Mark Cuban on the NBA, Cost Plus Drugs, and How to Fix Politics

I look at business as a sport, and I just love to compete. I like to be intellectually challenged. I'm an independent. I don't care about parties. I could care less. I want to be where there are different viewpoints—an intellectual response rather than just a “you suck” response that you get on social media.

Mark, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here.

We spent a lot of time together over the last couple of years, but most of that time digitally and in group chats. One question I often get in the group chat sphere is, “How do these billionaires have so much time to be on group chats?” To which I say, “Oh, that's actually the highest form of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Once you really make it, then you want to argue with your friends and have interesting conversations.” What do you say? What's your reflection on what you get out of these, or what you spend time on?

You want to learn. You want to challenge yourself. You want to see what other people think and why. Because in a world that's changing the way it is, I want to be where there are different viewpoints and have it be an intellectual response rather than just a “you suck” response that you get on social media.

Yeah. One of the things I appreciate most about one of our group chats is that you're one of the lone dissenters. Originally, it was about the election, right? It had more of a right-leaning crowd, and you were one of the most prominent Democrat.

I was the dissenter. I'm not even a Democrat. I was just the centrist, willing to be independent and ask, “Why?”

What did you get out of that? Did you just get sharper and make your arguments smarter?

It wasn't even so much that. To me, there were a lot of things that didn't make sense, and to them, it didn't make sense where I stood. I wanted to get to the root of why people came to those conclusions. Typically, it just came down to trust.

Yeah. But you don't know that that's going to be the underpinning logic until you ask the questions.

And so I think a lot of people presume, in any type of group chat, that they know where everybody stands and think they understand why. But it's only when you start challenging them that you find out. On top of that, it makes me reconfirm why I feel how I feel. That's a win for me as well.

Totally.

I'm an independent. I don't care about parties. I could care less.

Have you ever supported a Republican?

Have I? Oh, yeah. I've voted for Republicans. I just don't care. I try to look at each individual issue. I actually voted for George Bush.

Okay.

We can argue about the quality, but it's about the alternative.

And in terms of the comparisons to Trump—

We're both salespeople, and I think that is a strength for me in understanding him. At his heart, he just knows how to do PR and sales. That's who he is, and that's how I've grown my businesses. People always hear me talk about “sales cures all,” and you have to understand your market in context. He's brilliant at it. He understands how to sell. He understands how to use PR. He understands where leverage comes from and when it doesn't exist, and how to zig and zag when it doesn't work.

I think those are actual skills of people who have built businesses. Those are entrepreneurial skills. When you actually run the business, you have to do all the work behind it, and as a politician, that's not always the case. When did you realize that businesspeople would have platforms that would give them distribution advantages in reaching customers?

Just when social media came out.

Yeah. You were early to this—very early. You and Trump were among the early, early people.

Yeah. I mean, right when Twitter started—not in 2006, but in 2009 at South by Southwest, when they were all pumping it up, when it was all about, “Where's the party at?”

Social media was obviously, “Why are people following me?” It's aspirational at some levels, and I owned the Mavs, so it was informational. Then, with the technology background, it was informational there as well. I could reach into different domains.

And interact with people, and that creates a platform. Each platform has its own look and feel, and you just learn how to deal with it accordingly. It's going to be really interesting because of AI, right?

AI, as you know, has multidimensional impact: how you create content and how that content is absorbed effectively. We all have our own feed.

No 2 people have the exact same feed. What Trump has done well is learn how to flood the zone so that no matter what that algorithm finds for you, he's going to find a way to you.

Right?

Whether it's positive or negative. Then you look at Kamala and brat summer and “fell off a coconut tree,” right? Brilliant. She had everything going for her, but the Democrats didn't have anybody who knew how to sell.

So, going back to your question, it's not so much reality stars or businesspeople with followings. It's people who know how to use algorithms and understand how they work.

Now, as AI is evolving very quickly, knowing how to use AI and understanding its impact on social media is going to be critical. If it takes 2 seconds to generate on Veo, and then pretty soon that becomes agentic, it's, “Okay, just videotape everything that I do, create videos, and flood every single account that we create.”

All of a sudden, do people find themselves saying, “I'm going to use social media less because it's all AI-generated and I don't know what's real. There's nothing social about it”? Or do they think talking babies and gorillas in videos is the way to communicate? It's going to be fascinating over the next 3 years because we don't know that part.

We may find ourselves in a scenario where we diverge from the traditional salesperson putting it out there like Trump and find our way to, “Okay, let's understand how we do this.” It's just like polling. Polling is useless now.

Yeah.

You're always behind, and any one social media comment can change how everybody feels in a nanosecond. How do people start integrating surveys? I'm just continuously surveying with all those questions we get online. What direction does that take us? How do I integrate that into video creation? What's the limit?

Yeah. So, you experimented with the social network Cyber Dust a few years ago. When you look out 5 years from now, 10 years from now, do you think there's a new platform that emerges, or do you think it's this fragmented ecosystem that we have now? What's your prediction for the future of social?

Well, look at Bluesky. They have been around for a little while, but all of a sudden, when Trump got elected, their usage just boomed. I call it the fragmentation: people didn't like Elon, so they moved, right? But now it became its own silo.

I think there will—it won't be social media, right? But there will be media. It depends on how much you believe in AI and where you think it'll go. I always look at it as creative people will be able to amplify their creativity and iterate incessantly, and that will create some amazing, incredible things.

Are you just going to put it on X? Are you going to put it on LinkedIn? Are you going to put it on Bluesky? Are you going to put it on TikTok? You don't have control of the algorithm, right?

I think there will be something new, and I think how people connect to that content will be the foundation of it, because I think we're tired of rage bait. We're tired of the fact that the algorithm effectively presents what you seek. I think instead we're going to get unique offerings that don't seem to make sense right now.

The second part to that is, if you go on X and you use Grok, it almost always—unless it's something that Elon is individually interested in—comes up with a legitimate answer. You get people who say, “Hey, Grok, tell me which...” and it doesn't give them what they expect. I think that's a huge positive.

