FULL INTERVIEW: Mark Cuban on Robots, AI, Self-Driving, and Advice to Students

This is our full interview with Mark Cuban, recorded live on TBPN. We discuss why he believes AI agents are spawning a new wave of startups across every vertical despite most still struggling to find traction, unpack his contrarian take that humanoid robots will fail as the world instead redesigns environments around specialized machines, and debate how AI is reshaping everything from cold email and small business operations to Shark Tank, self-driving cars, and what the next generation of founders should actually be building. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to podcast platforms immediately after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Okta - https://www.okta.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Ramp - https://ramp.com Restream - https://restream.io Sentry - https://sentry.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Good to see you. How's your 2026 going? We haven't talked this year yet. What's life like?

• 0:05Mark Cuban?

  I'm loving life. I got no complaints whatsoever. Yeah. Yeah, I'm loving life.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  That's great. Are you, so you're not disappointed about the rollout of ads in L L Ms thus far then?

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  Hasn't ruined your year.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  Because I saw the first ad, it was for the Wall Street Journal, and it was just a little, little bubble at the top. Hey, you might want to take out the journal. Seemed innocent enough to me. But how are you feeling?

• 0:28Mark Cuban?

  I have, I haven't seen it at all, so it hasn't ruined my life at all.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  What's your information diet? Because it's hard not to log on the internet and not start blackpilling these days.

• 0:39Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, no shit. So my first stop, my first stop is a site called Memeo Random, which kind of gives me an update on all the, what's happening in the world. My second stop is Drudge Report, because that gives me the hyperbole on everything that's happening in the world. And then after that, all the different newsletters and emails that I get, just that try to keep me up.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  How are you processing the flood of cold emails that appears to be thoughtful, but is actually AI generated? Because you are notorious for your response rates and getting back to so many people that have reached out, but it, but it feels like maybe an impossible task now?

• 1:21Mark Cuban?

  No, I do what everybody else does. I bought a Mac Mini.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  You did?

• 1:26Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, for sure. And I'm still learning.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  So you're just like, you hit me with AI, I'll hit you with AI back right away.

• 1:32Mark Cuban?

  Right back, right. Because it's, it's not even like the cold emails, because that's pretty obvious. You know, it's pretty easy to see. It's people subscribing me to shit. And, you know, the good news is Gmail has an unsubscribe button, so you just got to train it to hit the unsubscribe button, then I just review it and all that shit. So it's still a work in progress, but at least I have a path.

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, the, the issue with that, with us is that historically, if you had a podcast and somebody wrote you an email and said, hey, I really appreciated this moment where you're talking about this one thing.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Totally. You're like, oh, they actually listen to the show.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  And then you could actually tell, like, hey, at least they, they press play and at least they found a moment. But now AI just does it instantly, so there's no way to clock whether, whether somebody's actually.

• 2:14Mark Cuban?

  Whether it's really not, yeah. And that's okay, right? Because they're gonna, the response rate most likely will be so low. We're in that trial and error phase where people are like, we're gonna try it, see what happens. You know, maybe we'll get lucky and then they'll get bored and then it'll drop off.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is owning a Mac mini a green flag for entrepreneurs these days? Talk to me about what you're seeing in early stage startups in this AI era. Like where, where, where are the interesting builders? What patterns are you seeing that are like, oh, I didn't think that this person would be going down the founder road, but they are now.

• 2:47Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, agents for everything.

• 2:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49Mark Cuban?

  You know, it's just because once you figure out how to do agents, then you can do them a little better than most other people. And then you can turn that into what would have been a SaaS business in the past is now, you know, we'll create your own marketing team. And we'll, you know, do all these different things for you that you no longer have to do. And we'll charge you X number of dollars a month. That's it. And I'm seeing dozens of those, you know, typically one for every industry you can ever possibly imagine.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  And are they growing revenue faster or are they growing profit faster?

• 3:19Mark Cuban?

  Neither. They're just still trying to, to get some, just trying to get some traction at all.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24Mark Cuban?

  You know, um, because if you're growing revenue quickly, you're probably not coming to me yet.

• 3:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:30Mark Cuban?

  You know, you're because, you know, the marginal cost to start is so low and it's so fast. And you're using the agents. So if they can get anybody to give them a credit card.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:39Mark Cuban?

