Mark Cuban on Why AI Could Turn Solo Founders Into Trillionaires

One of the many ills of healthcare is that it completely lacks competitive dynamics. Just merely by the presence of cost plus drugs, you've actually forced change in the incumbents.

United Health, 3,000 plus subsidiaries, $150 billion in intercompany transfers annually. There's oftentimes when they will increase premiums, increase deductibles, and at the same time force you into a relationship with a company they already own and you don't know they own them. The ultimate mission is to disrupt healthcare so that it's affordable again.

There's no better time to be an entrepreneur than right now. The biggest challenge and where AI, I think, is going to have the biggest impact is...

Thanks for having me on, guys.

I mean, Mark first of all just had the courage to enter into the morass that is healthcare in a way that made such a splash, and that many, many people who, you know, also are in the privileged position that Mark is in to just have such a huge audience have been intimidated, you know, to do so over many, many decades. And so I've loved watching the market react to what Mark has done in healthcare. I think, you know, the one thing, I know, Mark, you and I have talked about this in the past, but healthcare is like one of the industries, like one of the many ills of healthcare is that it completely lacks competitive dynamics and competitive forces, free market dynamics, all that kind of stuff. And what's been fascinating to watch is just merely by the presence of Cost Plus Drugs as one example, and we'll talk about others that you've done too, but just merely by that, by the presence of that entity and what you represent and what you're doing, you've actually forced change in the incumbents that otherwise, like even with policy, even with like all sorts of other forces, like never changed over the course of many, many decades. So that's one of...

Yeah, because I don't get to see that stuff because I don't talk to those guys.

And then I think to your point, like even absent a contract, I think people are recognizing from the demand side of the market that they need to show that there is some pathway for people to get your product, right? And so perhaps even in the absence of a direct contract, you know, I do hear people talking about, you know, your solution as part of their network.

Really, it truly does not surprise me when the big three or even the big six use our name as kind of a way to counter the request, you know, in the discussion of pricing, because they know that our prices are public, that anybody can take our API, and big companies that have half a brain are pulling that data on a daily basis and they're saying, 'You have to beat this price.' And so I can see that. But, you know, I've had at least one company and probably more that have said, 'Oh, yeah, it's, you know, pick one of the big three has told us that you're part of their network and we get your prices where you're cheaper,' and we don't have an agreement at all with any of the big three.