It's the same on other platforms as well. You can just go to ChatGPT, Perplexity, whatever you use—or all of them—and ask questions. So you'll see a reduction of misinformation, I hope. With the reduction of misinformation, you're going to have less rage bait. With less rage bait, what's the connection? Hopefully, it's better-quality content. Hopefully, it's something better.

If we were sitting here brainstorming and just saying, “Can we create our own new network?”—

What would it include, and what would the parameters be? And when you did it—maybe 5 years ago, maybe more...

Was that like a Snap competitor? I'm trying to remember.

Yeah. No, it was 10 years ago.

10 years ago—12 years ago. Yeah.

It was more because of what happened with the SEC, where I got charged by the SEC for insider trading, and they basically just took anything and everything I said out of context. So, I gave them everything I had, and I got cleared in about 15 minutes.

Right.

But the point was, I wanted something that was truly private.

Yeah.

It still exists today, but I mostly use it for internal communications with our employees.

Yeah, that makes sense. Let's go back to the messaging on Democrats and Republicans. If you were in charge of the DNC—the Democratic Party—and could control both the platform and the messaging, what would you advise?

Well, first, you've got to have people who know how to sell. Second, you have to know what people want to buy. And people want to buy, quote unquote, just a better life.

Yeah.

What the Democrats do is they project. They extrapolate: Trump did this, so it's the end of the world. The Republicans are just like, “What's the price of tea in China?” Because I drink tea from China. They don't deal directly with what's happening with you today.

Yeah.

For 99% of people in this country, that's what they care about first, right? So, I would go to the Democrats and say, “Look at the price of beef.” And I think that's what the Democrats miss. They're so intent on the T-word. Everything is just a trigger word because they want people yelling and screaming at rallies.

And that's great, just like Trump did. If you have 10,000 or 15,000 people with Bernie and AOC and you want to get them all riled up, it's a pep rally. Say what you've got to say for the pep rally. But if you want to get people to pay attention, it's different.

I'll give you an example. I was in Indiana for a Shark Tank company I have, Guardian Bikes, and we moved 80% of their manufacturing to Seymour, Indiana. They invited me in, we celebrated, and they've grown from $200,000 at Shark Tank to— they'll do $120 million now.

We got into a little bit, and then we had a question-and-answer. Somebody stood up—I saw it on the news—and they started asking the question, and I just blurted out, “I don't watch the news,” and the place went nuts. It just erupted. Of all the things we talked about for an hour and a half, that by far got a 10x response. That said volumes to me about where people's heads are at.

They don't want to deal with all that shit anymore. They don't want to hear about the end of democracy. They don't want to hear that Trump is an ultimate cancer. Put aside whether or not you believe it's true.

Right. That's not the goal.

The Democrats always lose track of the goal. They lose sight of what the endgame is. If you want to replace Trump, if you want to win the midterms, it's not about ripping on Trump. That's been said for the last 10 years, but how are you changing people's lives?

Then I got into it with somebody else on the Democratic side via email, and it was about oligarchs and billionaires. “Go get them.” I'm like, “Fine, I'll pay more taxes. I don't care.” But other than the 942 billionaires in this country, other than getting people riled up, how are you changing anybody's life?

Yeah.

People want to know that you're impacting their lives. They want to know that things are going to be better. We hear about housing. We hear about whether they should go to college or not. We hear about the threat of AI in their minds—all these different things that they truly worry about and talk about at the dinner table.

Yeah.

How often do the Democrats talk about it? Then it's like, “Let's go get the billionaires.” And I'm like, okay, if you want to—what's the goal? Do you want to reduce income inequality? Then go to the companies and give them incentives.

That really made them mad, right? Company incentives, not incentives for the individual 942 billionaires: “Your taxes will go from 27%—let's say you'll stay at 21%—if everybody gets equity in the company, and it's an equal percentage of take-home pay from the CEO down to whoever.”

Now you have appreciable assets and upside. When people have appreciable assets beyond just a home, A, if it appreciates, they can buy a home, and B, the wealth gap doesn't increase. It gets closed down.

If you do a little research—and I was just curious about all this—I went to Perplexity and asked, “What's the earnings of people who are in ESOPs, employee stock ownership plans, versus everybody else?” It's dramatically higher.

Yeah.

It's not even close. They make more than union employees, and there's less turnover. There are a lot of good reasons for it, and you don't have to be in power as a Democrat to do those things. You can go to the local employer and say, “Why don't we protest you unless you create an ESOP plan that everybody gets to participate in at the same level—as a percentage of earnings—as the CEO?”

I think that's the best form of UBI, which is, instead of free money, just upside in our S&P 500—upside in the economy.

There are places for UBI, too. If you're a caretaker, taking care of your parents, I have no problem with that, because you're paying for it one way or the other through Medicare, through Medicaid, some way. But to your point, appreciable assets change your life.

Yeah.

And if you don't have any, there's no way you can keep up, because the stock market's going up.

Yeah. Do we think that Mamdani's sort of socially progressive, economically populist combination—AOC in a different way, Bernie in a different way—is that the future of the Democratic Party?

He learned from Trump. He's the progressive Trump. Just lie. “Day-one groceries are going to be cheaper. I'll just open the grocery store because they'll sound more progressive that way, right? Day-one buses are free.”

Then everything else, he kind of moves back to the middle. He gives a little bit on the edge, too, for the progressives to be happy. But he's smart. He starts saying, “I'm reducing grocery prices. Trump is increasing them; I'm reducing them day one. When we have the House back, we are going to reduce grocery prices.”

“How are you going to do it?”

“We're going to do it. Trust me.”

Because that's the bifurcation between Trump fans and Trump haters. But in terms of substance, do you think the future of the Democratic Party is more like Bernie Sanders' economic populism, or do you think it's more—

I don't know. I think whatever gets results. I give Bernie credit because he was the first to talk about a living wage. It took him decades, but we've gotten there, and he kept pushing through. So, he deserves a lot of credit.

But it plays more to his base than anything else. Elizabeth Warren had the CFPB, right? That's okay. You can argue both sides, but she got something done. I don't know what the Democrats are doing that's getting shit done.

Yeah.

That's the change in their focus, and that's what's going to guide what type of candidate, right? Because you've got to be able to sell, you've got to understand technology, and you've got to be able to implement technologies.