  You know, or sign up or, you know, now there's a little bit of a battle to use, um, USDC for payment. It has the payment rails, you know, to make it so that, you know, just give me your wallet. And that's, you know, it's going to end up being a scam and a lot of people are going to get ripped off there. But, um, but I think the real thing right now is agents for vertical, verticals. And trying to turn that into replace all your employees. So you can start up or you can cut costs.

• 4:06John Coogan?

  Do you think any of those agent focused sort of like niche, at least niche to start businesses, uh, would be a fit for Shark Tank?

• 4:15Mark Cuban?

  Yes and no. Yes, they should be. No, people won't understand them and the other sharks wouldn't understand them. But yeah, I mean, effectively, anything you can do.

• 4:23Jordi Hays?

  But you only need one shark to understand.

• 4:25Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, right. And I'm not on the show anymore, so you're fucked.

• 4:28Jordi Hays?

  It's time to go back. It's time to go back.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was the anatomy of, I think we talk about what makes for a great company all day long. We'll talk about that throughout the show today. But what makes for a company that will put on a particularly captivating Shark Tank appearance?

• 4:50Mark Cuban?

  You've got to remember, it's for TV. You have to be entertaining.

• 4:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:54Mark Cuban?

  And if it's not entertaining in some shape or form, it's just not going to work regardless of the quality of the business. If you don't have a charisma, you don't have a compelling pitch that's entertaining, it doesn't matter. You could be selling dollar bills for 50 cents and it would fail.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  Interesting. How important is like the visual component? There's a lot of physical products, but at a certain point, it gets too big for the studio. How important is it like the physical product presentation?

• 5:22Mark Cuban?

  Well, the good news is that producers will work with you on that and they make them practice over and over and over. And of the hundreds, if not thousands of pitches I saw in 15 years, we only had one really just choke, right? Where they couldn't spit it out. Maybe two, which is amazing. It's a testament to Mindy and the producers there and how hard they prepare them.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think Shark Tank and shows like it will change in the era of AI video generation, you know, endless content? Is it stronger than ever because it's a known brand? Or is there some weakness there? Like, how do you see that playing out?

• 6:06Mark Cuban?

  It all depends on platform. It's like you guys, right? You know, it really just depends on reach of the platform and quality of the product.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 6:12Mark Cuban?

  I think, I think for Shark Tank, it's not going to have to change because of AI or technology, simply because you're, you're really communicating to a family audience. And the message you're communicating isn't, hey, here's a, here's a bunch of businesses that are great. The message you're communicating is, that could be you on the carpet. The American dream is alive and well.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 6:34Mark Cuban?

  And so that's really what makes Shark Tank successful, not the quality of the businesses.

• 6:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about sports? I've seen some, uh, some robots playing tennis. They're going to be playing basketball soon. I don't think I'll be watching robot basketball, but, uh, how do you think live events, sports, basketball will change over the next decade?

• 6:53Mark Cuban?

  I mean, maybe for the referees, like you've seen in tennis, but that's it.

• 6:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:56Mark Cuban?

  I think in reality, more people will want to go to in real life events than before because if, you know, if you're just managing agents, looking at output, looking for exceptions, you're going to want some human touch, right? You're going to want to be able to in, engage. And I think that, that's really, really important. Um, and I think that's where sports will grow. I mean, you're starting to see that now with, you know, what happened with the Olympics, the World Baseball Classic, you know, became much more popular because people want that disengagement from all the, the, the stress that, that's happening right now.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. At the same time, it feels like there's almost an opportunity for, not to bring it back to targeted advertising, but, but AI can tell me, okay, my favorite team's in town. I should go to this particular game. I should remind me at the right time instead of just signing up for the newsletter.

• 7:48Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, that's not AI. That's not really AI.

• 7:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, that's just targeting, right? And I'm going to tell you what, in terms of, I'm going to take it down a different path because I'm contrarian on this. Um, and that's with robotics. I think everybody's making this push for humanoid robots. I think they might have a five-year lifespan and then they'll fail miserably, maybe 10.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:09Mark Cuban?

  Um,

• 8:10Jordi Hays?

  You mean the device, you mean the companies or the device or the individual hardware?

• 8:13John Coogan?

  Physical robots.

• 8:14Jordi Hays?

  Or both?

• 8:15Mark Cuban?

