Stock Market Blues, a Crypto Crash, and Mark Cuban's Pharmacy

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Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher. And according to Apple, I'm a thief.

I keep getting these alerts saying you are close to someone else's Apple products, and I keep pulling it up. And it's basically accusing me of stealing my son's AirPods.
Oh, yeah, the AirPod thing.

Which is true.

But you can't get rid of it. And it's as if it's, you know, when you see the lights go off in your rearview mirror and you immediately feel guilty?

I doubt you feel like

they're on. Yes.
Yeah.

Literally,

they have ruined all 80s music with that YouTube album. That was a long time

for it.

It keeps happening. It still comes up in my, it still happens.
I have a new phone and I still get the songs of innocence or whatever. Really? I don't know.
Tool of the antitrust.

I'm going to work on your phone when I see you in a few weeks, but okay, fine. Really? No one's allowed to talk about it.
Yeah, I'll touch your phone. I'll touch your phone and I will fix your phone.

Is this dirty talk? Is this the closest thing a tech podcast has to dirty talk?

It's that you've become a senior citizen like my mother, and I've got to collect, I've got to fix her phone, and I will now fix it. I'm not exaggerating.
I mean, this in a sincere way.

I would like you to take care of me. I think you're very confident.
I think you kiss ass. I think you'd be a great fiduciary.
Thank you so much. I do find it creepy that they do that with my AirPods.

Lately, my phone has been telling me where my car is parked and

where I last parked it, and also where my AirPods are. And it's often.
My phones accuse me of carjacking. That's what's next.
Okay. All right.

Well, we'll work on you, and then we'll make sure that you don't text anybody. You shouldn't.
That's really good. Oh, that's a big jog.
Be careful what you sign up for.

That's what did you do this weekend? What did you do this weekend, Scott? You know what?

I actually had a wonderful weekend. I did my favorite thing, next to nothing, with my boys.
We watched, we haven't watched, we're really into Premier League soccer.

I'm not into sports, but my kids are into sports and I've decided if I want to. Everyone was going nuts with some football thing.
Yesterday was arguably

one of the best days in NFL football in history. The Rams had an amazing game.
And then the Kansas City Chiefs won an overtime. And I watched both games with my boys.
And now my boys are

super into football.

I caught up with an old fraternity friend, a guy named Dove Seidman, who wrote this great book called How and has been incredibly successful, great guy, married for 25 years, two wonderful kids.

He and I hadn't seen each other really since college, and we caught up. He came over to our place.
He just moved to Florida. Really nice weekend.

It was a really nice weekend. What did you do? I did a lot of things, but besides watching Cobra Kai

the season, which was so fantastic, I can't even believe it.

I went and interviewed Bob Iger in Richmond, Virginia.

Tell me about that. That was great.
He looks great. Let me just say, we did the Richmond Forum.
It was their first

in-person. He does.
And he looks fantastic, I have to say.

But he was great. He was kind of loose and said a lot of stuff.
It'll be on Sway on Thursday, but they kindly, the Richmond Forum kindly is letting me use that interview for the Times. But

he was really great. It was an hour talk.
And then the audience asked questions for an hour. He was there the whole time.
He was shaking hands. He talked to students.

It was interesting. He had a lot to say about streaming and all kinds of things.
And I've always liked him a lot. And I think he's one of the better the best

CEOs and learned a lot and was open to technology. So very early.
And so I liked it. It was great.
And then I made paintings. It's hard not to live.
I like this guy for my kids.

Yeah, he's hard. I think he is very hard.
Yeah, he was great. You'll hear it.
You will not hear it, but I will tell you about it once it appears.

He said a lot about the size of media companies, but we can talk about that later, like that they're too small, essentially.

We've been talking about it. They're too small.
Except for Disney. He thought Disney was big enough, but it still was touch and go for a while.
He thought he needed to bulk up.

That's why I bought Fox, et cetera. So he made some great acquisitions, boy.
Marvel, Lucas Films, like, boy, did he not pay very much for any of those, right? Talk about acquisition of the ages.

Yeah, he did. Lucas,

Pixar, and Pixar to start with, and Marvel. Marvel 6.7.
Something. They're really low.
The only one that he regretted was Maker Studios, if you remember, $450 million.

And the one he missed that he turned

that he had approval for, apparently, was Twitter

and

also BuzzFeed. I think it was BuzzFeed.
And he changed his mind because it was too much trouble. But

what would you do with a cesspool that is? Well, he wanted it for marketing and distribution. That's what his thought.
But then he thought, oh, no, this could be bad.

And of course, right around that, right was when Trump started to really get lively. Anyway, it was fascinating.
He's a great guy.

I'm excited to, he talked about thought about running for president and why. And he's very, I would say he's negative about the world right now, but he was great anyway.

Anyway, today we're going to talk about not just Bob Bladwee, but the market crash that's hitting tech companies, speaking of which, because we did talk about the power of tech companies, the new drugstore for Mark Cuban, and we'll take a listener question about Amazon.

But first, the wild ride at Peloton, what the, I mean, I know everyone was focused on the football game, but geez, Louise, what's going on there? That's how fast this thing has fallen so hard.

An activist investor wants to oust CEO John Foley and says he misled investors.

That comes as Foley denies or reports of production freeze on some products. Tad insult to injury.
Another TV character had a heart attack while riding a Peloton.

It was one of the lead characters on Billions. What's his name? That guy? Who's the main guy to acts?

We've been betting on Apple, but Foley's ponies say the company could also sell to Disney Nike to Sony. Does Sony make sense as a play to fight Activision? I don't know.
I don't know.

This is like so fast, so hard.

And on a product that is very good, it's not like it's, you know, it's sort of like Fitpit people are comparing it to, but they, they ended up doing okay, but nonetheless, what do you think?

There's a lot going on here because it's human nature to anchor off the highs.

And that is, even if you think about your salary, you take the year that you made the most money and you see that as normal.

You don't see that as abnormal. You say, okay, in this year I was making X and that's normal and I'm going to benchmark against that.

If you look at your stock portfolio every day as I do, which is probably unhealthy, you remember the absolute peak value and you benchmark off of that. And so

even if it's up threefold since you, where you bought the stock, if it's off 30%,

you hate yourself and you hate your stocks and you hate the world. And Peloton, what's interesting about Peloton, a lot of these stocks is it's fun to talk about how much they're off.