I said this to Jason Calacanis 15 years ago, baby. I'm like, look, if we can improve efficiency and reduce the cost of government—

Yeah.

—you can increase the money you give to people. Take half the savings. Here's a bigger check.

Wow.

That's what the Democrats could be doing: “We want to give you more money.”

Yeah.

Right? That's what the Republicans do. Great. We're making a promise.

Democrats: “We're going to use AI, and if we need to give UBI, if we need to tax robots, we're going to tax robots. The whole Bill Gates thing—a quarter to a dollar an hour, whatever. Then we're going to take the benefit of that and write you a check. That's going to be your UBI or your tax credit or whatever.”

They just don't think like that. They don't think, where is the solution? How do I get there? How do I sell it in a form that's easy to digest so people understand it? They don't get that AI is going to change everything. How can we not use this in government to be more effective?

Yeah. I mean, that's the whole point, isn't it? Right, let's go deep there, because I know AI is one of the things you wanted to chat about—something you spend a lot of time thinking about. When you look out at the next few years, what do you think is underappreciated or underrealized about how AI is going to change a specific category or a specific way of life?

I think it democratizes a lot of things.

Yeah.

You know, particularly education. While I understand the fear, the first pass is never the way it ends up.

Yeah.

I got 2 kids in college now, one in high school. Hell yeah, they cheat with it. They do. But then I started talking to this teacher from Pennsylvania. I forget what town in Pennsylvania it was. She emailed me and said, “What can I do to integrate AI into my classroom where it’s not just them giving me answers to questions?” And I said, “Make it more like Jeopardy.”

Yeah.

Right. And she’s like, “Well, okay. Here are the 4 causes. You use ChatGPT to find the 4 causes of the American Revolution and write up what it says. Then we’re going to discuss it in class, and you pick which one you think is the most impactful.”

Yeah.

And then we’ll discuss that in class. It’s just changing the paradigm of how they would do things. But back to your question, I think democratization of education is key, because a kid with a cell phone and internet access can go to any large language model and ask anything.

Yeah.

And ask it, “Hey, I’m 8 years old, and I want to learn to speak Polish because my grandmother’s from Poland. Would you put together a class for me and teach me how to speak Polish?”

Yeah.

It will.

Right.

How else are they going to do that? Sign up for Duolingo, right? I’m really curious about baseball.

Yeah.

Right. Who are the best baseball players and why? Teach me about the statistics behind it.

Yeah.

An always-on tutor.

Yeah, absolutely. How about in healthcare? It’s an area you’ve spent a ton of time in with Cost Plus Drugs. Right now, healthcare is like 20% or something of the economy. In the future, is that number going higher? Is that number going lower? Talk about what’s going to happen there.

It’ll go higher, but because we’re going to get some amazing treatments.

Oh, interesting. So the product will get better, the service will get better, right?

Because now you get single-treatment cures that might cost $3 million.

Yeah.

That jacks up the total cost. But in terms of how we do healthcare, everything I do, I put into a ChatGPT project first.

Yeah.

I share it with the doctor and then ask my doctor, “Do you use this stuff or OpenEvidence?”

“Hell yeah, we do.”

I think healthcare will get better qualitatively. I think we’ll benchmark ourselves a lot more, and that’ll make us healthier in a lot of ways. I think the challenge—and the hard part, other than the obvious optimization and processes in hospitals and all that—is how we value IP.

Yeah.

Because if I’m MD Anderson, if I’m Stanford—any research hospital, any scientist in healthcare—you’re an idiot if you publish it, right? You’re an idiot if you patent it, because it’s immediately going to get absorbed into a large language model. You’ve lost control of it, and you’ve lost ownership of it.

Yeah.

I think what’s going to happen is—and I’ve said this as I’ve talked to CEOs of research hospitals, et cetera—you need to silo your stuff. And you need to take what you’ve siloed and either do your own model or put it out to bid, right? Let the foundational models compete, because they’re in a data war. They need specialized data. They need all the data they can get, specialized or general, right? Everything that’s accessible on the internet, they’re getting or got.

And so the people who are creating new things, whether healthcare or anything for that matter, are going to start siloing it and putting it out to bid. I think even within the government, we see all these research grants getting pulled.

Yeah.

I told somebody I know in the administration, “No, keep on doing it, but put it out to bid for the models to get access to it.”

Back to your question again, it’ll change because there’ll be millions of models, as opposed to just singular foundational models. I’ve talked to folks at Microsoft, Meta, and other places, and I think they disagree with that.

Yeah.

They think all this information is going to be available, so the hospital system or the university, whatever it is, or the grantors will just say, “Go ahead and take it.”

Yeah.

Hell no.

So you think there’ll be a flourishing of startups that will have access to specialized data and either put it out to bid, or MD Anderson will have its own language model, and you’ll just have to know where to go?

Just like right now, ChatGPT isn’t going to give you the same answers as Perplexity, as Claude, et cetera. You’re going to use multiple of them, and you’ll say, “Here’s the input. Here’s the output I got here, here, and here,” and you’ll put it somewhere else to have it assembled. But I think there’ll be millions of models, and there’ll be front ends for those models that can’t go out and do a million of them but help curate what’s best for what you’re trying to accomplish.

If you could wave a wand and change anything about how we do healthcare in this country—or what we can learn from other countries—what would you change?

You get rid of the insurance companies and the PBMs, because they do all they can to not take risk. They do all they can to introduce opacity to the system. If you look at it, particularly on the drug side, we’re trying to do MFNs to match the pricing in other countries.

Yeah.

They don’t have PBMs.

Yeah.

When you look at the internals, the biggest PBMs cause all the problems. Literally, we get emails all the time from people who are on Medicare Part D for drugs who come to Cost Plus Drugs because we’re cheaper than their copays.

Yeah, that makes no sense.

But it’s the federal government that approves those plans, and those plans in Medicare Part D are run by individual insurance companies. Then, if you look at a bigger platform just for healthcare in general, think about how healthcare works here: 80/20 to 60/40.

You have an insurance company. Do you guys self-insure? Do you know?

