money, had no money, still sleeping on the floor, basically broke, thinking I might have to start bartending again. And had a company that had come in to talk to me about Time Accounting Software called Architectural Lighting. And I went to them and I was just honest. I said, "Look, I got no money, but I know this software. I taught it to myself. If you put up the $500 that I need, and it's $250 to buy the software,

• 38:17Speaker 02

  I promise you I'll make it work no matter how long it takes, or I'll wash your car, walk your dog, whatever." They said yes. That led to a referral to another company and another company. And along the way, I'm teaching myself how to program and basic and database scripting programs, you name it. And I started writing applications. And that turned into being a systems integration company. And one of the smart things we did in 1983 was we became one of the first resellers for a company called Televideo and a first reseller for a company called Novell, who were the first local area network companies. And Televideo was an OEM and Novell. So we were one of the first, if not the first, in Dallas and one of the first in the country to start doing multi-user local area network sales.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  And then not long after that, I'm writing software to enable, to customize applications. I wrote the first X dot 12 interface with Walmart and this company called Babyfair so that they could send automatically POs. Wrote a video integrated, this was a couple of years later, for Zale Corporation. So instead of having to go take a watch out of a vault so they could place another PO, we took pictures of all the watches and integrated them. So just wrote application to application, grew that business, where we were doing $3 million a month, 80 employees, sold it to H&R Block Copyserve, which was owned to H&R Block, for $6 million. A million of that went to employees.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Two and a half went to a guy I brought on as a partner, Martin Woodall, and two and a half for me.

• 39:50Logan Bartlett?

  And did you, at that point, did you just sort of fall into software because the guy hired you? And the staffing agency sent you that way and this was software and it seemed like, and you just kept following little crevices that took you forward. It wasn't like some purposeful outside in, hey, thematically, software is going this way.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Well, actually, I had a list of forward-thinking jobs I would like to get involved with, the cable industry. I didn't call it, it wasn't software, it was just the computer and the PC industry.

• 40:19Logan Bartlett?

  CD-ROMs, or I guess not even CD-ROMs at that point, floppy.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so that's why I was applying there because that was an industry I wanted to be involved with. And the way I looked at it is, it was, and to this day, it was something new, it was changing every day. And there was a new product, a new upgrade every day. And I figured there was, there were the people who wrote the software or created the upgrade and everybody else. And I was tied with everybody else in my opportunity to learn it. And so if I just put in the time, I could, you know, I thought I was smart enough that I could figure it out and catch up, maybe not catch up to the programmers, but stay ahead of everybody else. And that's the way I've approached it ever since.

• 41:06Logan Bartlett?

  So, so copy, serve, H&R Block buys, your systems integrator business.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Right. So then I, we sell and then I retire. And so I had read this book, How to Retire by the Age of 35. I was 30. I had a couple million dollars plus in the bank. And I was going to live like a student for however long. And I got hooked up with a broker at Goldman Sachs. And I told him, I want to invest like I'm a 60-year-old. He's like, you sure? I'm like, yeah, because I just want to collect because interest rates were higher. I just want to live off of that, don't want to have to worry about it. But once I got to Goldman Sachs, My broker kept on putting me in touch with the analysts. And their analysts would ask me questions because I had installed local wide area networks. So I knew all those companies, you know, Synoptics, Wealthy, Cisco, etc. And all the software companies.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  And I talked to them about the products and next thing I know, I'd see them on CNBC and they're saying they're just repeating what I said. And it would move the stock. And so my broker was like, you see what's happening. Why don't you start, you know, the companies you know that are good, you go long, the companies you know that aren't good, you go short. So I started doing that and just started killing it, killing it. I made tens of millions of dollars trading from 1990 to, you know, 1994, 95, before we started AudioNet. And so I did so well that I started a hedge fund that I never even had to go fund. Somebody who we were asking to invest in it as an LP just bought it out. They said, if you just help me, I'll give you all these millions of dollars.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  If you just help me, you know, raise more money, then I'll manage it and do it, you know? And I was like, great. So, I mean, I was set. I could have retired for the rest of my life there. And I was 36. But then I would get together with one of my buddies from Indiana, Todd Wagner. And late 94, maybe early 95, he came to me and he goes, yeah, we're California Pizza Kitchen. And we're yucking it up. And he's like, look, you know, we're both Indiana fans. There's got to be a way with this new thing called the internet to listen to Indiana basketball. And I'm like, let me think about it. And I had done, you know, like I just said, networking.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  And so I started looking at, you know, Linux and Sun and if that file formats to do progressive downloads. And so we created this website called audionet.com. And I went to a local radio station, KLIF, and I said, look, we're going to be streaming internet broadcasting over the internet. And we think people around the world and people in particular in offices are going to want to listen to your programming because they can't listen to it now. So think of it as just like cable TV for radio. Same concept. Would you just let us connect to your board and try to stream it? And by the way.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  This is a momental.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  So we took two eight-hour VCRs and two eight-hour VCR tapes and we went down to KLIF and I connected it to the board using analog connectors and then I'll record eight hours worth on each of these tapes. I take it back to my house.

• 44:21Logan Bartlett?

  For people that are listening, it's right next to the NBA championship trophy. So it has prime real estate in Mark Cuban's office, these cassette tapes do.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  I'm proud of that, right? Because literally, we took a $29 eight-hour VCR deck and two, you know, $2 eight-hour VCR tapes. And we would go back, I'd take it back to my house, I'd connect it and then encode it. And, you know, it would take all day, but then we would host it on audionet.com. And then I'd go on all the bulletin boards, you know, Prodigy, AOL, you name it, copy serve, and just say, hey, if you're interested in Dallas sports or news, and you're not in Dallas, or you're stuck in an office, go to audionet.com. And it just blew up.

• 45:04Logan Bartlett?

  And then ultimately, you bought the broadcast.com domain? Is that how that came to be?

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Well, a couple of years later, when we realized we were going to video too, we spent like eight grand to buy broadcast.com domains and moved it to broadcast.com. And, you know, the best way to describe it to people around, weren't around back then, we were YouTube before YouTube. I mean, literally, we had, and we were Spotify and Pandora, we had hundreds, you know, and hundreds of automated radio stations. We had, you know, police scanner radio station. We had Christmas stations running year round. You name it.

• 45:38Logan Bartlett?