And now and now something like more than half of more than half of NASDAQ stocks are off 40% or more. Something crazy.

But Peloton, what's interesting about Peloton, Peloton is now technically a busted IPO in the sense that it's not only 80% off of its highs, it's closed below where it went public, which is an extraordinary fall.

And the thing that's going to happen here is that the companies that represented growth in the future in this big story, and we're trading on not a wing and a prayer, but their promise more than their performance are going to become enormous acquisition companies that are more performance than promise.

The old guys that just continue to hit their earnings targets and don't have the crazy growth and don't represent the future.

But I was thinking about Microsoft and Activision, and Matt Levine, who's a fantastic writer in Bloomberg, said something really interesting that they had Activision,

had all this controversy. And the thing that Microsoft brought was this heavy blanket of comfort.
And that, as they said, we can kind of put a rest to all this bullshit.

And what you're going to have with Peloton is that an acquisition will not only be about money, but it'll be about this heavy blanket of supply chain fixes.

If Apple comes in, their supply chain issues will be over.

You're going to see so many of these

100% connected fitness. And also the thing I was thinking about, Peloton, think about this.
We've been talking so much about the metaverse.

The metaverse for rich people can be purchased for $9 billion right now.

And that is a universe where the wealthiest people in the world go into this immersive experience to work out with super hot other rich people, and it's called Peloton.

And I think I just can't imagine how many people are sharpening their pencils around this.

The activist, that's purely performative, as someone who is involved in a bunch of activist campaigns and the aughts, he's going into a company with dual-class shareholders.

Everything they've stated is already well known in the market.

The nomenclature, the phrasing in his filing was really interesting. He said, a significant shareholder of less than 5%, which means he could own $10,000 worth of stock.

So that whole thing is a distraction. And if I were the management team at Peloton, I would have someone meet with them and then just ignore them, which he will be.

But people forget Peloton has two classes of shares. And this is what's terrible about two-class shareholder companies.
This company should be sold. It probably should have been sold six months ago.

But there's a small number of people who can act

irrationally and not as fiduciaries because they have control of the company. They don't have to sell.
They should sell, but they don't have to. Yeah, the insider's got 20 votes per share.

It's a question of who's pushing from the inside.

The CEO did sell a lot, as we talked about, more than 16, I think, 16%.

And so the question is, what'll happen to who will push this thing? There's got to be someone in here that's like, we must move. I suppose it's the CEO, but

I don't know who the power people are within this group. It's certainly not these activist shareholders.

But

they're going to face a management thing, the people working there.

And I have to say, rich people cut and run. Like they see trouble.
Oh, this is the thing in the past. You know what I mean?

They could turn on this thing pretty quickly. Maybe not.

I find myself still using Peloton, but it still makes me uncomfortable. I don't know why.

But at the same time, I'm only tired of it from the,

I'd rather do other things.

But I think, and that's everybody varies their activity.

activity most of the time or if they do it at all they get tired of it and then it becomes a coat hanger essentially um but the question is who's going to do it one who is the one who's going to act within the insider group and then how much time do they have before it becomes you know i think a fitbit did sort of bounce itself back um but others didn't lots of the ones um totally blanking the one with the camera on your head didn't um

uh go pro

um you know this you know neither did um oh god i'm there's so many of them it's littered these hardware companies are littered um we debuted them at uh it was a it was a fitness tracker, another fitness tracker and stuff.

So there's just so many of these you've seen.

And I'm not calling them juiceros at all because I think this is a great product and it's a great, it's a great, great, useful product. But it's expensive.
It's difficult to do.

And it's going to be, I wonder who's going to, they have to sell it, right? They don't have any other choice.

Well, somebody said that even with, I think they have somewhere between two and a half million customers, that Apple could build something even at these depressed prices for less.

It comes down to, I think, about $5,000 or $4,000 per subscriber. And somebody said Apple could build their own.
I don't agree. I actually think it's a really strong acquisition.

I think Nike's another potential player here. Even someone like a surprise one could be someone like a Samsung.
And we were talking about Roku. Roku Samsung could come with Roku.

What about Lululemon that bought Mirror?

What about them? Well, Lululemon probably doesn't have the market cap. Lululemon,

they could buy $500 million mirror, but they can't buy $9 billion

Peloton. But this is the crazy thing here: is that if you're the CEO and you've seen your stock go down 80%, do you want to cash out at the all-time low?

Or do you want to say, hey, everybody, cool your jets. No, I'm not interested in speaking to you.
Talk to me when the stock's back at 50 bucks.

I'm not going to let you come in and buy this for pennies on the dollar. That takes he might very well be thinking that.
He might say, I'm going to ride this out. We're going to be fine.

And also, Kara, this is not Fitbit. Peloton does have a rabid installed consumer base.
The NPS on this product is off the charts.

And the most influential people in the world may be only riding twice a week because they're occasionally going back to Equinox, whatever. But there's real value here.
And

it's going to be a super interesting story, but you brought up something else that's really important.

And that is, show me something that's up in space talking about imagine the things that future.

When you really get into the yoga babble, when someone becomes militant and starts attacking people, if you want to question the valuation of the company, you can bet. You can bet.

That means they're about to hang up and call their broker and say, sell.

And insider, it's really important. The SEC mandates that when insiders sell stock, it is reported.
And guess what? Peloton, and they're allowed to do this. They have been selling like crazy.

As a matter of fact, they have sold.

Insiders have sold hundreds of millions of shares, not in a planned sale, but in decisions to sell. And this is the tough thing about crypto, which is going through its own correction.

You don't know when they're selling. You don't know when the insiders who started the quote unquote token and technology and have bots pumping it are actually selling.
And this is the problem.

This is what's going to happen. And this is who's going to get hurt in this correction.
is the people who came in late, retail investors who don't really

insider sales, I would say to anyone tracking a stock, always track insider sales. And if it's not a planned sale, ask yourself, all right, is it diversification?

They're selling at a healthy price, fine.

But when you see a guy selling like crazy to bail out his cruise lines and his airlines and constantly talking about this brave new world, okay, that's a good idea. He did a lot of that Foley deal.