I just joined, so—

Yeah, okay. So let’s just pretend you self-insure. You’re one of the bigger companies, so an insurance company comes to you, knowing you self-insure, and they put together a list of plans. Then those plans—no one ever asks, “Why were those plans defined the way they were?” They just assume we get to choose the plans and we pick them, right?

Well, there’s an inverse relationship between premium and deductible, right? They never check—do credit checks on the deductibles, do they? Younger people are taking the higher deductibles because they presume they’re going to be healthier. But the people who are making the determination to use the higher-deductible plan—half of them don’t have enough money for the deductible.

Right? So we’ve got an insurance system driven by these insurance companies, even if the risk is absorbed by companies or partially by the taxpayers, that are designing plans they know the people who are buying them can’t afford to utilize.

What happens then is that turns the hospital into a subprime lender, right? They go in either through the emergency room or they show up not knowing what their deductible is, and then the hospital will loan them money because they want them to be able to pay the deductible. So then they can charge the insurance company or the employer if they’re self-insured.

But wait, there’s more, right? Let’s just say someone goes in, gets a hip replacement, pays their $5,000 deductible, and they owe $10,000, right? The insurance company, even though they have a contract that says it’s $15,000 between the provider and the payer, doesn’t just write the check for $10,000. They say, “We’ll give you $7,000. If you don’t like it, come and get us.”

And so when you talk to a hospital CFO, they’re like, “We lose 3% to 5%. We can lose as much as 50% on the subprime lending.” They have to absorb all these costs to compensate for what’s happening on the other side of the payment process.

Then, of course, you have the preauthorizations. Most of the preauthorizations get approved after everything is said and done, but they get the time value of the money of the premium and don’t have to pay it. They’ve eaten up all these doctors’ time, and the doctors are the ones getting underpaid. So you’re going in for a heart transplant, and the doctor might make $10,000 unless it’s a big-name physician or surgeon. I want my doctor making a shit ton of money, right? To make sure that, you know—

So you have this connectivity between all the pieces that really hasn’t been thought out, right?

And those insurance companies either own the PBMs or are owned by the PBMs. What they do because they’re together, and they’re also vertically integrated to own clinics and hospitals—not necessarily hospitals, but clinics and other providers—so they have all these intercompany transfers that allow them to game the system. So with the ACA, depending on the circumstances, the insurer has to pay out 80% to 85%, called the medical loss ratio. And so you would think that’s just straightforward, but if you’re vertically integrated, you can put some over here, put all the profits into your PBM, and show that you spent all this money because you wrote that check to the PBM. And so that’s what happens. One of the biggest insurance companies had $161 billion of intercompany transfers.

Oh, yeah.

Intercompany transfers. That’s 0.3% of our GDP.

Wow. Just moving money around to make more money. So if you’d get rid of them, who should take the risk? Would you replace anything?

So, yeah. It’s a great question, right? Healthcare is easy, right? Presuming you get the right doctor and everything, you go to the doctor and they tell you what’s right or wrong, right? Go home. Wrong. Okay, what do I need?

Once you know what you need, there are only 2 questions, whether it’s medication, surgery, or whatever it is: How much does it cost, and how do you pay for it?

Yeah.

Cost Plus Drugs is still the only pharmacy company that publishes an entire price list. The only one, and we’ve been in business 3½ years. That in and of itself is crazy.

But then, once you get into the system and you don’t know what anything costs, they can charge you whatever. And then, in terms of how you pay for it, that’s who takes the risk, right?

And so deductibles are going up, no matter whether it’s Medicare Part D. Even Medicare Parts A and B have higher deductibles. Medicare Advantage plans shrink the network and create networks, so out-of-pocket costs are going up. Patients are the first line of defense that the insurance companies are trying to push the risk onto.

But better, in my mind, is to combine a kind of market where you get rid of the insurance companies and there are no premiums. Get rid of the big PBMs; there’s no manipulation, if you will, of the funds with intercompany transfers.

You create tools that allow patients, or their employers working with them, to go out there, find the best solution for them, and shop. Hopefully, you’ve saved a lot of money by not paying premiums, and you can pay for what you need. What you can’t pay, the government will loan you that money if it stays within the price parameters that have been set.

So it’s negotiating without negotiating, right? They’ve done that to a certain extent with reference-based pricing with Medicare and Medicaid for Medicaid patients. If you or I can pay for it, we just pay for it. But we’ve saved all that money by not paying premiums.

Slowly but surely, we’re getting more and more reinsurance options for individuals—for catastrophic insurance—so in case, God forbid, the worst thing happens, you have an option. That’s one place of risk. If you’re not paying premiums to an insurance company, you can pay for your reinsurance.

If your hip replacement is $15,000 and you have $3,000, you can use financing, but it’s guaranteed by the government.

Yeah.

Kind of like we do with college. You can use the financing the school has, right? But it’s guaranteed by the government. Kind of like we do with houses.

Yeah.

You can use the mortgage plan, but it’s guaranteed by the government, right? The most important thing that we have available to us is our healthcare. The government’s like, whatever, right?

If you take the risk and allocate it within a price control—price control is the wrong word—but if you’re a patient, you’re shopping for care, and it stays within the benchmarks that are set, then go for it. If you want to spend more, right, you think the doctor doesn’t participate, you want to get better—go for it.

But then, all of a sudden, you’ve got all this money that’s not being paid in premiums, and it’s available for people to use to save, whatever. That’s how I would look at it.

So you’ve built Cost Plus Drugs partially because you have this—you care about it, obviously—you have this distribution advantage and the capital advantage to get it started. Let’s imagine if you were a young entrepreneur, a mid-20s Mark Cuban in 2025, trying to be immensely successful like you’ve been. How would you think about that, or what would you pursue?

For Cost Plus Drugs, or—

No, no. You as an entrepreneur.

If I was just getting out of college right now, I’d be all AI, every day. I think the disconnect is employment for computer science graduates, and I said this 10 years ago. I got crushed in 2017, actually.

I said AI was going to put programmers out of business at the early, beginning-stage level, and people said, “Oh, you’re an idiot.” But now big companies are going to find ways to use AI.

Yeah.

They’re going to reduce their workforce—you saw Salesforce or whoever laid off people. Small companies have no clue.