  Both. Right, because I think everybody defaults to, well, we live in a human world and humanoids will take the place of humans for various functions, particularly in the home. And I think there's just no chance. I think if you look at warehouses and what Amazon does, they're not humanoid robots carrying boxes. They're robots that are designed to fit the environment. And I think, you know, I've heard people say, well, a house is a house, you need a humanoid. I think houses are going to be redesigned completely so that whatever the optimal robot is that allows it to simplify the house, that's where houses will go. So I'll give you an example.

• 8:57Mark Cuban?

  If we had robots that look more like spiders, that could, you know, but had hand, you know, the ability to carry and lift things, where more like ants, I guess, maybe, right? But, and you could create a house where the pantry and the refrigerator and the washing machines were hidden behind the garage, if you even have a garage. And that way you could redesign it so all the living space was for people. Because you know that the robots aren't going to be full-formed humanoids, they're going to be whatever the optimal shape is, and they're kind of co-designed. You design the house to fit the robot, and you design the robot to fit the house.

• 9:40Mark Cuban?

  And I think that way you could go a lot less expensively on both.

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  You know, the humanoid founders will tell you, you know, how do you solve stairs, right? Like, it doesn't work for wheels. But if the robots are really great, people, you could put like a mini robot elevator, right? Like, if it's on wheels, you could just put it, yeah.

• 10:02Mark Cuban?

  Like, you see like the old house dumb waiters, right? Where there's just the thing where you pull it, you put it in there, and you pull it up, and it goes up to the next floor, and somebody opens it up. You're going to see, you know, a mechanized equivalent to that, right? Where the, it recognizes the little, you know, ant robot that's coming up, and it opens up a little door that's, you know, that leads to the size of whatever it is it needs to carry or whatever. And then it goes up the dumb waiter, does its thing on the next floor, and the next floor, and the next floor, and does what it needs to do. I don't think, you know, stairs are an issue at all.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about? Just these types of ideas, AI products generally getting rolled out and then hitting it, bumping up against like human guardrails. Like when I hear that, I think like that sounds incredibly sci-fi and potentially possible from an engineering perspective. But then, you know, you try and, you know, remodel your house and then you're stuck in permitting for two years. And so that tends to slow the progress down a little bit. Is that?

• 11:09Mark Cuban?

  But that's all technology.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 11:10Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, of course it is. But that's all technology during the interim period, right?

• 11:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 11:14Mark Cuban?

  There's always a transitional period where you go from the old to the new. Like back in the day, you know, there wasn't enough electrical outlets for your PC. There wasn't enough, you know, you had to go into the walls to run all the ethernet cables and all that shit, right? You know, and so the houses and offices weren't designed for that because it wasn't considered when they were built. But they adapted. You found ways to adapt and it'll be the same thing with homes. It'll be same thing with offices.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Mark Cuban?

  We'll find ways to adapt. I think, you know, the biggest challenge going forward is going to be as we go from an LLM world to a worldview, a worldview world of AI where, you know, we're taking in video and learning from the video and extracting rules from the video. A lot of the things that we're going to do are going to be outside and are going to be, going to have to consume in the interim at least either satellite bandwidth or 5G bandwidth. And I don't think there's going to be enough bandwidth when you're working with video based AI models.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  Interesting. Interesting. You mentioned maybe a garage not existing in the future. Is that a way to say that you're excited about self-driving cars? Like what are you, what are you thinking is going to happen there?

• 12:30Mark Cuban?

  You know, I played around. I have a Tesla and I upgraded for a couple of months and it terrified the shit out of me. Not that I didn't trust it.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Mark Cuban?

  Oh, my God. Because like when you're going 25 miles an hour, it's no big deal.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Mark Cuban?

  You go in a highway and you're going 70 miles an hour and there's a median right there in the middle of the highway.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:49Mark Cuban?

  I was like shaking like, I was like, I don't, you know, Elon's cool or whatever, but you know, I ain't trusting him that much, right? You know, and I'm not waiting for the-

• 12:59John Coogan?

  Mad Max mode? You know about Mad Max?

• 13:01Mark Cuban?