I'd like to talk to Foley. I'd like to see, you know, I wonder, I don't really know who has the

one, if he has the set to like keep at this and say fuck you to all the others, or if there's an insider who can affect things in a way. I don't actually know that.

So it would be, that would be where, in every experience I've had, that's where it happens, right? There's someone on the inside that sort of plots against it.

I think they the insiders control 80% of the votes.

There's some power person in there that's not Foley. The other thing is the employees, you know, there's been allegations of racism there or not racism particularly.
It's just the way how people,

there's employee, the employees are critical there, especially the famous writers, and they could go to other places. The thing is, there's not a lot of other choices, right?

Would you go over to Apple and become famous or YouTube? You know, that's the kind of thing is people have followings. And so some some of them could walk away.

And if they walk away, that's a very big deal to make those stars again is hard. Anyway, it's a tough, tough, we'll see what happens.
It can be a really interesting story.

I think there's probably a lot of fascinating things going on on the inside.

Okay, also 2021, speaking of people who are pushing people around, tech lobbyists, tech giants spent a record amount in Washington.

What a shock as they tried to head off antitrust action by the federal government. Smaller tech rivals like Epic got in on the game too.
I know a bunch of them pushing for regulation.

We should should open a lobbying firm. I think we do lobby, don't we? I think we're lobbyists in some weird way that aren't paid, essentially.
That's what we're doing.

Yeah, we're the worst paid lobbyists. Exactly.
So that's an interesting, that's not much of a surprise.

Yeah, well, I think there are a few things that are surprising here. It's not surprising how much it's increasing.
The expense line titled lobbying has gone up faster than R ⁇ D or AI or anything.

What I'm most shocked about is that

not that our government is whores. Since Citizen United, it's basically become pay-to-play.
you're dumb if you're a corporate firm and you don't spend money on this.

What I'm shocked at is what cheap whores they are, and that is how inexpensive it is. And I believe that this isn't a function of them saying, oh, no, we have to spend more on lobbying.

I think they would love to spend $500 million a year. They just don't know how to shovel it out that fast because it shocks me how much access, how quickly you can get with a little bit of money.

And this is, I think, a lot of our problems reverse engineer, whether it's a tax code code that benefits, hugely advantages billionaires and corporations, whether it's an inability to have an adult conversation around incarceration or climate change.

corporate interests and big money interests will always find a way to get in there with money.

And here we are with, you're going to constantly see what I would love to see, just as you have insider sales reporting, every time you want to talk about an effective use of AR, every time there's a congressional subcommittee on big tech or something, I would like to see over the head of the person defending Mark Zuckerberg as a great innovator how much money he or she has taken from Facebook or a lobby connected to Facebook.

Because I can almost tell you what they're going to say. And

the same is true on the left, too. There's a lot of police, police, school teacher unions, lawyers, PACs who also give money to far left or progressive representatives.
There's money on both sides.

But I think it would be great to have some sort of AR or app that you hold up the phone on your TV and it says, oh, Marsha Blackburn gets 88% of her campaign funds from coal. And what do you know?

She does not like solar. She thinks these tax credits should go away.

But it is really, I think, a lot of our problems reverse engineer to money overrunning politics. And this is just a small symptom.
Yeah, 100%. It's really, I don't, this has been growing for years.

I know I liked it. It's been growing for years.
I've written that story. Today was a record year for tech.

They have all the good lobbyists. They do.
They do. But then again, some of them are their rivals do too.
So I think it's just going to go on.

It's a good time to be a lobbying firm if you work for a tech company for those opposing them

because it's just going to keep going as these legislation moves forward.

And there's been some really, you know, and not just here in this, in Washington, where I am, but in, you know, state's attorneys general are doing them all over the country and alleging all kinds of things about Google and Facebook, et cetera.

So it is a good time to be a lawyer, as always, as always, or a lobbyist in some fashion.

I think think in this case, there's as many lined up against them as there are for them, but they still have more money than anybody else. I think Lena Kahn noted that in the interview I did.

She's like, sometimes people come in that used to be your friends and there they are. You know what I mean? Like saying what you really need to know, Elena.
So she said it's very hard.

It's a really hard thing not to be tough on your friends, but how many there are and how much money they have. And I think.
Someone asked me yesterday what our business model was.

And I'm like, we don't really have one. We're like Greece in that is there's really no understandable economic model but we'll be here next week exactly we'll be here next week

sit by the sea here and eat our delicious you know

we should go out of business but you know we'll be here next week we're Greece okay god Jesus

we are not economically viable chances are you know what you do we need to send NFTs in a coin make a coin users of Twitter and Facebook may be seeing more NFTs I don't know did you notice this when you open Twitter can display an NFT as their profile pic I didn't even understand it.

I was like, what? You can make an NFT. And then they're working on a similar feature at Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook may let users create buy and sell NFTs on its platform. You knew that was going on.

They couldn't stay out of this as they saw other companies get powerful.

Yeah, so this is typical Twitter. They come up with a way for you to put an NFT as your logo.

And about 400 engineers of Facebook are figuring out how to tap into Teen Girls' Insecurity and serve them extreme dieting sites. You know, shareholders bet on Facebook, right?

But hey, I get to have drunk ape on my Twitter logo.

In any case,

do you worry about all these other companies that are doing these things, that if these guys come in, they're going to make it a feature?

Like Clubhouse got unclubhoused or whatever's going on with Clubhouse?

You know, if these big companies sort of steal the thunder for these smaller companies that are letting people create buy and sell NFTs, that they could become the center of the action versus these smaller companies.

Well, yeah. So I got a huge amount of pushback and inspired what I thought was a fairly productive dialogue.
I did a post on No Mercy, No Malice about Web3.

And Web 3, as opposed to Web 2, is largely about decentralization. There was a centralization of power to Facebook and Google, and it's decentralized to people can keep their data

or products and services get decentralized to people with tokens, with NFTs, with DAOs. Meanwhile, the majority of the spoils are going to an even smaller group of people.
I mean, it's

decentralized. It's the same as Web 2.0.
Let's decentralize products so we can centralize commissions and economic aims to an even smaller group of people.

Coinbase charges more fees than a lot of traditional platforms.

And by the way, Coinbase has a small number of people who have dual-class shareholder structures, which is the equivalent of a corporate autocracy, which is incredible centralization.