There are only 22,000 companies—I remember this from the Kamala campaign—with 500 or more employees.

30 million right now.

A lot of them are single entrepreneurs, but 5 million have 500 or fewer employees. That’s where you want to try to get a job, because if you’re AI-native—because you’ve been using it through your 4 years of college, or 2 years from now, having had 4 years of experience—they need you.

Yeah.

Maybe they have 1 person who’s picked it up, 2 people. But if you have a business background, which you can learn in school, and you become AI-native, you can walk into a small company and say, “I can help you, right? I can create agents for you that’ll go out and look for things.”

One of my Shark Tank companies is Rebel Cheese. They added a direct-to-consumer business, and they created an agent that compares the weight that comes off a scale with what they’re saying, or the box type, and what they were invoiced by UPS or FedEx, and compares it to the price list. They always got overcharged.

This little company is saving thousands of dollars a week just by using an agent, and it’s not anything difficult or advanced. Being able to walk into a company and say, “I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.”

Yeah.

It’s no different from what systems integrators have done for decades. That’s what I did in my first company, MicroSolutions.

You don’t understand PCs. You’re a small company. I do. I know networks. I can program. I’m going to write you an application that emulates what you’re doing, but faster.

Now it’s no longer about emulation. Those days are gone. It’s about how we change the process by removing pieces to make you more efficient, more productive, and more profitable.

So you rode the PC wave, as you say. Then you rode the internet wave with broadband. You had a big outcome there. If you were starting a company today, would you try to build a foundation-model company or a vertical application?

No, neither.

Yeah. What would you do?

Because they’re all going to be customized. I literally would hone my business skills as much as possible. Domain knowledge will be more valuable. Domain knowledge combined with an understanding of AI is the win, right?

So you would go with some sector that hasn’t yet been touched by AI and build—

Or just small companies. Yeah, you know, regardless of sector.

Yeah, but if you wanted to start something that could be big one day—

Right? Because if I work with 1 shoe company and analyze what they do, then I say, “Okay, I’m going to charge you X per transaction, and I’m going to do the agent for you and monitor the agents.” It’s SaaS at 1 level, right?

But it’s customized SaaS where, as AI advances, the model advances and the agent advances. Factories—you know, talking now, at Cost Plus Drugs we have a robotics factory, and we use AI agents to monitor everything. Our cost to run the factory is a fraction of pretty much everybody’s other than India and China, and we’ll catch up to them.

Understanding how business works, having that domain knowledge, being able to apply it, and then being able to scale it by taking it to all those companies in similar circumstances—or creating agents that modify the agents based on the information you’re getting from all your customer companies—that’s the new SaaS, potentially.

Yeah, totally. I want to zoom out and talk about general business success and advice. The internet lists your net worth, I believe, at over $8 billion or something to that effect. But typically, when people become super wealthy, it’s because of 1 big thing. It seems like you’ve sort of compounded wealth over decades.

I think the biggest liquidity events—correct me if I’m wrong—are the companies you sold, and then there have been other efforts. What do you think is the thread, the through line, when you look at your career and the ways in which you’ve made money that others can learn from?

I look at business as a sport, right? And I just love to compete. You know, that keeps me going. There’s always something new and always something changing. It’s almost like the forums, right? I just like to be intellectually challenged.

When I first started, I was always the youngest guy walking into the room. Now I’m the oldest guy walking into the room. And I like kicking everybody’s ass where I can, right? You know, you went—you got your CS degree from Harvard. Fuck you. I don’t care, right? Sounds like Gary and Ross.

And I understand patterns, and I understand being able to create new things. I think that served me really well.

It’s like Cost Plus Drugs. We launched in January 2022. We’re serving millions of customers, we’re changing people’s lives, and everybody thought I was an idiot.

We’re working outside the system, right? Everybody—Amazon, everybody else—said, “Okay, we’re going to work with the big PBMs because that’s where the money is.” And I’m like, no, they’re the problem. You don’t work with the problem.

You know, it’s the innovator’s dilemma. We’re going to take what they can’t do. When you run with the elephants, there’s the quick and the dead. We’ve got to be quick and aggressive, and I think that’s a big part of my skill set.

Whether it’s starting AudioNet, which was the first streaming company; HDNet, the first all-high-definition network; Cost Plus Drugs; or what I did with the Mavs in terms of bringing in technology, it was always about—Steve Jobs said it best—everything’s a remix.

Yeah.

You know, it’s about taking what I know, learning whatever’s coming up and what new technologies are emerging, and remixing it to apply to something different.

Right. When you bought the Mavs, did you have a sense that 20 years later they could be worth an order of magnitude more? It wasn’t a business decision?

No, in fact, I paid $285 million for the Mavs in 2000. In 2010, the NBA couldn’t even sell the New Orleans franchise.

Really?

There were no buyers, and the valuation had gone down, not up.

Wow.

From a financial perspective, it was awful. Plus, I was losing money every year, so it had nothing to do with money. But I loved it. That was the key part.

And I think it elevated your profile in a way that probably helped your other businesses.

Oh, yeah, for sure. And then Shark Tank got me to Shark Tank, and the rest is history.

I just looked at it back then as, “I’m having fun. I’m blessed. I’m going to make use of my time so I enjoy every minute of it.” But what changed the economics of the NBA was linear media being competitive.

You know, and that goes back to things I look for. I always look for death wars, where you’ve got competitors—one’s going to win and one’s going to lose—and they have to go all in.

Just like with AI right now, right?

They’re all spending tens of billions of dollars a year. They’re making an obscene amount of cash flow and spending it all. They’re paying a billion dollars to people to come over. What does that tell you?

That anything you can sell to them that really differentiates them, they’re going to buy.

With the Mavs, I didn’t see it as an investment. It wasn’t until the death wars hit linear television and all the TV deals went skyrocketing.

So that’s what made the difference between 2025 and 2010 in terms of why NBA teams have gotten so much more valuable. It’s TV?

One hundred percent. A little bit of real estate, so you can build around it, but it’s 100% streaming TV. The question becomes: How long does this sustain?

Right. If you look at Major League Baseball, they didn’t get a deal done with ESPN and saw their rights start to decline.

Yeah.