  I remember using it, by the way. I was living in, my dad took a job up in New York and I was, we were living in New Jersey and I wanted to go hear Tennessee college football games in 98, 99, which was the last time they were actually good. And I would, it was broadcast.com was how I was able to listen to John Ward on the radio in Knoxville, Tennessee.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, sorry, because we wanted to listen to John Fisher from IU basketball. And, you know, but people didn't know how to value the rights. So we locked up everything, everything. I mean, every major college football program, you know, whoever had their rights, we, we worked with them, Learfield, whoever, right? We locked up radio stations, we locked up independent TV stations, we locked up, you know, everybody and anything. We did the first of everything. First bowling, first wedding, you name it, anything that was broadcast over the internet, we did it first. But where we made our money was in doing professional events, so corporate events. So prior to broadcast.com, if Motorola, who was one of our customers, wanted to do an all hands

• 46:42Speaker 02

  meeting, they literally would rent movie theaters and using satellite, you broadcast to the theaters and have all their employees sit in the seats of the theater. We, you know, we would charge them a million dollars, which was a third of what they would pay doing it the other way and teach them how to connect it, connect, you know, go through their firewalls, et cetera, et cetera. And so they could do it and that was our business. And so between the commercial and consumer, we, you know, then we went public in July of 1998, the broadcast.com, and it was the biggest IPO in the history of the stock market at the time. It's been surpassed, but that was a big deal at the time.

• 47:19Logan Bartlett?

  What did valuation peak at, at its highest?

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Well, when we sold, that was the highest. Well, no, it actually, yeah, it actually wasn't the peak because even after we sold, we sold for Yahoo stock. Yahoo stock went up hundreds of dollars after that. So we, we sold for five, you know, the valuation of Yahoo's stock when we sold was 5.7 billion, but it probably went up to nine or 10, you know, when Yahoo's stock went up.

• 47:42Logan Bartlett?

  And so you made a bunch of money for every, right? Cause people that put in 30K ended up making whatever 22 million bucks off of that. And now they killed. Now, one of the things that you, I mean, one of the best trades and the reason we're not talking about Mark Cuban, the internet bubble guy, but instead we're talking about Mark Cuban billionaire, Mav's owner, all that was you, you recognized it was a bubble at the time and collared the stock. So what were you seeing? Like, what was the euphoria? I mean, everyone in hindsight knew it was a bubble, right? But like, not everyone collared their, their, their stock options, right?

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Well, what I told you about trading stocks after micro solutions and doing all that trading and also shorting stocks. So I saw stocks go straight up and stocks go straight down. I saw all the different trends, you know, PC stocks were big until they weren't. Networking stocks were big until they weren't. You know, people forget, Work Perfect, a company that's long gone, I think, was a public company, right? There were so many of those that just came and went, Novell, et cetera. I don't need to see this story for the fifth time. And so I went to my guys at Goldman and said, we got to put on, actually, the first thing I did was I wanted to buy or buy and sell volatility.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  And there was no way to buy or sell volatility. So the guys that we were talking to at Goldman quit and went out and started an index and created the VIX.

• 49:06Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, wow. I was gonna say the VIX didn't exist then, but it sounds like it was your, your brainchild.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it initiated it. So I was like, I don't need to see this story again. I got a B next to my name. I'm the luckiest motherfucker on the planet. I don't care. And so there was a law that said, because that I couldn't, I couldn't just short Yahoo stock. But what I could do is short an index that as long as it didn't have more than 5% of Yahoo stock in it. So I found an internet index that had less than 5% and took pretty much every penny I had. Every bit I had because one and I, and I shorted that index because one of two things was going to happen. If the bubble didn't burst, then, you know, my, my, um, my money went away, but I was good because I could sell my Yahoo stock.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  If the bubble did burst, well, okay, I'm cover until, until I can sell my stock or hedge my stock, right? So I bought myself six months, lost all my money on that hedge on that when shorting that index because the stock dropped. But it bought me time where I could immediately put on the edge that I did where I sold calls, you know, that were staggered over three years and bought puts that were staggered over three years. And as it turns out, I actually ended up making more money on the puts than I lost on the calls. And ended up making more money in addition to protecting my, my, um, my Yahoo stock.

• 50:25Logan Bartlett?

  Was there any moment that you saw, because people draw parallels today between crypto and the internet, right? And all of that, and we can go down that rabbit hole. I think you, you have some more optimism about crypto than, than maybe I do. But people certainly draw parallels about like that time versus this. Were there tangible things that like from a speculative standpoint, because? You know, Amazon obviously emerged from that time. Google was a couple of years thereafter. You know, their eBay is still worth 30, 50 billion dollars. PayPal's still worth 200 or whatever. So like, it's not like there was no value created then, but was there something that you just saw from a, hey, this is speculative clearly and there's retail money propping this stuff up?

• 51:03Speaker 02

  So the parallels to crypto are bright, you know, if, um, so remember back in the early days of Amazon, there was a widespread feeling that you're an idiot if you gave your credit card to any online retailer.

• 51:17Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, totally. There's some hilarious newspaper, like Barron's covers with Bezos on the cover, right?

• 51:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and so, and then there's, you know, the pets.com and a thousand other companies, um, that, you know, all they had was a website and no business and no sales and people just speculated on that. So, you know, the speculation, the pure speculation on just a bulletin board stock, right? Um, or even if it went NASDAQ is 100% analogous to the speculation on tokens. It's the same thing, right? There's no there, there, but it, you know, it's just supply and demand. And, and by the way, it wasn't just back then, there's 20,000 bulletin board pink sheets, over the counter stocks traded today where you'll see bankrupt companies trading 2 million shares a day and they're bankrupt. There's

• 52:06Speaker 02

  no chance unless you can get a greater fool to buy from you. And so, you know, it was very analogous there. In terms of the real fundamentals, it was the same, right? You know, there's got to be utility and lots of people argued over the utility of walking into a Barnes and Noble versus buying a book from Amazon. And who would do what? Lots of people argued about PayPal, you know, is, you know, do people really just need a few lines of code in their software and how much valuable was that when there were credit cards and all you have to do is put in your credit cards? And so there, there was a lot of argument about utility. I think if there's a difference between then and now, because, um, Because the internet was kind of a unified platform, right?

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Where even though there were issues, everybody worked on the internet. Whereas today with crypto, there is an unlimited number of blockchains that are the platforms, right? Even though there's an underpinning of X number of ISPs, basically, that are enabling all that communications with the blockchains.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  Right now, anybody, you know, with a little bit of time and effort can create their own blockchain, much like you could create your own website back then. But there's not one unified platform like the internet. And so that creates a lot of uncertainties. And you know, Warren Buffett has this saying, first is the innovators, then there's the imitators, then there's the idiots. And so right now, like with the web, we're in that, we're evolving. We've evolved out of that imitator phase where everybody copies the Uber of whatever. And we're in, we're coming out of that idiot phase. And what we need now, like we needed back then, were new, was new innovation. Crypto doesn't have that new innovation. DeFi is set, right? There's other, you know, NFTs and some other smart contract applications are set.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  But there's no other ubiquitous platform that your mom or your grandmother, you know, or your dad just has to use. Whereas with the internet, it was an obvious path, right?

• 54:06Logan Bartlett?

  And there's a lot of breakage, by the way, even, even, NFTs, we can agree, like, maybe they have value, maybe they don't, right? And digital scarcity and whatever.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  NFTs are just the collectible, right?