So this whole power to the people narrative is kind of bullshit. So you got pushback from

oh, God, are you kidding? The crypto Taliban. There is a group of people,

whether it's Tesla Long's, Bernie Brothers, anything crypto, where, and VC is protecting the septic tank of their portfolio, where if you want to have an intelligent conversation about it, some people weigh in with a thoughtful, you know, saying,

these are the points you're missing and I learned. But some people just go after you.
You're an idiot. And then the bots weigh in who are probably nothing but these people with masks on.

But there isn't what I call a lot of intelligent dialogue.

And I would argue that the fundamentalist trade, whenever you have extremism or extremism around a certain asset class, those are the things that go up the fastest and come down the fastest.

And that's what we're saying now.

Go and talk about how AMC or GameStop were shitty companies trading at ridiculous prices because they were supposedly a movement and see the attack dogs come out for you and look what's happening there.

Go talk about whether or not Apple might be trading at 38 times and shouldn't be. And people have an intelligent conversation about it.

Yeah, because there aren't a bunch of people hoping to make like what I call a quick buck on Apple. Yeah, I used to get attacked for some reason many years ago, especially when Dan Loeb was in Yahoo

on Yahoo when I was tough on them. I was crazy.
I was like, huh, you just want to make money on a shitty company, but okay, I'm going to keep pointing out. You mean because he brought in

a female CEO? Yeah.

They printed posters saying hope, like Obama. They did.
She took revenues down 20%, EBITDA down 50%.

I got on these acquisition boards. I went once and I never went again.
I'm like, you're crazy.

Made the worst acquisition in history, Tumblr for $1.1 billion, that just seven years later was sold for $3 million.

Yes. And, oh, and by the way, Dan Lobit, he's smart, bought.

And then sold like a fucking banshee the moment he probably did three board meetings and realized this CEO has no fucking idea what she's doing, but the market seems to like her, so leave her there.

And I'm just going to sell and leave town. And you know what? That's his right.
But people, again, should be looking at insider sales.

That's a good point. Anyway, we've got to get to the big story, though.

The stock market sell-off is seeing red, and its latest plunge continues. It's not helped by the fact that the U.S.
is sending troops to

Eastern Europe. Russia is poised on the edge, is massing troops on the edge of the Ukraine.
I'm sure that's not helping the situation. In fact, probably is one of the many reasons.

Last, probably the most important one last week was the market's worst since the start of the pandemic. One company had a particularly rough ride.

Netflix, for example, not having to deal with the situation in the Ukraine,

dropped more than 20% on Friday as it was predicted slower user growth and it has to find more user growth. Shares continued to slide on Monday as we record this.

The crypto market wasn't spared either. Cryptocurrencies lost more than a trillion dollars in value as the Biden administration expects to release an executive order targeting the crypto trade.

On Monday, the market opened into a slide. It's across the markets.
Tech is really getting hit because it was, of course, way up, way up, way, way up. And again, the situation

between Russia and the United States, you know, which some people are calling

not, they shouldn't be doing this on Twitter, World War III.

So what do you think? Through economic history, one out of every five years, the Dow is off 20% or more. And we've gone 12 years without that happening.
And it's interesting.

You can just see a lot of people just don't know what to make of this because they've never been through it. But you have,

I mean,

this is big. More than half of NASDAQ stocks are down 40% or more.
More than 70% of NASDAQ stocks have fallen at least 20%

from a recent high. And then Bitcoin has almost been halved.
You know, everyone talks about the halving. This is not what they were thinking of.

And

its decline since November 21 has wiped out more than $600 billion in market value. And over $1 trillion has been lost from the aggregate crypto crypto market.
Ether fell 7% on Friday. Doge fell 6%

and Solano and Cardano fell at least 17% on Saturday. And

it continues to happen today. And then you talk about SPACs, talk about the story stocks getting hit.
DraftKings and Virgin Galactic are down 60%

or more since their peak. So, you know, this is absolutely, we're in correction territory.
I don't think you can call it a crash yet. And the other thing I would tell people,

you know, I'm I'm getting a lot of emails like, what do you make of this? Your emotions are your enemy around investing. And that is the market is just so incredible.
It's a sort of collective,

I remember, what was that movie with Tom Cruise where there was some big blob that could,

it was actually a pretty good movie where he kept waking up. He'd get killed and he'd wake up.
I know the movie I saw it. Because I think Emily Blunt was the one I see whenever she's in.

Yeah, that's right.

She's a tall drink of lemon. I know she's tall, but I'd like to hang with her and John Krasica.
I think we'd be friends. I'd like to have them over.

I think it'll look up the name of the movies.

Explain the stock market and not your love of Emily Bennett. Anyways, please.

But

the market is largely the greatest organism or vehicle for absorption of emotions, and then it takes all of these points of emotion and data, and it doesn't really read data.

It reads emotions based on buy or sells, and it spits back a feeling in the form of an up or down red or green signal.

It really is amazing, and it absorbs tens of millions or or billions of data points and emotions.

And the thing you have to be careful of is today when you see it going down, the kind of inclination is, well, if I sold now, I'd still have these gains and I'd be okay.

And there's two things you got to remember. The first thing, especially as a young investor, try to never put yourself into a position where you could be a forced seller.

And the way you become a forced seller is with margin. or borrowing stocks or going short things or using options or kind of weapons of mass destruction.

Whenever you put in place a borrow on margin or you play with options, just plan some black swan scenarios and say, is there an instance where I become a forced seller?

Because when you're forced to be a seller, you can almost guarantee that is the wrong time to sell.

Also, also, and this goes for when you sell a company as an entrepreneur, your emotions are your enemy. When the company is doing great and you think we should not sell, things are jamming.

That's usually a good time to sell because buyers will smell the same attributes and pay up. And when you think, oh, I should sell, shit is getting real and really hard here.

That's the wrong time to sell because again, the marketplace will perceive that.

The emotions we're experiencing today, and some people say it's a buying opportunity, but the majority of emotion out there will be, I need to sell before it goes down another 10, 20%.

The market senses those emotions and keeps taking it down. So to a certain extent, you want to be a stoic around investing.