  No, no, no, no, no, no. You know, but you set a delimeter where it's like how much above the speed limit are you willing to go? And if the speed limit is 65 or 70? You know, you gotta go to the speed limit and it was scary as fuck trying to go 70 miles an hour. And I don't want to be there when somebody paints some adversarial, you know how there's graffiti in the weirdest places? Wait until there's adversarial graffiti.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like somebody, if somebody paint, if they put up a brick wall, and then they paint it to look like the road, roadrunner.

• 13:33John Coogan?

  Wile E. Coyote is gonna...

• 13:35Mark Cuban?

  No, that's like ridiculous shit, right?

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Wile E. Coyote is gonna paint the tunnel and then you're slamming.

• 13:42Mark Cuban?

  There's somebody somewhere trying to figure out how to fuck up self-driving mode, right?

• 13:48John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 13:48Mark Cuban?

  And, and just because it's just taking video input.

• 13:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:52Mark Cuban?

  And, you know, what, it could be some pattern and all of a sudden you're seeing this pattern on medians or, you know, overlaid on stop signs or whatever.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:03Mark Cuban?

  You know, because, you know, somebody's got to do that because it's just too easy not to.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Hyper-realistic camo wrap gets confused, you know, eventually.

• 14:13Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, whatever, right?

• 14:14John Coogan?

  You wrap your car in camo and if the camouflage is effective, you're gonna confuse the AIs. It's a risk.

• 14:20Mark Cuban?

  And you just might, and there could be a predator, right? Alien versus predator.

• 14:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:24Mark Cuban?

  Predator could show up, right?

• 14:26John Coogan?

  It's possible.

• 14:26Mark Cuban?

  And if Arnold isn't there to save us.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  It's possible. I mean, speaking of Arnold, are you, it sounds like you're in a good mood, you're optimistic about things. Are, does the question of AI doom come into your mind? These runaway robotics? Are you worried about that at all?

• 14:43Mark Cuban?

  Oh, not even the least bit. For, for the reason I just mentioned, right? In, in order, like, right now, it's, LLMs are basically bimodal with some video, right? Where it's almost all text and pictures with some video. You can't, you can't model the world with that. You just can't. AIs right now doesn't understand the consequences of its recommendations. It has no idea what happens next. A two-year-old kid with a high chair and a sippy cup knows if it pushes the sippy cup over the, off the high chair, mom's coming running and the kid's gonna start laughing at mom, right? Large language models don't understand.

• 15:21Jordi Hays?

  Every time.

• 15:22Mark Cuban?

  Every time, right? And there's no large language models. Ever, right? Ever. And it's hysterical, you know, unless you're mom, right? But, um, but you get the point, right? You, the, the large language models we have today can't do that. And so we have to evolve to models that can capture the world and physics and deal with the latency of capturing or not being, having access to, um, video that you can't see. And so you have to try to model that. And not only does that take up a lot of processing power, but it takes up a lot of bandwidth, as I mentioned before. And so the Terminator's taking over. I just don't see how it's going to happen.

• 16:04Mark Cuban?

  Now, you can have, you know, localized brains for, for military applications and power get better and manual dexterity will get better, all that. But that's, that's not going to allow you to take over the world. Right? That's going to be application specific. So I'm not afraid of that at all. And I also think that, you know, we're talking about agentic applications. I, I think particularly for small, medium sized businesses and some large businesses, they're not going to have that skillset. It's not going to be natural for them to do that. And I think kids coming out of school today that have taken some Python, don't have to be comp sci majors, but have done agentic AI. Like when I go talk to schools, that's what I tell them. You know, get into Claude, you know, teach yourself all the agentic stuff and then go

• 16:49Mark Cuban?

  to small businesses because they're not going to understand how to do any of that shit at all.

• 16:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. That makes a ton of sense.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, what advice are you giving to friends, uh, portfolio companies, et cetera, around navigating as a business leader during, uh, a time where we have, you know, major global conflict? I don't know what exactly you were working on in 2002, 2003, 2004, but there's so much. I mean, right now, uh, everyone's hoping for a quick end to the conflict, but it's hard to lean on that.

• 17:24Mark Cuban?

  You know, it's funny, in 2002, um, when we attacked Iraq, um, I created something called the Fallen Patriot Fund, um, which, you know, was just money available that I funded myself, money available for the families, um, of soldiers who didn't return or soldiers that were, you know, horrifically, um, Injured or disfigured or whatever it may be, and we paid out millions of dollars. But the bigger point was the way the media world was back then, we kind of just trusted what was presented to us by the gatekeepers, right? You could have an opinion whether it was right or wrong, but hey, there were WMDs, right? Weapons of mass destruction, destruction, and we kind of trusted.