But it was right around the time—I think it was Peacock—that bought just 1 NFL playoff game and got something like 100,000 new subscribers or a million 100 million new subscribers. Something ridiculous, right?

That all of a sudden set a benchmark. So this season, starting with the NBA season, how well that does in terms of driving subscriptions and reducing churn is going to make or break everything that comes forward.

For all sports.

Yeah. I also wonder if one thesis I have is that value capture will reflect value creation when the market gets more efficient. NBA players don’t seem to have equity in the league, and I wonder if in the future they’re going to band together and just say—

I don’t think you can, right? Father Time’s undefeated. At what point do you stop?

Right.

The price of the franchises now is so high. I mean, how much can you give them? I’m not going to say it’s never going to happen, but I think it could be a question.

The other point is that there are only about 2 players who fill an arena.

Yeah. Steph and LeBron, right?

When Luka played for the Mavs—and I had nothing to do with the trade—we didn’t play to sold-out buildings. He would draw fans, don’t get me wrong, but not every building was sold out. When Giannis would come to Dallas, it didn’t necessarily mean we were going to sell out.

But the whole concept of what drives attendance has changed dramatically, and so has what drives viewership on television in particular. Now fans are fans of the players more than they are the teams.

Yeah. When we grew up, it was like, if you grew up in Pittsburgh, you were a Steelers fan and a Pirates fan.

That’s why I wonder if they’re going to team up and say, “Hey, Wembanyama, the new generation—we could start a new league and get Cooper Flagg.”

Cooper Flagg. Yeah, it’s expensive, right, to start a new league.

Yeah. There’s a lot of infrastructure.

The NBA is its own.

And even with Caitlin Clark, I don’t know all the WNBA numbers now, but most of them aren’t making money.

Even in the NBA, most teams aren’t making money before revenue sharing.

Right. I know that you were dismayed at the Luka trade. We were sort of in the group chat when it happened, but I just want to reflect. I was so devastated by it that it seemed so unfair for the Mavs not to get picks back, or Austin Reaves, or whatever. I was complaining to my girlfriend at the time, like many people were.

I even remember reading this conspiracy theory that it was on purpose to take the value of the franchise down and then move to Las Vegas. And I was like, “Oh, this is the only way it can make sense. How did we not get more for Luka in this?”

I wish I knew. I wish I knew. But then the Cooper Flagg thing—I mean, it’s the world.

Yeah. The basketball gods were looking kindly upon us.

Yeah. The world works in mysterious ways.

But I have a dream to be a part owner someday as well, and I’ve wondered if the strategy is either to compete for a championship or do what the Oklahoma City Thunder do, where you trade for picks. What do you think?

I think the Thunder methodology is better now, with the new CBA.

Right?

Every new CBA creates transitional issues, where your decisions were made in a legacy environment and they just changed all the rules. Now it’s even more difficult with the second apron.

The problems of being over the second apron are far more draconian than anything we’ve ever seen. I think the patience approach that San Antonio and OKC have taken is going to lead the way.

Yeah.

Whereas with me, I was never patient, right? And that worked against me a lot, too. I wanted to win now. Win now. We have Dirk. Let’s get there. Win now.

What’s something you would have done differently?

We kept Steve Nash. We should have drafted Giannis.

I think I just would have been more patient and waited guys out to see how they turned out, rather than saying, “Okay, I’m going to throw in a draft.” At the time, you could say that if you didn’t have a pick from 1 to 15, the odds of that player being a player were minimal. So if I was getting somebody that I could already evaluate, that worked in my favor.

Yeah.

But now draft picks have become so much more valuable, and so that’s changed the valuation approach.

Right. I heard one argument that was somewhat sympathetic to the Luka trade. The argument for how you could understand it is that he’s obviously a legendary, iconic player, but he’s so expensive. With the way that the contracts were structured, if you kept giving him the supermax, how much room do you have to build a team? It’s kind of like Trae Young. Some of these players are so expensive, but are you really going to win a championship if you don’t have—

Yeah, it’s like, can you have 2 max players?

And that’s the challenge, right? In the past, you could reward somebody with a max contract knowing you had some wiggle room.

More importantly, you could always find a way to get off that contract.

Not anymore. If you have your 1 generational player, you pay them whatever it takes, right? Because of the max contracts, they’re by definition undervalued.

Yeah.

So the generational player, you always pay whatever it takes. It’s the next person—if they’re not a generational player, how do you deal with that? That’s the hard part. And you saw it with certain players whose teams couldn’t get off their contracts.

Yeah.

Either because of age, or they were a max player by the rules of the game 8 years ago.

4 years ago, but they're not any longer. That's where the challenges happen. Right, if you were making decisions for the Mavs now, given where everything is, what would you be thinking about? Where's the big question?

Develop Cooper first and foremost. Now we've got AD—we've got Anthony Davis—we've got Kyrie, who will be coming back, and Klay. Just having those Hall of Famers there—

You couldn't ask for anything better in terms of development support.

And so I think we have to focus on staying healthy.

Yeah. Getting Kyrie back.

It's an interesting thing with 2 timelines. The Warriors tried to do it, but they couldn't exactly pull it off, although they've done great. But these older players—and it's hard, like where the Warriors are now. Father Time is undefeated, and you're trying to stay committed to the guy who's got you there. The players aren't dumb, right? They know they only have a finite number of years left, and so they're trying to maximize their earnings during that period.

It's just hard. The whole second-apron restrictions really just kicked in last year, and now teams are having to deal with it. You're seeing players get stretched, not just waived, but stretched.

Yeah.

I think the strategy is changing right in front of our eyes. I think there will be fewer max players.

Right?

Coming up.

Interesting. There used to be this thing where, in order to win a championship, you had to have one of the best players in the league. The Pistons were an exception to that. I'm a Knicks fan, and I wonder if the Knicks have a possibility to question that. If you're playing for a championship, do you think that you have to have one of the 5 best players in the league?

Sure helps.

Yeah.

It depends on the skill set. What's changed a lot in just 6 or 7 years, and certainly in the last 10 years, is that there used to always be 1 guy on the court who couldn't shoot.

Yeah.