And you want to have the wherewithal an incredible advantage in the market is to ensure that you are never a forced seller. Yes.
But one of the things that's hard, I think, for people is that

everything is in record profits and everything is,

you know, I forget JP, Morgan, Chase, Wells, Fargo, Citibank all reported fantastic profits. Corporate profits are hit an all-time high.

You know, we're going to see earnings have been up 22% in the fourth quarter. Business has never been better.
We're expecting some other

companies to report soon in the first week of February. Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Snap, Amazon.
I'm sure they're doing great.

And, you know, VC has been putting tons of money into crypto, $30 billion. And so one would imagine, like, what is this? Why now?

And what's this maybe using the situation in Ukraine to cover it up, this sort of nervousness, because people have been talking about when the crash was going to happen.

I don't know. I don't know.

You know what I do? Here's my policy. I never look at it.
I just never.

Again, I said, that's a good way to invest. Diversification.
You're not a forced seller. You don't have to to look at it.
But you talked about Apple.

You talk about the boring guys that just keep hitting their numbers. You know, we talk about Virgin Galactic off 80%, Peloton off 70%.

Apple is off about 12% or 14%.

And without even looking, I know PNG or even like a

sleepy company like General Motors, they're off. The froth is off.
Sure, they've gotten hurt, but not that badly. We'll see.
We'll see the developing situation.

It's the meme stuff that's getting taken out to the woods.

But you know, the people are still really nervous still about COVID, Biden losing all this stuff, Biden weak memes going around, and then this in the Ukraine.

I think it's everyone's just sort of having a slight mental breakdown in every respect.

So I think maybe that's that people are exhausted. And also, even if these profits are up, you're right.
But you're right. You're right.

You just sit quietly and hope for the best, I think, is what you should do.

I'm not, by the way, the movie was The Edge of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, just so you know, that he kept coming back. Do you remember the name of it? Oh, yeah.
The Edge of Tomorrow.

I do.

We're right out, everybody. We're on the Edge of Tomorrow.
So just sit quietly and hope for the best. You're on the edge.
On the edge.

Edge of Tomorrow. All right, Scott, let's take a quick break.
When we come back, we'll talk about Mark Cuban's attack on big pharma, which is not a surprise.

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Okay, Scott, we're back with our second big story. Mark Cuban is starting a new career as a pharmacist.
The billionaire launched a discount online pharmacy for generic drugs last week.

The full name is Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs. The company said it's committed to radical transparency.
Medications are priced at actual manufacturer prices plus a flat 15% margin in pharmacist fee.

Customers pay out of pocket no insurance, but the company says that its meds are cheaper than most insurance deductibles and co-pays. You know, this is, he talked about something he was cooking up.

He didn't tell me what it was. So he loves this kind of thing or gets angry at certain industries every now and then.

And he was talking about drug prices or whatever he goes into, but it's a good target for him. The pharmaceutical industry is the most poorly regarded trade in America, according to Gallup.

Even oil and gas polled higher, probably journalists polled higher. Markups on pharmaceuticals can exceed 1,000%, according to the Wall Street Journal, which is crazy.

But drug prices is some people talk about a lot,

and going elsewhere to get them, Europe or Mexico or different places.

It'll be interesting to see if pharmacies follow his lead. The pharmacies that sell pharmaceuticals.

Walgreens

sells $1.8 billion a year, CBS $1.2, Rite Aid and $199 million, which is much smaller. But it's a big business, $68 billion, and it's ripe for a tax.
So what do you think?

Well, one, I would invest just because I think Mark Cuban is such an innovative thinker and surrounds himself with smart people and is a great business person.

And he has a great sense for when to sell. Remember, Broadcast.com.
I think the

company that initially made him a billionaire was not

an asset that was enduring.

And he's just a savvy business person and smart.

And this industry, this industry, my understanding is this industry has actually come back quite a bit from a perception standpoint because of vaccines.

But there's no doubt about it. Big pharma needs more competition, needs antitrust.
So I see this as a great thing. I'm glad he's doing it.
And

I think, you know, I would want to invest. And even the externalities here are positive.
This is an industry that needs... that needs full frontal assaults and needs to be attacked from its flanks.

The costs here have dramatically

have outpaced. There are just too many people in America who digest their stomach and have just tremendous despair and anxiety because they can't afford the diabetes medication for their wife.

So more power to them. Well, you know, the paying out of pocket thing, what do you think about that? Because, you know, that's,

you know, people that can afford it can afford it, even if he's getting lesser prices, right? So the people with insurance are fine.

I guess if you don't have insurance, you have to pay anyway out of pocket.

It's a really interesting thing because there's been attempts at this before, not with someone like this, if that makes sense.

There's been attempts to sort of attack Dougstore.com. There's a whole bunch of different things.
I think there's another one called, oh, it's not tablet. It's something like Pill, something.

They have ads all over New York all the time. There's a bunch of startups there.
Why would he succeed over this? Because it's definitely a tough business.

I don't know why this will work with even the business plan is, but I do think that in a weird way, the pay out of pocket thing is key to keeping prices in check because

there's no greater governor or cop for prices than consumers. And the problem is a lot of people

in some ways go into registration at their university or into the doctor's office, and if they have a student loan, it's no longer money. It's like, okay, I borrowed $50,000 and tuition is $38,000.

But maybe if I had to take out $380,000, $100 bills from my parents, I might think, okay,

is this worth it? And should I demand more from my university? And the same is true of healthcare. When you pay out of pocket, and this is going to freak everybody out, I've said this for a long time.

I think the insurance industry,

if you look at the ratio of wealth to talent, if I meet someone who's incredibly wealthy and not that talented, there's a one in two chance they work in insurance.

It is an industry that is so rife with inefficiency and gross profits, and they've done a brilliant job of positioning themselves such that they can extract value from the people actually delivering the services.

Doctors haven't increased their compensation in the last 30 years.

Patients have seen skyrocketing costs with worse outcomes. Who's done really well? Really well? The insurance companies that have grown their earnings every year.
And this is what I have done.

And everyone thinks, oh, you're a bad person. I stopped buying healthcare insurance about six, seven years ago.

The cost to insure my family at the, you know, I think of myself as a master at the university, so I always had to have the gold-plated insurance policy, healthcare insurance, was $50,000 a year.