• 54:16Logan Bartlett?

  People will believe it or they won't, and you know, who knows, right? The DeFi thing's interesting.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  It's like a Picasso, right? You either believe there's value there or you don't. It's up to you.

• 54:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And there's digital, there's such a thing as digital scarcity, right? Like, there's a finite amount of storage on our phone with pictures. And we could argue about that and people will either agree or not. The utility will be an interesting one. DeFi, you know, there's elements of it that I think are really, can be impactful. And certainly impactful, if not from an economic standpoint, but from a quality of human life standpoint, like, you know, whatever, escaping a country or whatever, all that stuff, right? And digital gold and all that. But there's so much breakage right now that exists of just like.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Fraud, there was more back then. The difference was you got all your information from a few websites, right? Or you got all your information from traditional media. Whereas with now with social media, there's just so much spam, so much garbage, that it's hard to segregate the signal from the noise. But I think the fundamental difference is with crypto, you can structure organizations so that they're flatter, right? They're not hierarchical. Whereas prior to crypto, like if you're starting a company today, whether you want to get in, you know, call it a dollar, whatever you want to call it, you could be far more horizontal and it works with crypto. Whereas if I'm starting a corporation today for almost any other startup,

• 55:41Speaker 02

  it's going to be a hierarchical organization, period, end of story.

• 55:44Logan Bartlett?

  Is that a good thing? I mean, people obviously argue about like, oh, your customers can actually be your owners and all that. But you've sold enterprise software, right? And like, I don't know if our customers actually, we want them telling us on product development or, you know, hiring people and incentive structure. Do you think it's, it's going to be widespread? Do you think there's a handful of use cases that it makes sense? I sort of struggle with like that.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  No, I think there's plenty of use cases and it's not so much your customers because I've always said you never listen to your customers because they don't know what they don't know yet, right? Your job is to invent where your customers don't know that they need yet. That's what makes, that's, that's what creates, you know, home runs. But at the same time, there are situations where hierarchical companies have to make decisions about the circumstances of their customers. And one of the easiest examples is healthcare insurance, right? You want a pre-authorization. Well, there's somebody, the first call, they're saying no. And then you always talk to the manager. They're saying no. Then you try to work your way up and hopefully you're not dead by that time,

• 56:47Speaker 02

  but you've caused a lot of consternation. In a distributed environment where somebody is creating a node, they put up some, let's just say it's Ethereum and they're putting up two Ethereum to create a node to be trained, to be able to be a decision maker in a, in a distributed.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  Healthcare insurance environment. And there's a thousand nodes that have been trained. And Mark has a request for a preauthorization for the Synthroid. You know, the hypothyroid is drug addict, right? And so rather than dealing with a hierarchical organization like we do now, and it's the health insurance company trying to find ways not to do it. These thousand arbitrators of it who are paid to be the arbitrator, they get a yield through their staking, right? They get to make the decision and it's majority rules, right? Or you can do an optimistic roll up where you could say, you know, in an optimistic roll up, there's a challenge node, right? Where there's a node that gets paid just to review all the decisions by the thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand. And if they think somebody is not, is being fraudulent,

• 57:51Speaker 02

  they get to challenge them. And if they win the challenge, they get their stake. And if they lose the challenge, they give up their stake. So in those particular cases where you don't want just an individual or two or hierarchical organization who's only interested in the bottom line over patient health. I'd rather, I'll take the distributed organization all day, every day. And I think everybody would as well for insurance applications. And there's other applications the same way. So I see the need, but to create that is going to be years and a lot of money. And so whereas with the internet, you, you know, once you got to the point where if you had broadband, you know, and in a laptop, you could create almost anything.

• 58:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, no, it's, yeah, it makes sense. Um, one of the things in talking about it, and I want to get to cost plus drugs in a second, but, but, uh, transitioning after the broadcast.com days. So, so then you bought the Mavericks, right? Which was another amazing investment. Can, can we talk a little bit about the culture there? I don't know how you would characterize it. And reading about it, it seemed pretty shitty. And they certainly were not winning games, right? And this is something that, um, when new leadership comes into a company or, uh, you know, CEOs are oftentimes, as we talked about earlier, the jobs are kind of selling and HR are sort of the two things that you get tasked with. How did you actually go in and implement that culture change from Ross Perot's, uh, I think more financial oriented only incentive

• 59:13Logan Bartlett?

  structure around running the Mavericks to actually being this new kind of upstart innovative group? Like, what did you actually do to make that happen?

• 59:21Speaker 02

  Money, time and energy, right? Vision, I guess, too. You know, on the business side of it, they were kind of defeatist. You know, it's just like if someone's a hardcore basketball fan or you're playing Michael Jordan, they were coming to see the other team, not, not the Mavericks. And I didn't, I didn't create an office. Once I bought the team, I didn't give myself an office. I gave myself a desk in the sales bullpen, right in the fishbowl. Cause it, and back then I just had a printout of all of our former season ticket holders or ticket buyers that we had information on in a White Pages book. And literally I would just, I just started calling people, you know? And if they hadn't been to a game, I'm like, hey, let me just tell you about the Dallas Mavericks.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  Do you know that you can have the time of your life with your kids for less than going to McDonald's? Less than going to a movies. We have tickets starting at eight dollars. And, you know, just to get their attention, but it sent the message to all the other salespeople. We can sell. We don't have to sell the quality of our team. And I literally created a rule that you are not allowed to mention our record. Because, and this also leads to one other thing that I think is important for all entrepreneurs. You gotta know what business you're in. You know, most entrepreneurs don't know. And so all of our, all of our people thought we were in the basketball business. We weren't in the basketball business. I, I was like, tell me the score of that game you went to two years ago. No one knows. No one knows.

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  But tell me who you were with. Tell me the special moments. Tell me about the first time your mom or your dad or your aunt, your uncle took you to a game. Tell me about the time you have with your buddy, you know? Tell me about the memories you have of going to your games. And it's always the experiences. And I had to explain to people, we're in the business of fun. We're in the business of selling experiences and ways that you can't get anywhere else. You know, you could scream and yell and hug people you've never met at a, at a basketball game. You know, when that ball is in the air and everybody's holding their breath and you're hugging people that you've never seen before in your life when it goes in, or you're commiserating when it bounces out. That's what makes the game different. So, once, once the business side realized that, and I told them they were not allowed to mention our record,

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  our sales started just creeping up because we knew what to sell. And on the basketball side, I had to spend money because they were so, I mean, it was awful. I remember I had a meeting with the players, and I said, "Well, what do I, what can I do to change things?" One of the first things that came up, a guy, Gary Trent, said, "Mark, we get into Oakland, California at 3:00 in the morning after a game, and we're hungry." Because all they had on the plane was snacks. We don't stay, we stayed at Holiday Inn or whatever it was with no room service. So, we're walking around Oakland, California at 3:00 in the morning looking for a 7-Eleven. You think that's good in the long run? Like, point taken. So, I immediately upgraded them all to Ritz-Carlton's, make sure we had room service, you know, and started

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  sending the message that I'm investing in you, but here's my expectations. You better bust your ass because we're gonna win because if we don't win, I'm shipping you out. I'm sorry, I'm only here to win. I love y'all, we'll be friends, but I'm here to win. And once that message got taken, it was over, you know?