I'll give you the rundown. So, we launched costplusdrugs.com January 19th of 2022. 111 medications, purely generic, and, you know, we didn't know what to expect at all. I went out and started talking about it and it immediately blew up, right? And then, you know, our volumes there led the manufacturers to expand their portfolio with us and we were able to add additional manufacturers. So now, as you said, we have, you know, 4,000 SKUs give or take and our business every week is up and to the right. So our biggest challenge is just keeping up with it. So that's segment number one. Then the obvious response to mail order is, well, I need to pick things up today. And so we created what's called the teamcubancard.com. I did not name it. And it's basically a discount card that allows you to go to any of the 17,000 pharmacies that have affiliated with us and pick up any of our, not any of, but most of our drugs locally because we pay, I'm a big believer in supporting independent pharmacy. So we pay our affiliate pharmacies a $12 fill fee, which means that's going to make us more expensive for the lowest cost drugs because if you have a $5 statin plus $12, you're going to get it cheaper somewhere else. But at the same time, if you really want to support your independent pharmacies, you can pick up the cheap drugs. But on the more expensive drugs, the specialty generics, the biosimilars, we're actually much cheaper. And for things like biosimilars and insulin and things that have cold shipping, it's actually cheaper to buy it and pick it up locally through our Team Cuban Card. So that's the second stool in what we offer. Third is Cost Plus Marketplace. Well, before I get to Cost Plus Marketplace, let me go back to our Dallas manufacturing. So a big part of Alex, my co-founder, Dr. Oksman, his original cold email to me was he wanted to manufacture drugs that were generic drugs that are on the FDA short supply list because there are pediatric cancer drugs, there are things that are widely used in hospitals, pitocin, epinephrine, this long list of drugs, and we were able to use AI and to use robotics to shrink what would have been a football field or more into 5,000 square feet. And not only that, but we were able to turn drugs every four hours. So we can make a six-month supply, turn the line, and then go to the next drug and continue doing it, and we sell those products to hospitals and clinics. An extension of that, because we've been doing that for a while, we started working on that five years ago. We've been able to take those same robotics and AI and shrink it into a manufacturing plant, if you will, the size of a tractor trailer. And we call those pods. And those pods can be used for anything and shipped anywhere. The government was our first customer. We've shipped the first one here recently where we just got an order for a second and they told us there's more behind that because if there's an ecological disaster, we can send it to FEMA, if FEMA's around. If there is a weather disaster, military disaster, god forbid, we can ship them there and configure them to make any specific type of drug. So we can configure a pod for sterile injectables, for, you know, multiple pods can be daisy-chained together so we can scale, and or you can have one as being a sterile room and another doing the tablet work for generics. And I'm not the expert on this. Alex can go into this in precise detail, but the thing I'm most proud of, and actually Stat News just wrote a story on this yesterday, the day before, is that we can take these pods and configure them to do N-of-one therapies so that we can ship the pod to a research hospital. And these pods cost about $20 million. Ship it to a research hospital and if they specialize in any types of therapies that, you know, for those people that are in the N-of-one category, they can make it and iterate very quickly there. And then now we're doing these ASO drugs, and don't ask me what ASO stands for because I can't pronounce it, out of our first manufacturing facility in Dallas. So that's part two. From that manufacturing, we created costplusmarketplace.com. Sorry, Cost Plus Marketplace. And Cost Plus Marketplace takes those sterile injectables we make and that we also others that we source from other providers or other manufacturers, and we sell them at a cost plus 10 or cost plus 12 to clinics, hospitals, providers, whoever want to buy them at the cheapest price. And we literally can save hospitals millions of dollars a year. But our biggest challenge there is we convince the CEOs but we can't always convince the purchasing people to do it. And then finally, because of my own experiences as a self-insured employer and going around and talking to hospital CEOs and CFOs and learning their relationship with the big carriers, the big vertically integrated carriers and all the things they like and dislike, mostly dislike, I went to them and said, 'Look, I know you hate the delays, the denials, the pre-ops, the, you know, the late pays, the clawbacks, the fact that, you know, your plans or the carrier plans keep on increasing deductibles, turning the providers into subprime lenders because they have to collect the deductibles before they can offer the care or before they can get access to the insurance money. Knowing all these things, I'd like to work out a direct contract, but I want two things. I'm going to tell you what I'm going to give you in exchange for those two things. One, I'm going to trust the doctor. Unless it's something crazy, trust the doctor. So you're not going to need a pre-auth. There aren't going to be denials. Now, we had somebody who had Munchausen's disease that required a denial. But, you know, other than that, if it's something crazy, I'm going to pay the price that we contract for on time. I'm going to take responsibility for the patient out of pocket. Either I'll pay it or I'll take the credit risk for the patient itself. So you don't, you're not a subprime lender, you know. And in exchange for all that, I want two things. I want a better price because your associated administration and overhead and doctor time is much less. Your yield's going to be higher. And I want the ability to take the contract we signed, this direct contract between us, and publish it on costpluswellness.com. So it can act as an open source for all of these contracts so that any employer can use them and any provider can post their contract, and even if you don't want to post or use, you can use them as templates in your own negotiations.'

Well, I love the last piece, Mark, because I think that was the genesis of our thread back and forth when I published a piece a few weeks ago on what I'm calling like the great replacement cycle of health plans. And for, I mean, for so long, so, you know, employer-sponsored health benefits is the largest class of insurance in our country, if you think about it that way. So, you know, roughly about, I think, 155 million Americans are covered by an employer-sponsored benefit or more.

Yeah, more.