Who couldn't get a bucket. They were there for defensive purposes, or they protected the rim.

Now they all can score offensively at some level. Whether it's the Knicks or anybody else, if you have enough guys who can put pressure on the defense—and that's why the Knicks made the deals that they did—but if there's 1 guy that you're playing against who's always the best player on the floor—

Yeah.

And you don't have that player—

Right?

It's going to be tough.

Totally. I think what the Knicks are asking, and I guess Boston's asking some of this, is: Can offense win championships? If you just stack the—

Well, yeah. The Knicks have got some defenders.

But Brunson and KAT are weak defenders?

It's going to be tough. It makes it tough because, once you get to even against Indiana, Indiana didn't have Haliburton. We tried to get Haliburton so hard, right?

Haliburton is not a top-5 NBA player. He's good. Maybe top 15—

But he was better, right—

In that moment, because you can do matchups over and over and over again across up to 7 games. You can play certain players off the court.

Yeah.

So you saw KAT not even being out there at certain times.

Totally.

Yeah. If the Pacers had won the championship, that would have really called it into question. They took them to 7 games. I know their best player gets hurt, but the Mavs, injured and all and without Luka, beat OKC 3 out of 4 games.

Yeah. Wow. By the way, Dallas is one of the deepest teams right now, too.

Oh, we're really deep. Stay healthy. But, yeah, there are so many teams—the Raptors, the Bulls, the Kings—that are in perpetual, what I would call, mediocrity. They're expensive and they're old, and I'm like, you just have to rebuild. Just admit you're rebuilding. There are a number of teams like that.

Yeah. Part of the problem is that there's a salary-cap floor.

Yeah.

Right? You have to spend up to a certain amount to be competitive again.

Right. That's the deal we made with the players. They want more money spent.

And so 90% of the salary cap is a lot of money, right? It's around $153 million, right? $17 million, give or take, times 9. Spending up to $153 million, that's $10 million average. That means you're overpaying a lot of people.

If you keep them on short contracts, you'll get guys wanting to come just to get overpaid. You almost have to tank.

I have a theory that there are these guys—maybe I'm being unfair—like Kuzma, RJ Barrett, and Brandon Ingram, who are sort of built for losing, for getting a lot of money and a lot of points on a losing team. They're freer on a losing team, and they do it to get paid more money.

Teams are smarter than that. But at the same time, there are teams that need scoring.

Right. If you fall into that category—

You're going to go after those guys if you have the space for it. But I think what's happening now is that we're seeing all the salaries kind of revolve around the mid-level exception, which is $14 million, give or take.

Right.

Guys now realize that, with the second apron, things have changed. So if you get paid more than the mid-level—

Right.

You're a good player.

Yeah.

If you get paid at the mid-level, you're a decent player. If you get paid below, you're a roster piece, unless you're young and you're on your way up.

For advice for me as a future owner, what are the biggest ways an owner can influence winning? Is it personnel selection, coaching, the GM? Are you always looking for an edge?

Yeah, always looking for the edge. Personnel selection is hard.

It's more art than science, right? Like I told Jalen when I did Jalen Brunson's podcast, he was just some chubby guy.

I'm sorry we took him from you.

No, you gave him away. I was not happy about that. We picked him 33rd, right? 32 teams had a chance to draft him, and they didn't. We liked his pedigree of winning at Villanova. But it's his effort, right?

When he was with us, his go-to move was either a spin or a move to the left, and he'd fall away doing a layup. He never got the foul because he was always falling away. Now his mid-range jumper is money.

And he worked on that. Totally.

That's what you don't know when you draft somebody, right?

What mental capacity do they have? Their athletic ability, right?

But will they work hard to improve their skills? Will they work hard to improve their basketball IQ?

Yeah. Yeah.

If the answer is yes, and they have the athletic side of it, you've got a chance. But you don't really know that, because no one comes in and works out—

Yeah.

—and says, "Okay, I'm an idiot. I suck," and shows you they suck. They've all been trained on how to work out, and they're in college maybe 1 year.

Yeah.

If they're going to college and getting paid now, it might be that they're just doing what the coach needs them to do there, which may not match what they need to do in the NBA. The hardest part for players who aren't superstars coming right in is that they've got to learn how to fit in.

Even with Luka, we didn't know he was going to be a superstar. We thought he was going to be really, really good, and we thought he had superstar mentality.

Yeah.

But I was terrified because I made a trade, right? I gave up a pick to Atlanta. I remember we played in China in the first preseason game, and I had Sean Marion, who was an ambassador of the NBA. I'm like, "Matrix, what do you think? Matrix, what do you think? What do you think?" I was terrified. But we know how that turned out.

Yeah. And by the way, it's so funny—just the basketball gods. The Lakers made all the wrong moves for so many years and were in such a tough spot. You talk about the Warriors: They were in a tougher spot going forward, trading all their picks and being so old. Then Luka falls into their lap just to keep it interesting.

I think we've done enough of this.

Yeah, exactly. The Mavs have Cooper. Don't trade him, and you'll be good.

Zooming out, going toward closing here, how have you thought about how you want to spend your time? You, for example, have your own Mavs and a big venture firm doing all these investments, all this stuff. You seem to run a lean, flexible operation. How have you thought about the efforts you want to get involved with, the things you don't want to get involved with, and how thin to spread yourself, so to speak?

Well, I mean, I got out of Shark Tank so I can spend more time with my kids. That's number 1, because they're 16, 19, and about to turn 22.

Yeah.

They're heading out on their own. I just want to spend the time that I can with them. But I think the difference for me versus everybody else is that my goal is not to make as much money as I can.

Yeah.

I do investing, but honestly, it's just people emailing me. I saw a list of who has the most unicorns, and I had, like, 11.

Yeah.

All of them were just from email. Somebody emailed me saying, “Check this out. Check this out. Check this out.” With Synthesia, I was their first investor. I gave them $1 million, and now I can get 20% to 25% of a company, sometimes more, and then help them grow. That's what I like.

Right. Taking long-shot tries as opposed to, “Okay, let's raise a fund, let's get a team together, we'll put in $10 million to $25 million, and then, if they're doing well, we'll put in more and do follow-ups, and we'll have these big scores.”