• 1:02:34Logan Bartlett?

  Does it make you feel old that Gary Trent's son's now in the league and, you know, like?

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it does make me feel old, but yeah, it's crazy how long it's been. It'll be 23 years. And if, you know, I, I like being the youngest guy that was raised in hell, but now, now they're used to be. It's harder to raise hell.

• 1:02:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, how, how much of, how much of the bombastic sort of stuff was for show versus you were young and having fun and?

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  I had no idea. You know, the owner of the Texas Rangers at the time, Tom Hicks, said to me, he said, "Look, you know, you got covered by the Wall Street Journal, your picture was in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, all, all the business places wrote about you, the local newspapers wrote about you. But they wrote about you, about you when they wanted to write about you. Sports is completely different. There is, there are newspapers and now blogs and other media, other outlets, podcasts that have to write something every single day. So, either you create the content for them, or they create the content for you. So, I decided to create the content for them. And by the way, one of the people I learned the most about that, right when I bought the team, I got introduced to Paris Hilton and we talked. And I asked her, you know, "How did you get famous for being famous?"

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, "How did you get famous for just being famous?" And she explained to me, you know, you know, when she was going somewhere, she would call in advance and tell all the reporters so she could control the narrative and the stories. I'm like, brilliant. We had Dennis Rodman for two weeks, asked him the same thing, same answer. So I learned early on that you either create the narrative or the narrative is created for you. And when you work with people that have to create content, it's better just to be open, honest, and have a direct relationship. And the correlation to all business, and I say this to all my entrepreneurs, right? Because, you know, I have this list, and one of the things on my list is, don't hire a PR firm. And that pisses PR firms off to nowhere. But it's not because I think PR is bad. It's the exact opposite. If you think about what

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  happens with the PR firm, first, you have to explain your business to the PR firm and the person there. Then you have to talk to them about who you think are the influencers within your industry. Then they go and they just connect you to the influencer and try to get an article place or whatever place and get you earned media. I'm like, fuck all that. Just call that influencer, call that writer, call that trade first, trade reporter, and develop a relationship with them because they always need content. And since you're inside the industry, they'd rather have it from you than an intermediary. And if you see something that they write that you disagree with, just be nice and tell them. If it really pisses you off because they're way up, be really pissed off and tell them. But then at the end of all those conversations, you tell them, email me, here's my email,

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  email me all the time, anytime, I will always respond. You might not agree or like what I say, but I will always respond. And that's how, you know, any CEO today can create the narrative as opposed to having the narrative created for them.

• 1:05:27Logan Bartlett?

  You know, it's funny is that that's one of my go to things for companies as well when they're getting going. And I wonder if I just stole it from listening to you like years ago. I thought it was my own insight, like once upon a time, but

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  It's yours. I stole it from you.

• 1:05:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. You probably heard it from me. Now, now, did you, did you always had an affinity towards European white men? Or was that something you learned over time?

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  No, that's kind of just the only way it turned out, right?

• 1:05:54Logan Bartlett?

  That, that's, that's a developed causation. There's nothing back to your, your childhood or anything around that.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  You know, we drafted Luca and it's not like we were saying no when you have the number three pick, you know, and Luca was the best name on the board. And so it, it, yeah, just happenstance.

• 1:06:08Logan Bartlett?

  Now, the fame point of it is interesting, right? Like I, I assume at this point, you, there's kind of two paths you can take. There's kind of the hedge fund guy path that people go about where they, they hide in the Hamptons or whatever, and they don't have Twitter and they don't have a persona and all of that. And, and then you veered in the, the other direction with buying a sports team and then you're on the front page. And then also Shark Tank, uh, wasn't something that you originally, I, I thought originally it was your thing, but you actually joined after it got going?

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, second season. I came on as a guest shark.

• 1:06:41Logan Bartlett?

  And do you actually enjoy the level of, uh, recognition and the ability to talk about the, um, some of the views that you have and how it helps your companies and all of that? Like, what do you uniquely enjoy about this level of recognition?

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  I mean, I have a platform, right? So there's nothing, if it interests me, I can get, I can create a conversation instantly, which is really cool because it allows me to check my whole card on things anytime I want. So if there's something I'm not sure about, something I want, I want to, you know, make sure I'm right about or see if I'm right and have people challenge me, which I like a lot. I mean, so that's probably, believe it or not, that's probably the best. If I say something, I know people are going to challenge me, particularly on social media, and I can go through and read them or I can respond and engage with them. And because being challenged, having that intellectual argument or discussion is, is really, really amazing to me because that's how I learn.

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  I mean, and it's hard, you know, you can't just read everything. Sometimes you, you, sometimes you just need to have somebody or multiple people just call you a dumbass and tell you why. And usually, you know, and I try to stand up for myself or I learn and I change my position. I'm, I'm rarely, if ever, other than, you know, being nice and you mean it, you know, the humanity side, um, I'm really rarely dogmatic about things. I really always want to be challenged and that's probably the best part of it.

• 1:08:03Logan Bartlett?

  Today, how would you allocate, uh, Mavs owner, Shark Tank, anything else? Broadcast.com, anything else on terms of what you get recognized for? Is it like 45, 45, 10? Or is it 50, 50, zero?

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  So it's probably as of. Today, it's probably forty, fifty percent Shark Tank, thirty percent Mavs, and twenty percent cost plus drugs with cost plus drugs rising rapidly. I mean, it's amazing now where people like walk up to me on the streets and just hug me.

• 1:08:37Logan Bartlett?

  That's amazing. So let's talk about cost plus drugs. You've kind of danced around it a little bit. Can you, can you talk about the pharmacy benefit management world as it was prior to this? Like, let's just lay out what the healthcare ecosystem looks like and prescription drugs and all that prior to your business here.