But in any case, it's more than half the country, 60% of the country. And historically, it's been completely, you know, monopolized by the big guys, like these national carriers. And it's been an unaddressable market from a startup perspective, right? Like the relationships were super entrenched. You needed these national networks to, you know, be able to play in the game. And so the starting cost to sort of enter the arena was too high for startups to get into and the relationships were just too entrenched. Now, the premium increases are just freaking ridiculous, right? Like this year we're seeing even amongst our startups, some big guys are forcing like 60% year-over-year increases in premiums. And it's just...

It's even worse than you think, Julie. You know, not to step in, but...

Because they're vertically integrated.

So, United Health, 3,000 plus subsidiaries, $150 billion in intercompany transfers annually. That would make them number 14 in GDP in the United States among states. And so that tells you how big they are. And CVS, Cigna are not far behind. And so there's oftentimes when they will increase premiums, increase deductibles, increase out-of-pocket costs, and at the same time redirect you or actually force you into a relationship with a company they already own and you don't know they own them. And you talk about, you know, employer-based insurance, particularly those who self-insure. 60% of people who get their health care from companies get it from self-insured employers. And those employers need someone to process all the medical claims. Put aside pharmacy, the medical claims, those things are called third-party administrators. And if they're owned by the big guys, they're called ASOs, administrative services only. And those administrators, you know, we hear all the time about the problems with PBMs and how they spread price. Well, on the medical side, it's a million times worse because...

It's also a chunk of market.

What's that?

It's also the bigger chunk of the market relative to...

Of course. Yeah, the medical side is much bigger, you know, 10% and growing versus the other 90%. And what they do is the plans and the hospitals have their own contracts. And the hospitals, unless they're market dominant, have to hate the big guys and those contracts, but more importantly, whatever that relationship is, the self-insured employer has no idea what the terms of that relationship is. Right? Even though it's possible you can go on the hospital and look up the file, you know, the transparency files for that relationship and that plan, they're not always correct. They're not always right. But what ends up happening is the price that the employer pays, the self-insured employer pays, rarely matches the amount that was charged or the amount that was paid to the hospital. So there's a spread pricing there. And to make matters worse, those ASOs that are owned by the big guys make it impossible to reconcile the numbers so that you can see if you're paying more or less. And they do things, you know, there's these things called 835 and 837 files, which is the data that's sent to the hospital and the amount of money that's paid in response to those claims. And the employers have no access to it. And in many cases, they don't even have access to their own claims. It is just so rigged. To your point, Julie, trying to, you know, remove them and disintermediate them is the key, the holy grail to what's happening in healthcare right now.

Yeah. And we're, I mean, we're super excited to see just an influx of startups that are now able to go after this market. A big reason why, in addition to all these market forces, and again, like the economics just getting to a breaking point, is the fact that AI can play a significant role in enabling a full-stack like health plan offering to be built in a way that reduces all the crap that you're describing in a very short period of time.

While AI, I'm a huge AI fan. Love it, love it. I think it's important on the clinical side. I think it's important on the operational side. I think it's most important short term on the contractual side. But the reality is in a broken financial system, even when you introduce AI into the economics and the operations and the processes, when it's already broken, you can't fix it because you brought up the point right at the beginning, Julie, and you're 100% right. We are not in an efficient healthcare market. The economics are broken. And you see that because if you don't have price discovery, that's one thing that protects you, that keeps you from having an efficient market. But what's even worse, and here's where the market, the economics really start to fall apart, and what makes it tough for AI in the short term operationally and less so clinically, the contracts are so big and so long, the big guys through their ASOs get to be contractual terrorists. And what I mean by contractual terrorism, the city of Dallas on their PBM contract, I haven't been able to see their ASO contract yet, 1,335 pages. Mhm.

There's no group of humans with enough coffee on the planet to be able to catch everything they try to squeeze by.

And so, as a result, no matter what AI, once you sign a contract, now hopefully you use AI to prevent yourself from signing a bad contract. And I think that's the low-hanging fruit for everybody. But once you sign that contract with terms you don't fully understand and conditions you don't fully, you can't even protect yourself against, they win. There's no AI on the planet that can protect you. And when you try to compete with them on plans, right, that sounds good and I'm all for it, right? What Sidecar is doing and so many others are doing is really smart, but they're having problems because, you know, yes, the wraparound networks are needed and yes, putting together a network is hard. But those big guys have so many subsidiaries, they [__] with you somewhere and you don't even realize it. And that's the ultimate challenge. And that's why I'm so big on the break up big medicine bill and going after these companies because I want this to be an open market for every entrepreneur, you know, to use AI in every way possible.