• 18:06Mark Cuban?

  Now there's so many information sources and social media, and we really only consume what the algorithms show us, you know, and each one of us has a different algorithm. Like the three of us are out, algorithms are like fingerprints. No two are alike. And because of that, everybody's got a different perspective on what's going on in Iran and what's happening around the world. And to me, that's scary, right? It's hard to know what's real and who to trust. And now with AI, video, you know, what's been created? And we really are in across our fingers and hope things work out for the best because

• 18:47Mark Cuban?

  I don't know that there's a way for anybody to, to really participate in decision or make a good decision.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're all trying to predict the future together. But based on different, well, based on wildly different kind of influences.

• 19:04Mark Cuban?

  Exactly. You know, we don't have access to the information we truly would need in order to make a cogent decision or even have a decent opinion. I mean, we just don't. And we spend more time trying to filter and determine what's real and what's not so that it's, it's almost impossible to really do anything but just hope and pray.

• 19:27John Coogan?

  We have a couple of questions from the chat. The first one is about cost plus drugs. Can you give us an update there? How's it going? What's the thesis?

• 19:36Mark Cuban?

  Crush it. Crush it.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  No.

• 19:42Mark Cuban?

  Yeah.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  But give us a sense of scale, give us a reminder of the strategy, reintroduce the company.

• 19:51Mark Cuban?

  Sure. So what, you go to costplusdrugs.com and you put in the name of the medication. If it's one of the thousands we carry, then we actually show you our actual cost. Then we show you that our markup is only 15% and we charge you $5 for shipping and handling and then the credit card fee. And in doing so with only a 15% margin, we're, unless it's like a $4 Walmart drug, we're almost always the cheapest option for anybody. So if you're underinsured, if you don't have insurance, you know, even to compare it against your copay or coinsurance, we may be cheaper than your copay. And because of that, our business is just skyrocketing. So that's part one of our business. Part two to our business, for

• 20:35Mark Cuban?

  my company, for my, my employees and their families, I went around and talked to the CEOs and CFOs of a lot of hospitals and found out where they were getting ripped off by the insurance companies. You know, if you think about this, and I don't think many people do, if, whatever your deductible is, if something happens to you and you can't afford it, even if you have great insurance, you might have a $1,500 or $2,500 deductible, which is big company, good insurance, but if you don't have that money and 40% of people don't have $400 for an emergency, when you go to the hospitals, as an example, they literally end up loaning you the money. And that, as a result, we've turned hospitals

• 21:18Mark Cuban?

  and providers into subprime lenders. Think about that, right? And then you have the denials and then they underpay, late pay, call back. So anyways, so I went to local hospital, Baylor Scott and White, who's a really forward-thinking hospital system, and I said, look, I understand where you're getting ripped off by the insurance carriers. I'll pay you on time. I'll pay you what we committed. I won't claw back. I won't lay pay. In exchange, I want two things. I want a better price. I want it as a reference price of Medicare. A hundred to a hundred percent of Medicare unless it's really complicated. And more importantly, we created a site called costpluswellness.com.

• 21:59Mark Cuban?

  And we are going to post this contract on costpluswellness.com. So that any business, you guys, TBPN, anybody, any size that wants a direct contract, can reach out to Baylor Scott White and get the same pricing that we get. And it's just blown up. I mean, it's just incredible. We have more than 9,000 providers. And what we're trying to do is teach companies who self-insure in particular, that they can take control of their expenses. You don't need to be dependent on the insurance company to come up with the right deal because they won't. They'll steal from you.

• 22:35John Coogan?

  Did you ever, I mean, it's such an interesting, it's such an interesting company for you. Because I feel like when you have as big of a presence as you do, it could be a book or a course or a protein powder. Did you look at anything else? Or have you burned out on that stuff?

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  Creatine.

• 22:56Mark Cuban?

  Protein powder.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  The Cubanator, the Cubanator protein stack.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  I'm in the, no, this is obviously much more, much more important.

• 23:05Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, I just thought, you know, nobody looks at healthcare and says, you know, the economic side is great. We're doing it the right way in this country. It's the exact opposite. And so if you're going to try to disrupt, go big or go home, right?