• 1:08:54Speaker 02

  Prior to cost plus drugs, what happens is there are these vertically integrated companies that are owned by insurance companies and they own these things called pharmacy benefit managers. And the design goal, the original goal of a pharmacy benefit manager is just what it implies. For insurance companies, you would think inherently they would like somebody to go out and negotiate the best prices for pharmaceuticals as they possibly can. If you're a hospital, you want somebody to go out and negotiate the best pricing for medications as you possibly can. If you're a self-insured employer, you'd like to have somebody, you know, do that. If you're a pharmacy, you'd like to have somebody negotiate that pricing for you. That's the stated goal of a pharmacy benefit manager.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  But as those pharmacy benefit managers were acquired into bigger organizations, they kind of got away from the simplicity of design and started making it a very opaque industry. And what they do now is they'll say to the insurance company, let me do the negotiation for pricing and I'll help you find the best drugs and I'll get you the best prices. But then they go to the brand, the drug manufacturers and say, look, you know, I can get this insurance, big insurance company to add you to their formulary if you're not already, but I need the best price. Okay, no big deal. But because I'm doing all this thing, all this extra work, consider me like the doorman

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  at the red velvet rope club. I need to get, you know, a little bit of juice, you know, in order to let you in that club. And so they created these things called rebates. And so now you have not just the manufacturers giving best prices to the PBM customers, but now they're rebating money on top of that to the PBMs. And then the PBMs play all kinds of games with that money, but for the most part, they just keep it.

• 1:10:48Logan Bartlett?

  And so PBMs, as they were originally architected, like the original goal was to serve as a broker, a middleman between insurers, manufacturers?

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, between anybody who sells or uses drugs and to go out and do negotiation because hospital A, you know, you're not going to have a lot of weight dealing with this big brand name manufacturer. But if I take your hospital and all the other hospitals, your insurance company and all the other insurance companies, all these self insured big companies, and I take all that volume together and go to the manufacturer, I can get a better price. Makes perfect sense.

• 1:11:26Logan Bartlett?

  So it's an aggregator, you get leverage over the suppliers. Hey, I'm speaking for all of the people in this area that need to buy drugs.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  Group buying organization, right? Group purchasing organization, same thing.

• 1:11:37Logan Bartlett?

  And then they got acquired by pharmaceutical companies or not pharmaceutical companies, the insurers, because the insurers say, look, you're negotiating for us, I'll buy it.

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  And then the insurers also said, okay, let's also buy a big retail pharmacy chain.

• 1:11:52Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  And some other insurance companies. So now I've got all that volume and the distribution. So I've got the negotiator, I've got the payer, the insurance company, and I've got the providers with the hospitals, and they don't really own hospitals, but they've got the relationship. And I have the retailer to reach the patient.

• 1:12:10Logan Bartlett?

  Vertical integration is taking place.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  Full stack, all the benefits of full stack brought to the pharmaceutical industry. And so, but they got greedy. And in doing so, to stay, to support that, they had to make it very opaque. So there's no transparency. You know, it's like if you go to, so think about what happens when you're prescribed a drug, right? The doctor says, you need this medication. I have hypothyroidism, right? So I need Synthroid, where I use a generic person. And what's the next question? What pharmacy do you use?

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  Not how much, what can you afford, what are your options? What pharmacy do you use? And most people, because they're on every corner, if not every other corner, um, there's a major chain pharmacy, right? And so you go and you take your prescription to the pharmacy. You show them your insurance card. Now, do you have any idea how much that costs? Not just to you, but to the insurance company or whoever else is paying for it. Not only do you not know, but the pharmacist doesn't even know. They don't know until they put in the prescription and ring it up. You know what network it goes through, all this stuff. And so everything is incredibly distorted and opaque.

• 1:13:32Speaker 02

  What Cost Plus Drugs did, we started this company, Alex, Dr. Alex Osmiansky and myself, really four years ago, but almost four years, but it took three plus of those years just to get all the I's dotted, T's crossed, all the regulatory stuff taken care of. Um, and we launched on January 19th, 2022 on costplusrugs.com. And effectively what we say is this, we are going to be transparent. We are going to show you the price that we pay for a medication. We're going to mark it up 15% because we're mail order right now. That's going to change over the next 60 days or so. But because we're mail order right now, we are going to add a $3 pharmacy handling fee to for our pharmacy partner and $5 for shipping. That's it.

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  And so now, not only do you know what you'll pay for a medication, but the entire industry knows what a medication costs. And because of this transparency, you know, the old sunlight is the best disinfectant really holds true here. People are able to see what they could be paying for any or all of their medications. And now they're starting to look and they're starting to compare their pricing at their local pharmacy to what we charge. And it's insane, the differences. You know, I had a friend who brought a prescription to me, um, said, can you help me get this medication? Turns out it was generic. He was there, the, his local pharmacy, um, a national chain was going to charge $3,000.

• 1:15:00Speaker 02

  For three months, no, $3,000 per month for three months, 90 units. Our price was $75. Originally, I thought it was 61 plus shipping and handling. So it's going to come out to about $71 with everything. And so it's just crazy, the pricing distortions that occur.

• 1:15:19Logan Bartlett?

  And is the margin in that, is that going back to the pharmacy benefit manager? Is it going back to the payer? Is it to the manufacturer?

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  So with us, with Cost Plus Drugs, we buy directly from the manufacturer. We work completely outside the pharmacy benefit system. You know, there's three big companies that dominate that industry. We work completely outside the big three. Don't deal with them at all. And all they do is talk shit about us constantly, as you might expect.

• 1:15:44Logan Bartlett?

  I'm sure they have wonderful lobbying groups too, that are on your ass. Yeah.

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  But yeah, so we're just completely transparent. And, you know, we're, we're trying to become the reference price list for all things medications. You know, our, our goal really is to be the low cost provider for all medications that we're legally allowed to sell. And but our product, and we talked before about really knowing what business you're in. Our product is trust. Because no one trusts anybody but their doctor in the whole healthcare system. You really don't. You know, if you're in the hospital, you just hope to God you trust your nurse and your doctor, and that all works. But you know, you're getting slammed everywhere else. You know that you're fighting to get your insurer to pay for whatever it is, you know?

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  And it's just a nonstop battle that we don't trust. And it's just as bad, if not worse, for medications. And so Cost Plus Drugs product is trust. And the beautiful part is, you know, two beautiful parts, actually. The manufacturers really are the victims in all of this. They've been demonized as the cost of, the cause of high prices. They're not. It's the PBMs. And it would take days to explain all the other games that are played. But I'll give you an example. The PBMs will, you know, talk not only about how they want the lowest price, but they'll go to the manufacturer of the drug and say, "I need you to price this really, really, really high." And you'll think, well, that's counterintuitive what we're trying to do.

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  And then they'll negotiate their best price, right? And they'll go to their partners and say, I got 90% off. Right? But then they'll get the rebates back so that they'll take some of that. But it gets even worse. They'll go to other, typically the government and they'll say, because they know that no one gets to see that 90% off, right? They'll go to the government and say, I got you 30% off. That's insane. Right? And then on top of that, they'll still get a rebate.

• 1:17:45Logan Bartlett?

  Are you able to, through all this, like, are, because one of the problems that exists, and we've sort of, we've talked about the incentives, maybe at an individual level. But then also there's the insurer element of all this. And we don't need to go all the way down the rabbit hole. But to some extent, if it's a $3,000 thing, but I'm not paying for it, it's, it's certainly problematic for the overall healthcare system because it's getting billed back to the insurer itself. Right?