And so you went exactly where I was going to go, Mark, which is one of the areas where AI is playing a role, for better or for worse, is that it is just shining a light on how broken the underlying system that humans designed is, right? So the whole like prior auth war situation that's happening right now between payers and providers is one of, you know, people blame the AI, but it's actually no, it's like AI is just implementing the existing fee-for-service billing system to the full extent and showing us how broken that system is. So I'm curious to like what your take is on what's the end state of that? Like clearly your direct contracting methodology, it sounds like, is able to reduce a lot of the information asymmetry and contract clarity and things of that sort. Is that what it's going to take or...

So the bot wars in terms of claims and upcoding and downcoding, that's short-term stuff, right? That's just like, you know, okay, I need to lose some weight, I'm not going to eat, you know, my rice, I'm not going to eat my Frosted Flakes every day, right? It's nice on the periphery and it's a good short-term play, but it doesn't really change everything because AI is a great equalizer. Your AI, my AI, your OpenAI, my Anthropic, whatever it is, we're going to battle each other out and you might win a couple innings, I'll win a couple innings, but they're going to net out at some level. So I don't see dramatic change in the long term. Maybe if you're first in, you can pick up some things and you see some lawsuits and you see some challenges when one side has it and the other side doesn't, but the revenue cycle management on the hospital side is pretty darn good. And the big guys have a big problem in my opinion because they grew through acquisitions. We mentioned these 3,000 subsidiaries. That's a lot of siloed data. And even though you can try to find ways to get access to claims and specific things that allow you to upcode and they're doing that, it's going to be hard for them to become AI-native companies on the big guy side. And I think over the long term they're going to be challenged. But all of this starts, and I can't say this enough, all of this starts before those employers sign their contracts. If every one of your portfolio companies said, 'You know what? I'm going to run my existing benefits contract. If I have a broker, if I have a consultant, if I have a TPA, if I have a PBM contract, I'm running my existing contract through AI and I'm using a prompt that asks a single question: Where are they [__] me over? What should I do about it?' And within 30 seconds, you're going to see bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And the things I've seen running through contracts, because let me just tell you how much I love AI agents. So I use them all. I use Grok. Eric and I are NBA fans. And so I got the Luka Doncic plan because it's $77.69 or something. I'm like, this is brilliant. Grok, $77, the Luka plan. I got you. And then I have the Gemini plan. And then I have OpenAI's plan, etc., etc. And I use the agents and I say, you go out and find me every state entity, organization, enterprise that has an open records opportunity and I want you to find me every single contract, RFP, whatever it is you can find from those entities and I want you to write the letter to request it. Put it in an email. Put it in my draft. Let me personalize it some. Tell me when it's there and I'll hit send. And it's amazing, right? Stuff that's always been at the bottom of the list that I always wanted to get to but never could. Now it's just like this stuff is coming. And so I put it up on Google Drive and each of the different LLMs has access to it. And I just tell them all every time something new loads on the drive, you go through and you tell me, you give me the good news, you give me the bad news, you give me what should be done, and then you give me the simple version so I can send to the company or, you know, school or whatever it is. And bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And that's where I get to see all these contracts that the big three on the PBM side and the big guys on the ASO side are signing. And so I get to see specifically how all these enterprises are getting ripped off, these school districts, oh my god, cities from Denver to Dallas to Fort Worth, unions. I mean, and if you think about it, again, going back to your perfect point, Julie, is if that 67%, if the employers representing 67%, the 160 million plus Americans actually did one thing, one thing, ran their contracts through AI before they signed them and negotiated from that, the entire system for the big guys and big PBMs and all their subsidiaries would collapse. The cost of health care in this country would drop like a rock. And so when I go and I talk to employers, when I go talk to investors and talk about their portfolio companies and they're like, 'Do we need legislation? Do we need this, that?' I'm like, 'No, you need to be smart and do your job and bring in somebody that I call a healthcare CEO or CFO whose only job is to manage the contracts and everything associated with it.' And you will find that your health care costs will go down. And then once we get you there, then we can talk about carving out for direct contracts and doing all these other things immediately. Like there's a couple public companies that I told to do this and came back to me and were like, 'Oh my god, we had no idea how badly we were ripped off,' and I'm begging them to mention it on their quarterly earnings conference calls and they won't do it because they still have to do business with those big guys even though if they left them for whatever reason. Yeah. And so if we just do that one thing, run the contracts through. Literally, if you have more than 1,500 employees, the quickest way for, or members I should say, the quickest way for that startup, that tech company, maybe depending on how bad you're ripped off, into the millions or more, is to just do what I just said, run your contracts through AI.