It was $4,100 a month. And then you kind of hit it because your company paid for it and you paid a little bit of a copay.
And I love data.

And I found that somewhere between 40% and 60% of the costs we were incurring, we were paying out of pocket because we wouldn't want to go to the approved dermatologist.

We went to the dermatologist that we wanted to go to. So I said, okay,

I have enough money. The reason you have insurance is to absorb the big one.
Someone gets very sick and they need a million dollars in treatments for some rare

disorder. Nobody can do this.
But here's the thing. Here's the thing.
I can absorb that blow.

So in the last six years, I've pocketed a quarter of a million to $300,000, which will buy a lot of health care. So again, like everything else in our society, health care is a transfer of wealth.

from the poor to the rich, specifically modestly talented insurance executives and people who are wealthy enough that they don't.

You're counting on people to to be worried. I wouldn't do that.
I would never, I couldn't imagine having had a stroke.

I'm like, oh, what could really ruin me financially or in front of my kids and stuff like that. It's a really interesting, you know, wealthy people can make that.

Really wealthy people can make that thing. It's a really, I think it's interesting that he's doing this.

I think he's hitting a group of people that are that are easy to hit and deserve to be, you know, deserve the criticism.

Another company I was thinking of was Capsule, which is, you know, they're trying, that's a different kind of thing, which was a one-stop shop for digital healthcare where consumers can access Capsule's digital pharmacy along with a curated set of products and services, just telemedicine or mental health.

There's been a couple of these, especially from Silicon Valley. There was another one I can't remember the name of it.

But it's,

you know, this idea of how badly our healthcare services are delivered is still a really powerful one.

It's just running up against a wall of people's worry about healthcare, a wall of insurance company, a wall of what if I get sick, you know, for most people can't do this.

And so it creates incredible unhappiness at every at every level of society around this kind of thing. And drug prices are one of them.

You know, a lot of politicians have, you know, Amy Klobuchar talks about this. That's how she got into

politics over a drug, a particular drug. But nonetheless, it's a really interesting thing.
And we will be watching Mark carefully. He always has a very good instinct on where to hit

where there's opportunity for himself. Yeah, and I just, I just want to follow up here.
I feel a need to say that I am not suggesting that you don't have health insurance.

I'm suggesting that health insurance margins are so dramatic.

Something like 45% of health insurance premiums go to administration or profits, meaning for every dollar you give to your health insurance company, you're getting 55 cents back.

And if you are in a position to absorb an enormous health care crisis and still be okay, again, you're fine. It's the same, you know what? It's the same with flood and homeowners insurance.

I have some rental properties. You don't have a chance.
If a hurricane came along and took them all away, I'd be bummed,

but I'd be fine. And guess what? Every six or seven years, you save so much money, but there's this immediate reaction that you're a bad person if you don't have enough children.

It's the same mythology that you have failed as a parent unless you go into a quarter of a million dollars in debt to send your kid to some joey bagadon or shitty college.

Because only bad parents

don't let their kids, don't force their kids to go to college. It's a myth promoted by the insurance lobby and by the self-aggrandizement and arrogance of universities

with economics. With Allstate? You don't like being in good kids.
All state. Remember that?

But again, that is absolutely if they can afford to spend a quarter of a billion dollars a year on really fucking hilarious cavemen and lizards, doesn't that tell you something about the return you're getting on your dollars?

Yes, it does. We're all chumps, Scott.
We're all chumps. We're all chumps all the time.
Anyway, let's listen. I'm glad.
I'm good to know you're uninsured. I'm going to try not to hit you hard.

Okay, Scott, let's pivot to a listener question.

You've got, you've got, I can't believe I'm going to be a mailman.

You've got mail.

Hey, Scott and Carol. My name is Kevin Koop.
Love the show. Here's my question.

A lot of conversation right now about regulating or even breaking up companies like Amazon because they use sales data to decide which private label items they're going to develop and how they're going to prioritize them on the site.

But in so many ways, that's what every retailer does. Walmart, CBS, Kroger, Safeway,

Walgreen. They all use sales data to decide which private label items they're going to carry, how they're going to advertise them, where they're going to put them on the shelves.

If you're going to apply the rules to Amazon, which admittedly is faster, better, smarter about how it does it, don't you have to apply the same rules to everybody?

Yes.

Yes. Yes, Kevin.
I agree with you. Well, I'm going to do the yes.
This start was actually started by a lot of grocery retailers. We're the first to really do it here in D.C.

I remember writing how smart it it was for izzy yes yes give me our phone sorry go ahead i i hush up i'm making a point did i interrupt you in your rants about various and sundry things oh my god the only person that is a bigger fan of cutting off is lorraine bobbitt okay

i'll be here all right

people didn't get referenced google it lorraine bobbitt um that's a that's an old you're really old okay um yes giant food here in washington this guy named izzy comb was one of the first people to do this with milk and and other things.

He had his own dairy, et cetera, et cetera.

And they had all this private label stuff under the giant brand because they realized some of the stuff they could do just as well on by slight cutting the price and then and then

just not it being a brand that you're paying for the brand. Absolutely.
It's an interesting thing. I just don't know if they're going to be specific to Amazon or not.

I mean, I think that's not at the focus, the private label stuff. It's them using sales data to

it's using it to put other businesses that are on their platform out of business, which I suppose is similar, but it's not the same. Scott, you go ahead.

I have to think very carefully about what I'm saying here. Go ahead.

So, no,

here's the issue.

You could make the argument, as very thoughtful Kevin Coop, with actually quite a lovely voice, is making, and that is that Amazon really isn't doing anything that any other retailer isn't doing except a lot better.

Because Walmart discovered several years ago that they could reverse engineer into Sam's Cola and make a shit ton of money because they controlled the interface with the consumer.

Kroger's and other organizations said, we have great data.

Let's create a different company called Dumb Humvee and then sell it to other people who want this data to better plan their product development and their marketing campaigns.

Amazon just does that, same thing, exponentially better. But it's not about, well, we have to do the same thing to everybody else.

The bottom line is that when a company does it as well as Amazon or Google or Facebook does, and that expertise and that, let's just call it that, that fantastic management and those brilliant people pull out so far ahead of everyone else that they're in a position to capture so much capital and so much market share that they can start behaving badly, that they can start quashing or performing infanticide on small companies or putting big companies out of business that tend to be better taxpayers and great employers.