Yeah. I like it better when it's Dude Wipes.

Yeah.

They come on Shark Tank, I give them $200,000 for 15%, and now they're worth $1 billion, easy. They're a premier brand, and they never had to raise another cent. Helping a company never have to raise more money and making it insanely profitable—that's what I like.

I had this company, List Cookies[?]. This guy, Doug, was living in his car with his family, and he sent me these cookies. They were this big. They were the best cookies I've ever had, because I always do the nutrition thing first: What's on the back? No added sugar, lots of fiber, low net carbs.

But when I took it out of the plastic, it all fell apart. So I said, “I'm going to give you money.” I got, like, a third of the company, but I'm going to guide you through what it takes. We changed them and made them into bites instead of cookies, put them in a plastic container, and took them to stores to sell them. I'll do a tasting—I’ll go to a grocery store one time and hand them out.

Now, no more money in. We'll do $25 million this year, but that's not the important number, because we don't spend money on advertising or anything.

Profit?

Profit makes $12 million to $14 million a year. We just added Whole Foods. We just added Costco. We're adding more and more outlets. He can get to $100 million and make $50 million a year.

Wow. That stuff's fun. Yeah, right. So, if you could clone yourself a few times, or when you look into the future, are there other businesses like Cost Plus Drugs that you want to start or incubate?

Yeah. Education. If I can do what I want to do with health care, which is saying a lot, right?

Yeah. Totally. That's a big effort.

Yeah, but it would be education, just because—

Like AI-first K–12, or what kind of—

Yeah, I mean more postsecondary education, simply because the cost structure is all fucked up. It's all built on accreditation, and that's kind of a mafia. When I see a mafia like that, I just ignore the accreditation and do it anyway. If you get the results or guarantee results, you'll get plenty of—

We talked about your health care platform. We talked about your messaging. Are there any other policies that, if you could be in charge of the Democratic Party or sort of running America, you would be most excited about in terms of their transformative potential?

You know what I would say? I would say a focus on entrepreneurship. Right now, whoever the candidate is, particularly if it's for president, takes credit for everything.

Yeah.

And that's ridiculous. They do less to impact startups and the building of businesses than anybody. I think what's missing—definitely missing with Biden, maybe less so with Obama, and definitely missing with Trump—is a focus on entrepreneurship.

When you hear Trump talk about tariffs, he never talks about small businesses. It's always, “Hey, I've got this company investing $500 billion, $600 billion.” When you've got all these Shark Tank companies getting crushed, and you increase an average tariff from 2.5% to 15%, that's their profit margin, and it's gone.

So I would put a focus on recognizing, encouraging, and rewarding people who are starting businesses, and using AI as government-as-a-service, where you simplify all the friction involved in starting a business—from the paperwork and all the requirements, to incorporation, to a bank account, to all of it. Simplify all of it so entrepreneurs can be entrepreneurs.

That is what Joe Biden told me, of all people. During the Obama administration, they invited us from Shark Tank to do a thing for entrepreneurship at the White House. He gave a little speech, and what he said was, “I've traveled around the world, and there's no Chinese dream, there's no French dream, there's no U.K. dream. There's only the American dream, and people have come here to live it and experience it. That's what makes us unique.”

And on that note, in closing, what advice do you have for those of us in Silicon Valley, or in tech more broadly, who are building with AI on how to make it more popular so that we don't have this big backlash?

You have to get with either party and communicate the upside.

Yeah.

Because they see the downside. They see, “Hey, maybe my job is being taken away.”

Yeah.

And going back to what I said earlier, there will be disintermediation, but I don't think the net number of jobs is going to decrease. I think everything gets reinvented, because AI right now is not smart.

Right.

It's statistical in a lot of respects. Robotics, on the other hand, is getting smart. If you clean my bedroom, it has to know to pick up the sheets and all this stuff. But I think the combination of the 2 will create unique opportunities for jobs.

Yeah. We just emulated what we already did and tried to optimize it.

You don't—if you can create devices and robots that can look like anything, and you want them to be domestic in some way, you don't build houses the way we do now.

Yeah.

I think there's going to be a lot of jobs that go in different directions. Silicon Valley has got to do a much better job demonstrating those jobs, hiring people for those jobs, and supporting people who are concerned about their jobs.

Even with teachers, when we look at AI tools, you can read papers faster. That's not going to change anything; you're just doing it the same way. But if a teacher can use AI to customize responses to kids to help them learn, like you said, with AI tutors—but in a classroom—you're going to keep your job longer.

Yeah.

We need more teachers, not fewer teachers. But Silicon Valley doesn't communicate that at all.

Yeah. Because when you're raising money, it's about what you're going to change, not what you're going to sustain.

Yeah. But there are so many unique opportunities. I'm old enough that I would walk in selling PCs and say, “You're out of work, you're out of work, you're out of work.” But as it all turned out, the economy just keeps on growing.

I think the same thing is going to happen here. The other side of it is that inner cities can benefit, too. I have this thing called the Mark Cuban Foundation AI Bootcamp, and all we do is go into underprivileged schools and encourage kids to sign up for the boot camp.

It used to be just machine learning, where we taught them that. Now it's learning how to use AI with models and everything, and agents, for 15-, 16-, and 17-year-old kids. It's great, because they're going back and coming up with new ideas.

Right.

The Valley needs to go out there and engage more with middle America so people can see the upside. You're getting this rejuvenation of San Francisco, and all the spending is pointing there.

Yeah.

How is anybody else going to understand that or see that?

Right.

They don't at all.

Yeah.

When it's open to them—and that's why I did the boot camp—more things are going to happen. People don't realize that when the internet first hit, we used to think kids who could do HTML coding were geniuses.

Yeah. Right.

When they moved up to JavaScript, they were even smarter, because they were building all these websites that were getting ready to go public. AI is kind of the same thing. It's not hard to build agents, and it's getting easier.

But knowing an application that you can use to start something and prove something—that everybody can do. Every kid, every mom, every dad. Silicon Valley is making it sound like this is the Jetsons and we have no chance.

Yeah.

And I think that has to change.

That's a great note of advice and optimism to end. Mark, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

A lot of fun. Thank you. Appreciate it.