So, a couple things. One, I mean, the ultimate mission is to disrupt healthcare so that it's affordable again. And I'm a fan of universal healthcare, but you can't get to universal healthcare until you have correct data and people can make decisions based off of real data. So that's bigger system. Whatever direction it ends up going, I just want to disrupt healthcare so that when people think about the economics, it becomes, okay, I know exactly what's going on, how we get there, more education than anything else. Like I mentioned before in terms of the business of Cost Plus Drugs, look, somebody could come along for the retail side and say, 'We're going to do cost plus 1%.' Okay, trust is still our primary product. That's what I try. We don't spend any money on marketing or advertising. And when we first got started, all the people who came from pharma said, 'Oh, you're going to get killed.' I'm like, 'No, you know, people are going to tell others how much money they saved.' And then they're going to trust us. And that's the one thing missing in all of healthcare economics: trust. And so once we gain their trust by doing exactly what we said, by being fully transparent, only having a set markup of 15% will garner people trust. So that'll protect us to some level. But the grandiose vision, those pods I told you about that sell for $20 million, there's good margin in those. And we think we can sell within two years a couple hundred a year, within five years a couple thousand a year. So you give me, you know, a thousand pods to sell at $20 million each, we're going to be doing really, really, really good. And it'll completely change healthcare because we can daisy-chain those things. Like literally, we could manufacture tableted generic drugs in Dallas, Texas using these and make them for less than we pay India, the manufacturers we partner with in India. Now, we don't go for the cheapest price. We go for the best manufacturer. So we pay a little bit more. But still, we can make it for less. The only thing holding us back is that for each generic we have to fill out, we have to apply for something called an ANDA, a new drug application. And each one of those things costs $365,000 plus other fees. So you want to do a thousand of them, that's $365 million plus all the cost of the pods. We're trying to say, look, if we truly want to bring manufacturing and onshore for medications, we're here for it and we can do it. You're already working with us in other areas and so we think we'll get there as a big part of what we'll do. And we've already planned so that on costplusdrugs.com we'll put a little American flag when something is manufactured by us here in the US, but that's probably two years away just because of all the work we have to do with the FDA. But that's the big picture. If we're selling $20 billion worth of pods a year, watch out, Elon.

Yeah. Yeah. There's regulatory capture and there's scale capture. Right now on the economic side, it's all scale capture. And when you listen to the earnings conference calls or read the transcripts for all those big vertically integrated companies, they talk about technology, but the one thing they never say is this is going to translate into lower costs for employers and patients. They always say this is going to improve our earnings. You know, we're going to return more to shareholders. We're going to buy back stock. But until I'm able to educate all these employers, right, they're going to keep on making it nearly impossible. Which is why, you know, when Julie talked about earlier about CVS, why I mentioned we don't deal with any of them directly because we have to work outside of them because otherwise you fall into their trap and they get you with their contracts.