• 1:18:10Speaker 02

  So think about who the insurers' customers are. It's either the government or it's Medicare, right? Through Medicare Advantage, or it's your employer, or it's the company that you invest in.

• 1:18:20Logan Bartlett?

  Which, which, and so I don't really care about it. I mean, my employer, sure. But like, I don't really care that much about price shopping if I'm only going to have to pay a $5 deductible. So are you guys operating outside of insurers right now? How does that work?

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  So we're working with smaller insurers, not the big ones, right? Because the big ones don't like us. The smaller insurers love us because our pricing is better than theirs. And so they're working through us. And self insured corporations absolutely love us. And that's just now starting to click in. So I'll give you an example. I had the Mavs HR take the generics that we bought over the last two years and only for ones that cost over $30 because there's so many smaller ones that would take them forever. And compare them to the price we would have paid through cost plus drugs. So we would have, we spent $165,000 on those drugs. Would have cost us $19,000.

• 1:19:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:14Speaker 02

  Now, take that, you know, 400 employees times, you know, 100 or 1,000, right? Or just, you know, if you're, if you're a startup that gets to that 200, 300, 400 employee level where you want to self insure and you're able to save another million dollars a year.

• 1:19:33Speaker 02

  That's cash money. Literally, we think that for VCs, and we're starting to have these conversations, one way to find cash in your portfolio companies is through drugs.

• 1:19:48Speaker 02

  Being able to reprice them because that's money you have to spend because otherwise your employees are not going to stay, are going to stay. And like three years ago, my price for a family of five was $30,000 a year for insurance. Now, we're not going to cover all that because there's still huge expenses that, you know, in surgeries, et cetera, et cetera, that we're not anywhere near. But if 20% of that is medications and, you know, it's $6,000 a year and we can cut that by 50%, that's a huge amount of money. And that's found money for every company. So every, every organization have your HR go to costplusdrugs.com, take your most prescribed generics and look them up. You're going to save money.

• 1:20:31Logan Bartlett?

  So how do we keep stuff like this from happening? I mean, I get the feeling you're, you're a well-schooled libertarian in certain respects that you've, you've read your Ayn Rand, you've read your, you know, all this stuff, right? So to some extent, you're enabling the free market to play itself out here. But there are these perverse incentive structures that have allowed things like this to play out. And so let's, let's take cost plus drugs out of the equation to some extent, but think about it as an abstract example. How do you think the incentive structures have allowed this to happen? Is it, is it vertical integration and acquisitions? And so we need to be more careful about that?

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

  No, it's not even that. Look, industries, you know, what time period is a long time? What's transitory, right? You know, is it one year, five year, 10 years, 20 years? Because over 10 years, a lot of shit changes and it changes before your very eyes. But it's like the frog boil and you don't realize it until it's too late. And it's impossible to get ahead of all of it. You know, the challenge is going to be as a country to figure out where all the incentives are, um, so that we figure out how to pay for things. So you've got these new things called specialty drugs. These are the drugs that you see promoted that cost a million or $5 million each. And your first response is, oh my God, that's insane.

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  How can any drug cost a million or $5 million? And the bad first, the bad guy is already immediately the pharmaceutical manufacturer, right? But the reality is, most of those drugs, you know, came out of that price because they have to gauge the, they have to model what the market will bear, knowing that the insurers are going to do everything possible not to pay for it, right? So they have to jack up the price, like any product where you have a limited market and a chunk of that market, you know, doesn't pay for it themselves. How do you balance that out? And so there's no way just free market insurance is going to work because there is such, um, the technology is changing so quick with AI and

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  everything else that you'll see more and more of these specialty high-priced drugs coming out. And the benefit, so if you can keep, you know, is it worth a million dollars to add 10 years to someone's life and keep them out of the hospital so they don't have to take any other medications? Yeah. If it were my life, I'd certainly say it was worth it. If it was yours or anybody I knew or didn't know for that matter. The problem is, where's the cost benefit analysis from a financial perspective? Right? The insurer that you hope pays for, they don't really benefit from any of that. You know, they're still gonna get paid that $500 or $900 a month, and there's no way they're making up for a million dollars. And since we all get sick at some point, every single individual pre-Medicare, or at least

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  once they're on Medicare, Medicare Advantage, since that's 50%, the insurers are paying for it somewhere, some, some way at some time, right? But it makes no economic sense. So what they're doing is everything possible to, to say they won't cover these drugs and to force them to the, the special programs that the manufacturers have. And so that's where you start getting these misplaced and distorted incentives because nobody wants to take responsibility for the value that these medications bring. And so we're at least not enough people. So that's where the government's got to step in, in a private-public partnership. So we're starting to have, and this is a 10-year process, you know, hopefully faster,

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  where it's like, look, the government has got to be able to say that we're going to guarantee this drug manufacturer that their market has reached, that if somebody that a doctor prescribes this for and it's legit, then we'll cover it, right? Because we want, it's cheaper to society to pay the million dollars than to have them die in five years and, you know, be sick for the last two of those years and all the healthcare costs associated with it. So we have to start negotiating things between the government, maybe an intermediary like us to help, but at least also with the manufacturer, so we can start solving these problems rather than having it like it is for so many other things. Oh, you know, you think you need that surgery or you need that medication? We don't think so.

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  You know, try this instead, try that instead. That's what helps jack up the pricing. Instead, it should be, look, we estimate the number of potential users for your million-dollar drug to be a million, be a thousand people per year. So that's a billion dollars in revenue if it was paid out total. But typically, you're only going to get 40% of those people paid for. The other 60% could benefit but won't. So we'll cut, we'll split the difference. We'll pay you 700 million a year, right? Or 600 million a year, but every patient who needs it gets it, just one flat price, right? And we'll do that every year, right? And then the next drug, and the next drug, and the next drug. So that, you know, the people who benefit, taxpayers, really get the cost savings and the people who need it, the patients, get the benefit as well.

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  But you're not going to get that type of thinking from the manufacturers because they're going to price it high because they know the way the insurers work. You're not going to get the help from the insurers because you can't model new drugs coming down the path. And not only can you not model new drugs, but when they do come down the path, they're not getting the financial reward for saving these people's lives. They're picking up 900 bucks a month, you know? That does them nothing. And so the only, the only payer is...

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  The taxpayer, the federal government, who then can say, what's in the best economic interest and the best health interests of the country? And that's guaranteeing this manufacturer, the drug, that all, you know, your X amount of money so that we can reach all patients. But, you know, but that goes to the heart of where are the incentives? And how do you figure them out? And who does the negotiating? And it can't just be free market because there is nobody that is a true beneficiary that is going to be willing to pay for somebody who you're going to have five or 10 years through their lives and keep them out of the hospital.

• 1:26:29Logan Bartlett?