• 23:17John Coogan?

  Another question from the chat. What's the most underrated business you've seen in your career? I think they're talking about something that like you, it is the moment you saw it collect and you were like, okay, this is like a wildly mispriced asset or something that could really fly.

• 23:33Mark Cuban?

  Streaming.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  Streaming.

• 23:34Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, we called it Internet broadcasting. I sat down with a buddy of mine, nineteen ninety-five, at a California pizza kitchen. And he was like, how can we listen to Indiana basketball in Dallas, Texas?

• 23:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Mark Cuban?

  And this is right when the Internet had just started, right? It was brand new to everybody. And I'm like, let me figure it out. And so we started a company called AudioNet.

• 23:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:54Mark Cuban?

  And got the right stuff, you know, hundreds of schools, hundreds of radio stations, TV stations. You know, back then, the copyright laws were different. Created our own Internet jukebox and unlived a number of Internet radio stations and started streaming until we sold it to Yahoo. That was the most obvious thing I'd ever seen in my career.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  What was the domain name negotiation like? Jordy's a big fan of, of great domain names.

• 24:19Mark Cuban?

  Great question. Great, great, great, great question. So when we started, it was AudioNet, and I just registered it. Nobody had it.

• 24:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:28Mark Cuban?

  But then.

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  Wait, AudioNet.com or Audio.net?

• 24:31Mark Cuban?

  No, AudioNet.com.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  Okay. I like it, yeah.

• 24:34Mark Cuban?

  Because we were just doing audio in nineteen ninety-five.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Mark Cuban?

  And then by ninety-seven, we, we started to do video, and AudioNet wasn't going to cut it.

• 24:41John Coogan?

  No.

• 24:41Mark Cuban?

  And so I found Broadcast.com because we wanted to broadcast everything and anything. And found the guy and paid him eight thousand dollars, and he was thrilled to get the eight thousand dollars.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 24:52Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, this nineteen ninety-seven.

• 24:53Jordi Hays?

  Did he ping you after that? Did he ping you after?

• 24:56Mark Cuban?

  Yes, he did. Yes, he did. But wait, it gets better. Well, wait, there's more, right? And so I'm like, oh, shit, this is nothing, right? It's an automatic traffic generator. And so I started going out there and just glomming up and just grabbing all kinds of URLs so that we could put content on them and then drive it back to Broadcast.com. So literally, I owned FinalFour.com, I owned Baseball.com, I owned Sandwich.com. You name it, I bought it. I bought it for, I would buy like just packages of URLs, right? And just.

• 25:33Jordi Hays?

  And this is because people were just going to their browser and being like.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  This is before SEO.

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  Sandwich.com.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  Before search engines.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  And they would type it in.

• 25:39Mark Cuban?

  Yes, exactly.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  So people would just go and type it in.

• 25:42Mark Cuban?

  Exactly. Everything was a portal, right? Everything was a front door. And so I was like, anything that generated traffic. And I've done it since, like, I own MrPresident.com. I own Democracy.com. I, I, I mean, all, all kinds of really cool stuff.

• 26:00John Coogan?

  He checked Democracy private.

• 26:02Mark Cuban?

  I was worried. I was worried.

• 26:03John Coogan?

  That's the most American thing I've ever, I've ever heard. I love that. That's incredible. Okay, the last question from the chat, and we'll let you get back to your busy day. I, I want to flip it around. What's a, what's a business that you've seen in your career? That you wanted to work so well, but for whatever reason, the business just didn't achieve what you had in mind? And why?

• 26:24Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, um.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  And you don't need to be specific about this particular company. I mean, like, a technology or maybe an anonymized company, something like that.

• 26:33Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, um, God, I'd have to think about it. You know, the, um, what was not the, the motorized skateboards, they weren't called it with the two wheels?

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Hoverboards.

• 26:41Mark Cuban?

  Hoverboards, yes. So.

• 26:44John Coogan?

  I agree. I want the hoverboard future. Everyone traveling on hoverboards everywhere.

• 26:48Mark Cuban?

  Yes. So a buddy of mine, um, his son was an engineer. And I was like, okay, this kid could try to come up with some new ways to do hoverboards, make them safer, et cetera. And so we started a company that did hoverboards. And there were so many more patents already in place than I ever imagined. We couldn't get past them and that it failed miserably.