I mean, it looks the same as any other industry. You have to still hire entry-level people because no matter what the model is, the minute it's released, that's it, right? It's behind, it's behind. And so there's latency associated with every model. And so you need people who are aware of everything that's going on, that create context and deal with the models, be the human in the loop, understand the consequences, etc. And you need those people to grow with the organization over time so that as all these things change, they've seen the history of the implementation and they can bring value to the organization. So that's part one. You can't just get rid of all entry-level positions. Part two, you have to enable those people and everybody else white-collar oriented how to use AI because AI doesn't replace jobs. People who know how to use AI replace the jobs of people who don't know how to use AI. So that's part two. And then part three is the bigger picture stuff. The first step to that is trying to educate the C-suite on how AI even works. Teaching them how agents work. Teaching them how to use a model. Teaching them, you know, the difference between open-source and closed models and the different things you have to do. Helping them understand the latency of a model, that this brilliant conversation the three of us are having is in no model anywhere and won't be until it's published. So if we say something that we can all go out and use, the models are all behind and AI is all behind. So that's a given. And of course, you know, LLMs are text and some pictures and don't deal with, you know, all the real-world things that are going on in video. So you have to be able to understand as a CEO and in the C-suite how all those things impact your company. Once you get a good grasp on that, then you just start fooling around, right? Because there you can just find new ways for things to happen that benefit your customers or create new opportunities. And that's the brilliance of AI, right? AI is not smart. It's, you know, it's book smart maybe, but it's not street smart. It's not, you know, entrepreneur smart. You've got to have somebody there who guides it and helps it. But until you have a C-suite that understands how it works, it's going to be very difficult for that organization. I mean, I literally sat with the head of a consumer food company and he was talking to me about acquisitions and this was months ago and he was like, 'Yeah, because of GLP-1s, yada yada yada.' And I'm like, 'Okay, well, let's do this. Let's take your number one product, your cookie, right? And I'm going to ask ChatGPT to create a competitor that is more GLP-1 friendly and will be priced lower. And I want a full bill of materials. I want sources, everything, manufacturing, what I have to do.' And in about three minutes we got back to him and he was like, oh [__], he had no idea.

The greatest struggle for most organizations now, for entrepreneurs asking that question and trying to implement no matter what it is, there's no better time to be an entrepreneur than right now. You know, there will be the trillionaire in the basement. There will be, you know, somebody who puts out their own agent swarm but does it on an entrepreneurial basis.

You know, now there's still challenges, particularly for agents. So agents don't see social media posts. They can't review them, right? And it's hard to get transcripts for any material amount of them. They can't, you know, watch ads or see ads. And so if we're moving to an agent-driven economy for individuals, there's going to have to be a lot of changes that occur in how we communicate commerce to those agents.

Like literally, I was fooling around with one of the guys in my company and we created this thing and you can go check it out. It's not truly active. It's called agentfeeds.dev. And the whole idea is you take the transcript of your post and you just put it into agentfeeds.dev and then you copy and paste it for anybody can copy and paste, you know, anybody you follow into their agents. Hey, follow all the feeds for this and it takes all the ads and gives you all the information you need so your agent is more up to date on those categories or whatever.

You're going to see, you know, you're going to see an explosion of those types of things, but we still have to get through trust and all the things we all know about AI and the issues we all know about AI. But in terms of opportunities going back to health care, the biggest challenge and where AI I think is going to have the biggest impact other than clinical is by patients, by consumers, right? And being able to look at the things that you are given on the economic side, that you know, the benefits bill, right? The EOB, right? The explanation of benefits, right? And here's where I think consumers will get the greatest benefit.

So right now there's terror in, I don't know, half the country, right? 40% of people in the country can't afford a $400 emergency bill. And so what I always tell people is before anything happens, go into your favorite AI model and say get me a list of all the nonprofit hospitals, go to them and ask them what their financial support services are because all nonprofit hospitals have to have financial assistance programs and some of them are really good and for some people you're better off.

And I don't want to make the decisions for people, but you can ask the questions of the AI to say whatever my insurance plan premium was going to be, I'm going to put it in a money market fund and let it collect interest because I've already discussed my situation with the local nonprofit hospital and I know everything there is to know about their financial assistance plan.

Now those financial assistance plans are created and the pricing is a reference price to the federal poverty levels in most cases, but it can go up to 600% of federal poverty level, which can be over $100,000 for some families in some states. So patients slash consumers slash families understanding what their options are and how to procure those options from particularly nonprofit hospitals is going to be enormous.