  I'm going to hit you some rapid fire right here on a handful of things. So, so, uh, these are some things you've said in the past. These are some things that I would love to get your opinion on. Um, one, uh, don't follow your passion.

• 1:26:42Speaker 02

  Follow your effort. Yeah. Because we're all, I, I followed my passion. I still try to be, still be trying to be an NBA player, you know? But where you put your effort is typically where you find yourself really being good at something or having a chance to be good at something. And if you have a chance to be good at something and you put in more time and you get good, nobody quits things they're good at, right? And that's really where your best opportunity is to reach your goals.

• 1:27:05Logan Bartlett?

  How do you tell people? I get this question a lot of like, hey, you know, the, the sort of, I want to pick your brain question, right? Like, I'm sure you get it infinitely more than I do, but you know, someone that's starting from a cold start of something of, hey, I, I'm not really sure. I'm 22. I graduated from a liberal arts school or Indiana or whatever it is, right? And I'm trying to figure out, I want to get into business, this big amorphic topic, right?

• 1:27:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I want to start a business. What do I do?

• 1:27:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And it is hard, right? Cause it's like, well, I, you know, you started, got to start running ahead and then you'll bump into something and then maybe you'll hate it and then you'll go bump into something else. But how, how do you give people advice about this?

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  I just tell people to be curious, right? You don't have to have the answers. I went through a bunch of jobs. I, I learned more from where I got fired. You know, I didn't know specifically what I wanted to do. I just knew I wanted to be in business and start a company at some point. Just try everything, you know? You've got nothing to lose. And if you want to start a business, just do your homework, right? Just don't wing it. That's it.

• 1:28:06Logan Bartlett?

  It's interesting when people talk about like the bravery of starting a business, but there are all these so, safety nets behind starting a business that it's actually such a good way of launching yourself into your career if you have an insight or an idea, right?

• 1:28:19Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, but you look, you know, David Jaup from Shark Tank calls it the power of broke. When you're broke, I was living with six guys in a three bedroom apartment when I got fired. The fuck did I have to lose?

• 1:28:29Speaker 02

  I couldn't get any broker. You know?

• 1:28:32Logan Bartlett?

  There was no, there was no wife to leave you, no kids to, you know?

• 1:28:35Speaker 02

  I was as downside as the downside could get.

• 1:28:38Logan Bartlett?

  Now, why can't we get a ranked choice primary process across the board?

• 1:28:42Speaker 02

  I wish I knew. I wish I had a solution. People are always like, give me money and go out there and promote it. I, I just don't have the sales pitch. You know, it makes sense. It makes, it makes perfect sense. It's what people want, but it's hard to get entrenched politicians to do the right thing.

• 1:28:58Logan Bartlett?

  Is it hard to articulate it and get people to internalize like why that's better? Or is it just the machinery of the political parties?

• 1:29:06Speaker 02

  Well, just the machinery, if you talk to, you know, an established politician, you went to Chuck Schumer or Elizabeth Warren, you know, they're going to say, no, we picked the best candidates. Right? We don't need more candidates. We, we need more Democrats. Because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. You know, why do you think all these politicians and parties for that matter, change their positions on a dime? It's just about retaining power. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I, I give the example, you know, talking about primaries where such, so few people vote that the extremes have all the impact. You know, the extreme, the extremists know from both sides. No, that's when you give money and that's when you get your brethren to vote. And that's, you know, that's how you get power.

• 1:29:50Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and for, for people that don't like appreciate this in its nuanced form, like if you appeal very deeply to one person, but he is deplorable, he or she is deplorable to the vast majority, like that person wins because all it takes is, you just need to appeal the deepest to the most number of people, even if everyone else hates you.

• 1:30:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, particularly in primaries because if only 15,000 people vote and it's, you know, 6,000 people are so committed to this one position that they have. You know, they want everybody to wear upside down hats and they think that's the most important thing ever. Those 6,000 upside down hat accolades are, are going to give money and they're going to vote. Whereas if you're in ranked choice and that, they may not even have the majority of votes, but they'll win. Right? They have the plurality. Um, but if you have ranked choice, then you could have an unlimited number of candidates and you just whittle them down and people like, the politicians I talked to, well, it's too complicated. I'm like, you know, do you ever have somebody send, the partner sends you to the grocery store? And they say, you know what? If they have vanilla ice cream, get that. If they don't have vanilla, get chocolate.

• 1:30:53Speaker 02

  If they don't have chocolate, get strawberry. That's how hard and how difficult it is. And if you look at Alaska and Maine, right? And the two senators from those states, they're the ones that just vote their conscience and do and vote to represent their constituents. You know, because they know they're not going to get primaried because they're ranked choice states.

• 1:31:16Logan Bartlett?

  You know what, like rockets are complicated, right? Like drug discovery is complicated. Ballot box ranked choice primary, I don't think is particularly complicated. Yeah. Now, you have some strong opinions about the SEC in general and like where it fits. I don't know if it's specifically related to crypto or in general the stance. Like what's your relationship or thoughts on the SEC and how that should be remade or rethought?

• 1:31:39Speaker 02

  So look at Kim Kardashian getting fined the other day, $1.25 million, right? Whatever it was.

• 1:31:44Logan Bartlett?

  The most notorious crypto scammer out there, Kim Kardashian, right?

• 1:31:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so what does Gary Gensler say? Gary Gensler says, well, this is a law known, you know, since 1933, that if you promote a security, you have to disclose how much you got paid. I guarantee you, there's not one single person who's ever promoted a stock, you know, that ever disclosed how much they got paid, right? And the SEC has done nothing there. But that's not even the most important thing. The most important thing is they could have said, Kim, we would find you because, but we know you just don't know this. But we'd like for you to get out and tell everybody. And on our website, we'd like to just have you endorse this page we're putting up

• 1:32:30Speaker 02

  to communicate to everybody, this is what you need to do if you're promoting any type of crypto token. Would you do that for us? Sure. That's not what they did, right? I had somebody, one of my companies, I had them call up the SEC, who's crypto. And I had them go through, disclose the company, disclose that I'm an investor and just, you know, ask for advice on how to register a token. Because I'm not against registering tokens, right? I don't think that's the problem. And I wanted to know what it took to register. We didn't have a token. We don't have a token yet, but we were considering it. And long story short, they put us, then they got us to the crypto person. And he referred us to a judgment called the DAO case, the A O case, right? And you can read that, but then his next words were,

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  "Call a lawyer and get their advice." "Call a lawyer and get their advice is the greatest disaster when it comes to entrepreneurship, whether it's crypto or anywhere else, ever created by a government agency." Because there's no startup in the history of startups, great ideas, that first thing they do is call a lawyer.

• 1:33:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  None. That is the last thing you tell one of your entrepreneurs to do, call a lawyer.

• 1:33:41Logan Bartlett?

  It's setting up perverse incentives for the good actors. Like, the good actors are actually being punished.