• 27:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that was a very interesting boom, the hoverboard boom. It sort of came out of Shenzhen fully formed. Because there was a massive supply chain and they were all over, but there was no one brand. There were like a ton of different brands because really what was going on was there was one amazing supplier in China that had like 20 different companies that were reselling it all.

• 27:27Mark Cuban?

  And they were making a killing, a killing.

• 27:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what, what, uh, is it still possible to create a widget and make? Like a hundred million dollars from it, or does the cop or do the clones come? Cause I, I, I know the guy who made um like the, the, the fidget spinner, like his claim to fame.

• 27:46Mark Cuban?

  Right, right, that's cool.

• 27:47Jordi Hays?

  And but, but he didn't.

• 27:48Mark Cuban?

  It got knocked off like that.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it was, it was the kind of thing that like was a hit product.

• 27:53Mark Cuban?

  That's all on Amazon, all on Amazon.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so it's.

• 27:56Mark Cuban?

  Right, so, so I started talking to some Amazon resellers like mid 24, because I was just curious about some things. I see some things on, on X and um as it turns out, if you're an American seller, it may have changed. So correct me if I'm wrong, if you're an American seller, you can have one company that sells on Amazon, right? For, for your, but if you're Chinese, there's no limit.

• 28:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:19Mark Cuban?

  And you don't even have to have a nexus. So if you're that American company and you're making sales and making money, then you have to pay taxes and define your nexus and you know.

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so you're just screwed because you, because you're.

• 28:32Mark Cuban?

  You're screwed.

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Mark Cuban?

  Yeah. Because so these Chinese companies to this day, as far as I know, these Chinese companies don't have to have a nexus, don't pay the taxes, even though they're supposed to, right? You can literally have a Chinese bank account and Amazon will send the money right to that Chinese bank account. And I was proposing to these guys and talking to some legislators at the time that Chinese companies should have to post a bond before they can sell the product and post it on a website that whatever, whatever dot gov. So that, you know, the fidget spin guy, spinner guy could come in and say, you know, we're having an agent now that continually continuously checks to see if there's a knockoff of their product and then can challenge it.

• 29:12Mark Cuban?

  And then at least there's that 10,000 or 25,000 dollar bond that offsets the risk for that fidget spinner.

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  Okay. I know, I know one, I know one widgets company that bought the next five most popular widget.

• 29:26Mark Cuban?

  Oh, wow.

• 29:26Jordi Hays?

  Companies in the category that were knocking them off.

• 29:29Mark Cuban?

  Yep.

• 29:29Jordi Hays?

  And they just continue to operate them.

• 29:31Mark Cuban?

  Yep.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  But they have enough ranking on Amazon and they have the scale.

• 29:35Mark Cuban?

  But it's just wrong. It's just wrong that, yeah, because any, whether it's China or Vietnam, any country, if you're outside the United States, you immediately have a cost advantage, not the manufacturing, but just from an IP, from a, and from an Amazon cost perspective. Why in the world is it cheaper for a Chinese or Vietnamese company to sell on Amazon and to easily knock off than it is for an American company to sell the original product? That makes no sense. And, yeah, and legislatively, you could fix it in a heartbeat. You gotta post a bond, $25,000 bond, depending on the size of the market, maybe more, and then give everybody 90 days to check it.

• 30:17Mark Cuban?

  And all of a sudden, the whole industry changes and American manufacturing skyrockets. And the, because that, that cost of knockoff isn't just about the cost of, um, losing sales. It's the administrative, the, the, the legal cost, that there's just so many nuanced things that you have to spend money on.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we have, we have, we have a knock, we have a knockoff issues and like, we, we spend thousands of dollars to have our lawyer like chase him down and send takedown requests.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  From our merch, like just t-shirts and stuff.

• 30:48Mark Cuban?

  Yes. Oh, yeah. Merch is crazy. And then IP too, right? All the, the DMCA takedown notices because they're just scraping and, you know, reposting all that shit, right? It's easy to fix if, you know, someone has the guts to do it.

• 31:02John Coogan?

