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

0:00John Coogan:Good to see you. How's your 2026 going? We haven't talked this year yet. What's life like? I'm loving life. I got no complaints whatsoever. Yeah, I'm loving life. That's great. So you're not disappointed about the rollout of ads in LLMs thus far? Is that safe to say? It hasn't ruined your year. 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? I haven't seen it at all, so it hasn't ruined my life at all. What's your information diet?

0:33Because it's hard not to log on the internet and not start blackpilling these days. Yeah, no shit. So 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. 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.

1:17But it feels like maybe an impossible task now. No, I do what everybody else does. is I bought a Mac mini. You did? You know? Yeah, for sure. And I'm still learning all my Spotify stuff. So you're just like, you hit me with AI, I'll hit you with AI back right away. Right back, right. Because 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.

1:54Well, the issue 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. And then you could actually tell, like, hey, at least 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 somebody actually. Whether it's real or not. Yeah. And that's okay, right? Because the response rates most likely will be so low. We're in that trial and error phase where people are like, we're going to try and see what happens. Maybe we'll get lucky and then they'll get bored and then it'll drop off. Yeah. Is owning a Mac mini a green flag for entrepreneurs these days?

2:34John Coogan:Talk to me about what you're seeing in early stage startups in this AI era. Like 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. Yeah. Agents for everything. Yeah. 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 and are they growing revenue faster are they growing profit faster neither they're just still trying to to get some just trying to get some traction at all yeah you You know, because if you're growing revenue quickly, you're probably not coming to me yet.

3:29Okay. You know, because, you know, the marginal cost to start is so low and it's so fast and you're using the agent. So if they can get anybody to give them a credit card, you know, or sign up or, you know, now there's a little bit of a battle to use USDC for payment, 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 I think the real thing right now is agents for 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 would be a fit for Shark Tank? Yes and no. Yes, they should be. No, people won't understand them and the other sharks wouldn't understand them. Sure. Yeah. I mean, effectively, anything you can do. but you only need one shark to understand yeah yeah right and i'm not on the show anymore it's time it's time to go back it's time to go back yeah what what was the anatomy of i i think we talk about what makes for a great company all day long we'll talk about that throughout the the show today uh but what makes for a company that will put on a particularly captivating shark tank appearance um you got to remember it's for tv you have to be entertaining yeah 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 you know 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 interesting uh 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.

5:19John Coogan:How important is it like a physical product presentation? Well the good news is the 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 yeah we only had one really just 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. Yeah. How do you think Shark Tank and shows like it will change in the era of AI video generation, endless content? Is it stronger than ever because it's a known brand or is there some weakness there?

6:04John Coogan:How do you see that playing out? It all depends on platform. It's like you guys, right? It really just depends on reach of the platform and quality of the product. I think for Shark Tank, it's not going to have to change because of AI or technology, simply because you're really communicating to a family audience. And the message you're communicating isn't, hey, 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. 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 robots playing tennis. They're going to be playing basketball soon. I don't think I'll be watching robot basketball, but how do you think live events, sports, basketball will change over the next decade? I mean, maybe for the referees like you've seen in tennis, but that's it. I think in reality, more people will want to go to in real life events than before because if you're just managing agents, looking at output, looking for exceptions, you're going to want some human touch. You're gonna want to be able to engage. And I think that's really, really important.

7:15And I think that's where sports will grow. I mean, you're starting to see that now with what happened with the Olympics, the World Baseball Classic became much more popular because people want that disengagement from all the stress 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 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. Yeah, that's not AI. Yeah, that's just targeting. 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. 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.

8:08maybe 10. Yeah. You mean the device, you mean the companies or the device or the individual robots or 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 gonna be redesigned completely so that whatever the optimal robot is that allows it to simplify the house, that's where houses will go.

8:55So I'll give you an example. If we had robots that looked more like spiders, that could, you know, but had the ability to carry and lift things, 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-form 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.

9:40And I think that way you could go a lot less expensively on both. 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 like you can just put it yeah like you you seem like the old house dumb wait um 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's 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 dumbwaiter does this thing on the next floor the next floor the next floor and does what it needs to do i

10:36John Coogan:don't think you know stairs are an issue at all yeah uh how do you think about uh uh 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, is that a real technology? Okay. Yeah, of course it is, but that's all technology during the interim period, right?

11:13There'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 to run all the ethernet cables and all that 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 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 world of AI where, you know, we're taking in video and learning from the video and extracting rules from the video.

12:00A lot of the things that we're going to do are going to be outside and are 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 thinking is going to happen there? You know, I played around. I have a Tesla and I upgraded for a couple months and it terrified the shit out of me. Not that I didn't trust it. Yeah. Oh my God. because like when you're going 25 miles an hour, it's no big deal. You go on a highway and you're going 70 miles an hour and there's a median right there in the middle of the highway. I was like shaking, like, I don't, you know, Elon's cool or whatever, but you know, I ain't trusting them that much, right?