• 1:33:47Speaker 02

  Because they don't know they need an S E C lawyer. But what the S E C could do, and this is what pisses me the fuck off more than anything, right? They could be proactive. They could post white line, bright line guidelines. They could say, headline, post it on their tweet, pin it on their Twitter, right? If you, here's how you register your tokens.

• 1:34:12Speaker 02

  And if you do these steps, okay, you've passed the first step. Now, there's some libertarian cryptoites that would hate it. Fuck them, right? This would take the risk out because by doing this, you encourage entrepreneurship. By saying you need to get a lawyer, you encourage two things. People to either, or three things, not start the company, move the company to a foreign country, or three, start the company, not even realizing that it's a risk and getting fucked. And they could preempt it like that. But they have no interest in doing it. And that's why the S E C is so fucked up, right? They could just bam. I mean, this like, you know, you hear the stories all the time about lemonade stands, kids starting lemonade stands.

• 1:34:56Speaker 02

  And, um, you know, then there's local, um, Local registration and local licenses that they need. And always someone comes out and says, hey, you're supposed to have it, but don't worry about it. Right. But then there's, there's PR for it. And then typically they get rid of that licensing as it applies to small. The SEC could do that. They choose not to. They choose not to. And that's what's fucked up. And I attributed, you know, it's happened for a long time, but Gary Gensler understands crypto. Right. But this is not about crypto. If they were, if you look at what, what's required to register a bulletin board stock or an over the counter stock, right? Stocks that don't trade on the NASDAQ or the NYSE.

• 1:35:40Speaker 02

  It's just a couple of pages. And you just provide some financials every year or two, or whatever it is. And that's it. Now there are more scams on those, in those stocks than there are in crypto. You know, because if you're a public stock that gives you a little bit of cachet and people hustle those stocks as much as they do crypto. But it's really easy to register. And if they were proactive, they just said, here's a registration form that applies. So you can be the equivalent of an over the counter stock. If you just fill out this form and you just, um, send us this data and, you know, your financials every year. Okay.

• 1:36:23Speaker 02

  We, you know, now all the fraud things still apply because fraud is fraud. Right. But if you do this, we're not going to get you for like we got Kim Kardashian. Right. We're not going to gotcha you. Right. We're not going to say, oh, see your security and you didn't register your security. Because I guarantee you 99% of the token plays out there would register. You know, now the SEC would still have to do some education because like bulletin board stocks, those 20,000 bulletin board stocks, because they're registered, doesn't mean they're legit. Right. It doesn't mean that they're, they're good, they're, they're good operations. But at least it gets rid of the gotcha. At least it encourages entrepreneurship.

• 1:37:03Speaker 02

  At least it, it doesn't require a lawyer before you can start any type of biz crypto business.

• 1:37:11Speaker 02

  I mean, because here the difference is if I just do a private startup, I don't need to register anything, even though I might be selling stock in my junior achievement company to my mom, my dad, my aunt, my uncle, right? I'm selling securities, you know, but it's not for much money. I mean, what are they going to do? Shut down junior achievement for selling, you know, stock in the little companies they create? It's ridiculous. It's counterproductive. It's un-American, right? I get wanting to protect investors, but that's not what you're doing here. All you're doing is preventing entrepreneurship in this space. And you could fix it like that by just posting, here's examples of tokens, register this way, right? And that's it. That is it. It'll take, I'll write it for them.

• 1:37:56Speaker 02

  Gary, call me. I'll write it for you.

• 1:37:59Logan Bartlett?

  That's good. We'll put this out here as a PSA, Gary Gensler. I'm sure, I'm sure he won't take you up on it.

• 1:38:06Speaker 02

  It's just so, so counterproductive. And look, I mean, have you invested in any crypto companies?

• 1:38:11Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, we have as a firm, not me personally.

• 1:38:13Speaker 02

  Okay. So you know, a lot of them are based outside the United States for this very reason.

• 1:38:17Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:18Speaker 02

  I mean, there's guys, you know, that left the United States to go to Singapore or wherever, the Bahamas and elsewhere because of Gary Gensler.

• 1:38:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:26Speaker 02

  Think about that.

• 1:38:27Logan Bartlett?

  We're pushing it all offshore.

• 1:38:28Speaker 02

  Trillions of dollars of assets are offshore because of Gary Gensler. And all he has to do to fix that is post a couple of FAQs, some samples, some introductory videos, some how-to videos. And then if somebody doesn't register because they really feel strongly in their heart, they're not a security and they don't need to, those people can get a lawyer and they can fight it out. More power to them. But I don't think the argument really is, are we a security? Does it pass the how we test? That's not the real underpinning of this. It's how do you enable entrepreneurs who think that using crypto is a better foundation for whatever it is they're trying to create? And then we'll have a problem registering? I wouldn't.

• 1:39:09Logan Bartlett?

  Yep. That makes sense. I have two quick ones for you. Will you get hit? Can I ask about Vincent Wamiamna or whatever? Or is that tampering?

• 1:39:17Speaker 02

  Yes, tampering.

• 1:39:18Logan Bartlett?

  Ah, gosh.

• 1:39:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. He's a stud though. He's a stud. He's amazing.

• 1:39:21Logan Bartlett?

  He's a freak. Did you actually? Teach yourself to dunk or physically get yourself to dunk at 37 years old? And how do you even do that?

• 1:39:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, tampering. Yeah, he's a stud though. He's a stud. He's amazing.

• 1:39:34Logan Bartlett?

  He's a freak. Did you actually teach yourself to dunk or physically get yourself to dunk at 37 years old? And how do you even do that?

• 1:39:43Speaker 02

  I've worked out every single day.

• 1:39:46Logan Bartlett?

  Are you doing like calf exercises and leg exercises?

• 1:39:48Speaker 02

  And I lost weight. I mean, I was ripped. I was ripped because that was actually right before, right at broadcast.com where AudioNet was getting going and I had the time, right? So I worked out every day, played basketball every single day. That's all I.

• 1:40:04Logan Bartlett?

  We're talking full basketball 10 foot rim.

• 1:40:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, full basketball 10 foot rims. Like I could always touch the rim, right? I just needed to get an extra, you know, eight inches to get the ball above the rim.

• 1:40:15Logan Bartlett?

  God bless Mark Cuban. Thanks for doing this.

• 1:40:17Speaker 02

  I appreciate it. Great interview. I really appreciate it.

• 1:40:24Logan Bartlett?

  So that'll do it for the 37th episode of Cartoon Avatars. Thanks to Mark Cuban for joining and being gracious with his time. And thanks to everyone for listening in. Hope everyone has a, has a nice weekend. I myself are, I'm on my way down to Tennessee, Alabama for one of the bigger college football games of my life. So wish me luck by the time you're listening to this. I think most people will know the outcome of the game. So fingers crossed on this one actually going well for me. But I hope everyone has a nice weekend and we'll see you next week for episode 38 of Cartoon Avatars.