  What is the anatomy of using your likeness? Once you've made an investment, what, what, what does the, the best relationship look like? I imagine it's very open and transparent, but I imagine that anyone who's been associated with you at all is trying to like slap your face next to their product and like pump it all over. And maybe you haven't invested yet and you just said, oh, it looks nice. And then they're like, clip it. He said it looks nice, you know?

• 31:29Mark Cuban?

  Yeah. I mean, it depends on the company, you know, usually I, I don't even care, but two things. One, you know what Synthasia is? Synthasia.io?

• 31:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I think so.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they've been on the show.

• 31:39Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, they have the avatars there, Victor and all those guys. Well, I was their first investor, so I send them there.

• 31:44Jordi Hays?

  Okay, yeah, yeah. Your dog, your dog. That's a unicorn.

• 31:53Mark Cuban?

  And I gave them like a lot of money. I gave them a lot of money. This was 10, 12 years ago. Way ahead of the curve. Yeah.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Okay, so it's easy.

• 32:10Mark Cuban?

  Yes, it's so it's easy. So I'll push into them or like I'll just fuck around like you saw with Sora. Um, they had, um, so I just, I, I put one picture of me out there, but I was playing with it because I want to learn all this stuff. And they, um, Sora had this thing where you can put conditions on how, when it can be used. And so I made it. Yeah. So I made a condition. I made a condition so that at the end of every video that, video that used my likeness, you had the, it showed the logo for cost plus drugs.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  So smart. So smart.

• 32:42Mark Cuban?

  And it's been used like hundreds of thousands of times. And I know we've seen a bump as a result.

• 32:46Jordi Hays?

  So smart. John did the less commercial thing. He said, portray me as a bodybuilder.

• 32:53John Coogan?

  It's funny.

• 32:54Mark Cuban?

  It's fun. It's really fun. But unfortunately, Sora has kind of fallen behind now. So they kind of, I don't know if the opportunity is gone.

• 33:00Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, it's good. It's gonna, uh, it'll just get added into chat GPT and then you got a billion people just, just pumping cost plus drugs.

• 33:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Mark Cuban?

  Uh, it's always, it's always crazy to me to see it like I tell it, you know, don't, you know, because it has, um, terms of service. You can't show drug use and da, da, da. And so there's pictures of me like doing lines of coke and shit. And I got, you know, so it's kind of crazy, but.

• 33:20John Coogan?

  Ridiculous. Um, what, uh, when is the right time to, for a company to apply to Shark Tank?

• 33:27Mark Cuban?

  Anytime. You just don't know. I mean, they have open auditions, um, all the time. So if you go to, um, Shark Tank's website, yeah, it'll give you all the information there.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:36Mark Cuban?

  And you just gotta go out there and have fun.

• 33:38John Coogan?

  Go out there and have fun.

• 33:39Jordi Hays?

  How are you processing the peptide boom? Both FDA approved?

• 33:44Mark Cuban?

  Non-participant, non-participant. I'm not a believer in that shit at all. Like every single LLM that I put it into and asked for, you know, show me the trials and show me the, um, research.

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  You mean the non FDA approved, just, just the, the stuff coming off the boat?

• 34:01Mark Cuban?

  Right.

• 34:01John Coogan?

  Or are you short Eli Lilly?

• 34:03Mark Cuban?

  No, no, no, no, no. The insulin, like the real, because when people talk peptides, you're talking supplement type stuff, right?

• 34:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Mark Cuban?

  Right.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  You're talking BBC 157, not Ozempic that's running Super Bowl ads.

• 34:15Mark Cuban?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 34:16John Coogan?

  Very heavily regulated. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 34:18Mark Cuban?

  No, because that stuff's going to come down in price.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 34:21Mark Cuban?

  And now, you know, Lilly and Novo are smart now with their GLP-1s.

• 34:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Mark Cuban?

  They're working around the PBMs. They're doing direct to patient, direct to company. And that was brilliant. That was really smart.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's very cool. Well, thank you so much for taking the time, Jordi. Yeah, super fun.

• 34:35Mark Cuban?

  It's always fun.

• 34:35John Coogan?

  This is super fun.

• 34:36Mark Cuban?

  Always fun.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  Great to see you, Mark.

• 34:38Mark Cuban?

  Always fun, guys.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  Enjoy the rest of your day.

• 34:39Mark Cuban?

  Appreciate it, guys.

• 34:39John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 34:40Mark Cuban?

  Thanks, guys.