12:57You know, and I'm not waiting for the - Are you in Mad Max mode? You know about Mad Max mode? No, no, no, no, no, no. You know, but you can set a delimiter 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 the speed limit and it was scary as fuck trying to go 70 miles an hour. And I don't wanna be there when somebody paints some adversarial, you know how there's graffiti in the weirdest places? Wait until there's adversarial graffiti. Oh yeah. Yeah, like somebody, if somebody paint, if they put it on a brick wall - It's Roadrunner.

13:31And they paint it to look like the road, Roadrunner. Wile E. Coyote is gonna - No, that's like ridiculous shit, right?

13:38John Coogan:Why is he going to paint the tunnel and then you're slamming? There's somebody somewhere trying to figure out how to fuck up self-driving mode, right? For sure. Because it's just taking video input and it could be some pattern. And all of a sudden you're seeing this pattern on medians or overlaid on stop signs or whatever. Yeah. You know, because, you know, somebody's got to do that because it's just too easy not to. Yeah. Hyper realistic camo wrap gets confused. You know, whatever. Wrap your car in camo. And if the camouflage is effective, you're going to confuse the AIs. And there could be a predator, right?

14:23Alien versus predator. Predator could show up, right?

14:26John Coogan:And if Arnold isn't there to save us. It's possible. I mean, speaking of art, are you, it sounds like you're in a good mood. You're optimistic about things. Does the question of AI doom come into your mind? These runaway robotics, are you worried about that at all? No, not even the least. For the reason I just mentioned, right? In order, like right now, LLMs are basically bimodal with some video, right? where it's almost all text and pictures with some video. You can't model the world with that. You just can't. AI right now doesn't understand the consequences of its recommendations. It has no idea what happens next.

15:08A two-year-old kid with a high chair and a sippy cup knows if it pushes the sippy cup off the high chair. Mom's coming running and the kid's going to start laughing at mom, right? Large language models don't understand. Every time. Every time, right? And there's no large language model ever, right? Ever. And it's hysterical, you know, unless you're mom, right? But you get the point, right? 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 having access to video that you can't see.

15:52And 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 gonna happen. Now you can have localized brains for military applications and power get better and manual dexterity will get better, all that. but that's not gonna allow you to take over the world, right? That's gonna 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 think particularly for small, medium-sized businesses and some large businesses, they're not gonna have that skillset.

16:32It's not gonna 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 to small businesses because they're not going to understand how to do any of that shit at all.

16:52John Coogan:Yeah. What what advice are you giving to friends, portfolio companies, et cetera, around navigating as a business leader during a time where we have 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, everyone's hoping for a quick end to the conflict, but it's hard to lean on that. You know, it's funny. In 2002, when we attacked Iraq, I created something called the Fallen Patriot Fund, which, you know, was just money available that I funded myself, money available for the families of soldiers who didn't return or soldiers that were, you know, horrifically injured or disfigured or whatever it may be.

17:48And we paid out millions of dollars. But the bigger point was the way the media world was affected. And 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. And we kind of trusted. 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.

18:31And to me, that's scary. Right. It's hard to know what's real and who to trust. And now with AI, video, what's been created. And we really are in a cross our fingers and hope things work out for the best. Because I don't know that there's a way for anybody to really participate in a decision or make a good decision. Yeah, we're all trying to predict the future together. Within perfect information. Well, based on wildly different kind of influences. 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.

19:16And we spend more time trying to filter and determine what's real and what's not so that it's almost impossible to really do anything but just hope and pray.

19:27John Coogan:We have a couple questions in the chat. the first one is about uh cost plus drugs can you give us an update there yeah how's it going what's the thesis yeah russia

19:43John Coogan:yeah fantastic but give us a sense of scale give us a reminder of the strategy reintroduce the company sure so what time 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 five dollars for shipping and handling um and then the credit card fee and in doing so with only a 15 margin we're unless it's like a four dollar 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 co-pay or co-insurance we may be cheaper than your co-pay And because of that, our business is just skyrocketing.

20:31So that's part one of our business. Part two to our business, for my company, for 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 hospital, as an example, they literally end up loaning you the money.

21:15And that as a result, we've turned hospitals and providers into subprime lenders. Think about that. And then you have the denials and then they underpay late play call back so anyways so i went to local hospital beller scott and white who's a really forward-thinking um 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 about 100 to 100 of medicare unless it's really complicated.

21:53And more importantly, we created a site called costpluswellness.com. And we are going to post this contract on costpluswellness.com so that any business, you guys, TBPN, anybody, any size that wants to 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.

22:34They'll steal from you.

22:35John Coogan:That's very cool. I mean, 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? Yeah, protein powder. Protein powder. The Cubanator protein stack. I'm in the, but no, this is obviously much more important. 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 another question from the chat uh what's the most uh underrated business you've seen in your career i i i think they're talking about something that like you uh it is the moment you saw it it clicked and you were like okay this is like a wildly mispriced asset or something that could really fly streaming streaming yeah we call it internet broadcasting i sat down with a buddy of mine in 1995 at a california pizza kitchen and he was like how how can we listen to Indiana basketball in Dallas, Texas?

23:45And 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 and got the rights to hundreds of schools, hundreds of radio stations, TV stations. Back then the copyright laws were different, created our own internet jukebox and unlimited 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.