And we find that we could go in and break them up and the entire ecosystem would be healthier. And we don't have to, you don't need to impose the same regulation.
You just need to break them up.

So I was saying

that's the point. There's lots of grocery stores that do this.
There's lots of Walmarts. Walmarts doesn't own the whole market the way Amazon and Google, et cetera.
Sorry, go ahead.

It's all about market power. And so we always tend to see this stuff through fairness or

are they bad people? We can't break them up

unless they're bad people.

No, look at it this way. Capitalism is a function of how oxygenated the ecosystem is.
How many new businesses can we create? How many jobs can we create?

How can we ensure that there's not as much income inequality? How can we create a ton of new businesses?

How can we have massive employment, prosperity, a number of players who are incented to behave well? And we have a proud legacy.

The guys that ran the aluminum companies, the oil companies, the seven sisters from the phone companies were not bad people, but we made a concerted assessment based on economists that we could go in, and if we broke them up, everything would get better for every stakeholder except the one megalomaniac that put into dual-class shareholder systems.

It will make a difference. So, no.
Okay, Kevin,

another point being is that there is story after story after story about a business that got on the Amazon platform.

They weren't supposed, they're supposed, Jeff Bezos talked about this, that the wall got breached, oops, kind of thing, that they were doing one business, and then Amazon went and brought in a cut rate competitor to them.

Even those that don't, that didn't go on the platform for just this reason, because they didn't want Amazon to have this data,

like on away luggage or things like that, they immediately started to have those hard-shelled luggage that they were selling.

And so

they don't tell stories like that about Walmart or CVS or Kroger, even if they compete. And those people still get good showing on the shelves, the brands do, and things like that.
And so

you don't get the story. There's story after story after story of a company, including big companies that get, that what they consider get screwed by Amazon, I think, or

there's no other place online to do this much that has this big a footprint.

We can have a billion other examples. Everybody accesses Spotify through Apple in the App Store.
So Apple gets to see every song, every individual, when they're downloading Spotify.

how they're using it. And then they decide to launch, I know, Apple Music.
And maybe we won't send update tools as quickly to Spotify. We'll also place a tax on Spotify of 20 to 30%.

And what do you know, Apple Music is now growing faster than Spotify. So this isn't a question of whether they're good or bad people, if we have to apply similar standards.
It's simple.

Would the economy, would the Commonwealth be better served with more

companies that are only $100 billion in value, not a bunch that are worth trillions? And the answer throughout economic history is the former.

But again, see above, a massive increase in lobbying efforts. Yeah, see above.
Yes, so no, we don't have to apply the same law.

Okay, Kevin. It's a curse of bigness.
Kevin, that is right. Kevin, thank you for your excellent voice.
Kevin Kuhn.

Anyway, that was a good question. Send us more.
If you've got a question you're curious about, go to nymag.com/slash pivot and submit for the show. All right, Scott, one more quick break.

We'll be back for wins and fails.

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Okay, Scott, give us this week's wins and fails.

Do you have any? I say Cobra Kai is my win. Cobra Kai is so good.
It was shocking. You lost somebody.
No, I'm telling you. I just literally, I said it to someone off the top of my head.

They're like, oh, I know. This is amazing.
They managed to, I thought it couldn't go anywhere and it went somewhere. They're so creative and funny.
And they have a fifth season coming.

And I didn't think I'm like, I'm tired of Johnny versus, you know,

Miyagi-Doh versus Eagle Fang. And, and, um,

so, you know, it just, oh, yeah.

Anyway, but it's actually, they managed to do it. And I was like, good for them.
Like, I really am looking forward to the next season. So I just want to say, oh, my God.
It's such a bad girlfriend.

You just keep going. No, oh my God.
Everybody loves it. Can I put up with it? Everybody loves it.

Oh, my God. I sit there, I watch it with my kids.
And I'm like, these are grown men. How can they do it? It's funny.
All the references, all the old 80s references, it's fantastic. Like,

I'm just glad Ralph Macchio, who, by the way, is 61, is working. He's great.
I think it's great. Oh my God, he's Ralph.
Who's the blonde guy? I think he's really blonde.

William Dabna. He has something like that.

He's fan. I love him.
I love every single person on that show. I have to say, I don't know who I love

more. I agree.
So, anyway, it's a wonderful congratulations. Shout out to your win, Cobra Kai.
I just finished it this weekend. But go ahead.
Sorry. There's lots of things I watch, but go ahead.

So

my win is

it took me a while to figure out that when you start as a dad, you want to be engaged and moments of engagement are the key, I think, or one of the keys to really enjoying and being a great parent.

And I was immature in the thought that I wanted them to engage in the things I'm engaged in.

And what you recognize as your boys get older is what it means to be a good parent and a good father is you capture engagement on things that they're interested in, even if you're not interested in them.

And I'm not interested in sports. I like to play them.
I like to work out. I played sports growing up, but I'm just not interested in sports.

I look at the NFL and I think, okay, there's tard of dyskinesia waiting to happen. I just don't like the NFL.

I don't like organized sports for the most part. Anyways,

by the way, they should absolutely pick college players, but that's not what I'm talking about. But the NFL on Sunday, my kids have gotten into football.
And I watched the Los Angeles Rams

beat

the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and it took me back to growing up with the Rams. The first sporting event I ever went to was my father and Vince Ferragamo and Pat Hadel.

It brought back a lot of great memories. And where my win really is, though, is over the weekend I saw something called American Underdog.
Have you seen this?

It's a story of Kurt Warner. And who was probably the most successful,

easily the most successful L.A. Rams quarterback.
American Underdog, it's a story of Kurt Warner, his wife. This guy literally stalking shelves, not that there's anything wrong with that.

It went into the arena league, got drafted, got cut, got drafted, married a single mom with two kids, including a child who's handicapped. And it is literally a Hollywood story out of Des Moines.

It is just such a wonderful story about persistence. Love those stories.
Well, it's also a story about faith. He's a very religious guy and as an atheist, I don't need that shit, but I respect it.

And it was obviously a huge source of comfort and inspiration for him and his wife. He now has seven kids, been married for 30 years.