If I was going to start a company in this space, I would go to every nonprofit hospital and set up a plan that posts agents that I enable people to use. Hey, you know, if you're concerned about how you're going to be able to pay for your bills or your family bills and you, you know, you don't have much money in the bank, whatever you're making under X number of dollars, copy and paste this into your Muse or into your DOT or into, you know, your Claude Co-work, whatever it is, and it'll know to come here to us and ask questions.

And so when I taught the heads of hospitals, I'm like, you don't understand. You guys suck at marketing. You are dependent on the Blues and their plans and being part of their network to feed you patients. That's ridiculous, right? If you make it easy for people to use your financial assistance programs, maybe go to a local bank, maybe show people how to use stop-loss for smaller medium-sized companies. So many options for them to use it to make things better for patients because that's really where the big disconnect is.

You can offer better plans. You can use technology to reduce the price and become more efficient in how you create a network or negotiating direct contracts. But until the end user truly embraces it and knows how to use it, there's going to be challenges. But all of us at some level, just like we learned to use spreadsheets back in the day when we thought it was too complicated. I'm old enough to remember when people thought spreadsheets were hard, you know, and you had to explain to them and they had to pay $500 for Lotus 123.

But the same thing is happening now as we go through this transition and people, yeah, there's a lot of people who are anti-AI, but there are a lot of people who are anti-everything. That's just a matter of time. But once you get the way you get them to overcome AI is their fear of AI is to show them how these are the things that can really benefit you and protect you and reduce the inherent fear that you have in the event that something goes really, really wrong.

I'll tell you exactly, I'll tell you exactly, and I'm selling my own book here a little. The cost of designing a drug personalized to you after reviewing your DNA and knowing everything that it knows will start approaching zero as the capabilities of models go up. Right? We talk about GPUs and how they'll get faster, the networks behind them, the power required, but it's the algorithms that are going to change everything and make them more efficient. Right? And we don't even know what the speed of improvement are going to be on algorithms.

At some point in time, whether it's 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, they're going to take something from Eric, Julie, and Mark, and they're going to say, starting with over the counter, because if you think about it, right, you walk into a drugstore, you get this, you know, excuse me, whatever, Advil, Tylenol, right, ibuprofen, and we all think it's going to impact us the exact same way. And we have to experiment to see how it impacts our body. The body makes no sense whatsoever.

And so as the processing power and the analytics power of these models from the frontier models gets better, they will be able to really truly personalize over-the-counter drugs without a lot of the mishagos you have to go through to try to figure these things out, right? And now all of a sudden if here's my personal ibuprofen, here's my personal dose or mixture of whatever these over-the-counter drugs, bam, you start to change it.

Then you get into, you know, making other drugs that are personalized for you because again, the fact that we all take Eliquis and decide between Eliquis or Xarelto or Warfarin makes no sense whatsoever in the big scheme of things. And so being able to take those things and personalize that medicine. And what I have told two of the frontier models, I said, if you really want to be smart, you take your $20 or your $200 subscription and you include that service once it's available.

Because your marginal cost for doing this at that point in time, look, the inference and everything that has to happen just to respond to a request today is expensive like this, right? Coming down very quickly. But the same thing is going to happen for this type of personalized medicine. Initially it's going to be enormous. But as we understand the human body more and understand all the variables in our body more and our brains more, etc., and understand the medications and figure out how to do the N of one for everybody, it will be part of a normal subscription because there's no reason it shouldn't be.

How expensive is 23andMe? You pay $99 or less now to get your DNA looked at. And so maybe I pay $99 upfront. I give them my DNA if I'm willing to do that. You know, obviously for privacy concerns, they store it. They continue to bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. You know, maybe you want to know what could be wrong. Maybe you don't want to know what could be wrong based off of your DNA. But if something does go wrong, they have access to all these drugs, all these opportunities, and the ability to create them in real time.

And selling my book, we want our pods to be right there to be able to manufacture them because we're the only ones capable of doing it. And I don't see that changing for a long time.