It just, it is a wonderful story, and it could have easily been very cheesy, and it wasn't. Anyways, my win is engagement with your boys and the great Los Angeles Rams and also American Underdog.

My fail is a little bit more, I don't know, the term is serious or boring. You know, people look at the Theranos case in Elizabeth Holmes and they say, she violated the law.
She should go to jail.

And I agree with that. What I think is, and I'm excited about Pri Barara's book, Justice, that's coming out this week.

I think we need to be more thoughtful about, okay, she broke the law, but she was not, and people have really pushed back on a blog post I wrote about storytelling, basically saying that there's something wrong here.

And they said, well, you know, people take medical lies around medical diagnostics much more seriously. She wasn't convicted.
Of that. Nope, she wasn't.
Of misleading patients.

This thing never actually even shaped. She could have.
That was.

Go ahead. Go ahead.
But it didn't. She wasn't convicted of that.
She was convicted of defrauding investors. And who are these investors? And this is where the gaps in law are.
She defrauded.

The victims were George Schultz, Secretary of State, Larry Ellison, Stephen Jurvetson, and Rupert Murdoch.

And laws are meant to be, A, ensure that we have an operating system for our economy, ensure that people don't lose their autonomy, but they also are calibrated to who is most vulnerable.

If you traffic people, you go to jail for X time. If you traffic children correctly, you go to jail for 5X.
You sell drugs to kids, you're in deep trouble. And this is what the Theranos case says.

Rich people getting their thing.

Who are we protecting? What the law says right now is that if you steal money from rich, really rich old guys, you're going to prison. However, however,

if you have 100,000 unmarked graves from opioid deaths or if you're depressing teen girls, Sorry, folks, fuck you, you're on your own.

There are huge gaps in our laws in terms of who we protect and who we've decided are kind of on their own. There are real gaps in who we are protecting and who we are not protecting.
I like this. So

should Elizabeth Holmes go to prison? Yeah. And guess what? Her cellmate should be named Cheryl.

And there should be a guy fighting over flip-flops. Mark.
There's a guy who should be fighting over flip-flops with other guys named Sackler for their shower time.

So, you know, Elizabeth Holmes should absolutely be going to prison, but who exactly are we protecting here? All right. That's a very good question.
I like your speech. I like your speech.

This is an interesting thing. We'll say, you know, this is fair.
This is a fair point. You're going to get a lot of pushback on that, Jose.

But nonetheless, nonetheless. Shit everywhere.

Well, that's something that. She is to provoke a conversation, Carol.
Easier fail.

Wow. Cobra card.
No, not Cobra Card. That was a win.
I'm about to try this 12. I'm writing a piece on this 12, 3, 30 workout.
You know, this thing. Oh, my God.
It's become such a thing. What's that?

You walk at 12% incline at 3.0 on the treadmill for 30 minutes. It's by

this YouTube personality, Lauren Giraldo.

And health people are like, this is actually good. Like usually they're like, don't do these weird fucking things on TikTok, but I'm probably going to die.
And thank goodness I have insurance or FF7.

Oh, wait, you know what? I have that app. You know what it's called?

Stair. No, I get that.
No, I get that.

I'm just saying, I'm going to try it. I'm going to come back and tell you how it is.

I'm fascinated with all these health things on all the social media sites. And so I'm going to try a bunch of them that are actually approved by health people, health experts.

Do you know what a great health act is? And I was known for this my first couple of years at CERN. Take the stairs.
I got that. Thanks.
Always take the stairs. I don't have stairs right now, but okay.

I appreciate it. No, but I mean at office, if we ever go back to the office, take the stairs.
Yes, well, now I'm going to try this thing. All right.

I'm just going to try out all the different TikTok workouts, and then I'm going to need my insurance. That's all I have.
Just TikTok workout. Yes, 12, 3.30.
You try it. See how you can do it.
12%

incline, 3.0, 30 minutes. I want to see how Scott does.

I know. I'm just saying.
It's supposed to be very good. And I looked up all the people who were first were about to attack this TikTok star.
We're like, oh, this is actually a good idea.

You know, pretty for a lot of people. Anyway.

All right, Scott. That's the show.
We'll be back Friday. Uninsured, Scott.
That's the show. Oh, jeez.
I know you are. Okay, Scott.
We'll be back for Friday for more. Hold my phone.

I'm getting excited for Pivot MII in person. You better like have it.
You better get classy. You better get some classy looking clothes for that.
David Solomon, DJ Soule,

chairman and CEO of Goldman Sound. Got more people to announce.
We just, I just, you saw who I just added to the program and more to come.

Finally, pull in your weight. Stop it.
I booked this whole fucking thing. Anyway, no, you've done a great job, too.
Actually, you know what I'm thinking?

Is we got, we're trying to get preaked down there. I've done this whole fucking thing.
Oops, did I just say that? You've done a great job. No, you have.
But you've done a great job.

No, let's be honest. You bring all the names.
Nonetheless, you're doing a great job. Yeah, thanks.
Thanks for that. Anyway, we're excited for it.
Oh, my God. I have my dream dinner tomorrow.

I'm going to. Okay.
I got to go then. I'm going.
Talk about a person.

I'm going out to dinner with George Hahn. Oh, my God.

Rex Chapman. Do you know Rex Chapman?

He's a former NBA player. He's got this enormous Twitter following.
He's just like reeks of soul and character, and he's super funny. And he's doing a CNN Plus show.
And who's our fourth?

Who's our fourth? Stephanie Roll. I don't like to share him with other friends because we're very close.
The great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt. I don't know.
Who?

Jesus Christ. Lead a horse to water.
Anderson Cooper.

Boom. Oh, my God.
What a dinner party. Oh, my God.
Hello. I'm so excited.
I literally flew to New York for this.

Don't tell them that because I want to think that it's just a casual thing and I'm not that. Oh, my God.
Don't tell them. That is a dinner, isn't it? A lot of photos.
Anyway, read us out.

I have to go exercise and then interview the governor of Colorado. Go.
I know. I know.
Butros, Boutros, Golly's waiting for us back room.

Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Thanks also to Drew Burrows, Emil Silverio.
Ernie Entertod engineered this episode.

Make sure you're subscribed to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from Vox Media.

We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison.
Who is not going to prison? Anyone with the last name Sackler?

She's still a criminal, Scott.

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