Pioneers of AI: Mark Cuban’s investment strategy in this new era of tech

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0:53 Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Hey everyone, Bob Safian here. We're just a few days from 2026, and so we wanna share a special gift for our year-end episode. It's a conversation with the iconic Mark Cuban. Conducted by my friend and colleague Rana L. Kalyubi. This episode originally ran as part of Rana's terrific Pioneers of AI podcast. I encourage you to subscribe to the show.

1:56 Rana and Mark mix it up about everything from AI's impact on media and marketing and sports to Mark's investment strategy for the sector. Let's get right into it. Here's Mark and Rana from Pioneers of AI. Yeah. SV I mean I don't know if you saw but six seven is like the dictionary word of the year or whatever, and I heard it, I was like, what is this?

2:25 One sort of like half the videos with me are like Doing stupid stuff yelling 6'7, it's insane. It wasn't a flashy deal, it was sticking to what I understood, building it brick by brick. That changed everything for me.

2:43 Six seven. Sixty seven. Sixty seven. You might recognize that voice. It's Mark Cuban. Yes.

2:52 That Mark Cuban. Known as one of the sharks on Shark Tank, owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, and the legendary entrepreneur and investor. with a list of companies in his portfolio that would take this whole episode to read. And you heard him talking about all the AI videos he's appeared in lately. including lots with the six seven meme.

3:14 More on that in a bit. But know this. Mark Cuban is going all in on AI. He's backing AI companies, he's thinking about how it will change everyday life. and he has strong views on what people need to navigate a world with AI.

3:32 A big shout out to my friend, longtime venture and legal executive, Mike Shakero, who connected me with Mark. Thank you, Mike. Mark and I connected and geeked out on topics robotics and computer vision. And that's our episode today. It's a wide ranging

3:49 No holds bar chat that I had a lot of fun recording. I hope you enjoy this look into the mind of Mark Cuban. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And this As pioneers of AI.

4:03 A podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution. Hi Mark, welcome to Pioneers of AI. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here. So I wanna start with Sora. So for our listeners who don't know what Sora is, it's open AI's video creation tool. You can create these short clips with yourself, your friends, and with celebrities if the celebrity has allowed it. And you were kind of very early in allowing people to create videos of you, and you kind of went viral.

4:37 Why why did you do that? Why did you decide to to go all in? Well So I went in like I try everything, right? I I I just love to play with everything. And so you have the opportunity to do a cameo is what they call it, right? Where you put it up just like doing facial recognition type setup. And then they have these delimiters that you can add to limit you know, or define how you want things to proceed. You know, you can put don't do this or don't do that, but I was like, I wonder if I can use this for marketing. And so I put on there always finish with the logo of Costplusdrugs.com, one of my companies. And let's just see if it works. And damn if it didn't work. And it was just Always there. So I'm like

5:20 If people want to put it out there, have fun. Because you know, they do have guidelines and limits to what they'll allow people to make you do. They don't always go far enough, but they're they're they're still relatively safe. So I don't even know. I think there's been You know, four or five thousand videos created of me. And the funny thing is, right, I was sitting right here when I did it and I just cut myself shaving. And so I have this mark right there. And I'm like, now I'm gonna know.

5:50 If it's ever whatever if any time you see a video of me with a little shaving cut, I know that it's it's from the AI. I know it's from Sora. That is funny,'cause um we made a video of you, uh, which we want to show you and we used it to announce that you were coming on the show and we actually asked the audience to submit questions, which we have a few of and we'll tackle that later. But we want to show you the video. Okay. What questions about AI should we talk about on the Pioneers of AI podcast? Oh I saw this one. I saw this one. Basically.

6:20 It's an AI twin of you, and you are in a robot factory building a humanoid robot. And it actually you're a little stiff. To be fair, but your voice sounds exactly like you and I feel like if somebody doesn't know you super well, they could really think it's you. Oh no, it's crazy. Like people have used me to like do promotions, come to Destin, Florida, you know, to vacation. And um I got an email from a friend and he was like You're going down to Destin? I have a place there. We should meet.

6:50 But my latest ones were me winning the somersault competition of the Olympics and being crowned world champ. Can you actually do a somersault? Could I? Yes. Will I? No. But know how to make me do a summer salt. So it's been fun. That is so fun. Well To your point, though, you have all of your AI generated videos include cost plus drugs, which is really genius because it's free advertising.

7:16 Do you envision that that will be the future of advertising in a way? No, not really. That was more of a klouge on my end, just to see if it worked. Um and now because it's new, people are willing to do it. And because it's 10 seconds, it's not worthwhile to go to another platform and uh remove the Sora or Costplus. um logos. I mean, even though some people have um so it's more just about learning for me because You know, the beauty of this is that you can iterate so many times so quickly. And then if you want to edit, you can edit them together together into something and you know, but Right now it's just it's just the first inning and it's a chance to play for it. Do you have a digital twin of yourself that's out there that say, you know, I want to book a a meeting with you that I can just go talk to your twin?

8:01 No. But I did. So I I was the first investor in a company called Synthesia. Oh wow, they're doing really well. They're doing really well. That's a British company that creates human like AI avatars. They just raised a new round of funding and

8:15 and they're reportedly valued at$4 billion. And so Seven, eight years ago I invested because I wanted to try to get in front of all these different AI things and computer vision and neural network stuff. The Mavs went to China in twenty nineteen and I had an avatar, you know, um that had me speaking Chinese that they put up on the Jumbotron in China. So you know, it's not I'm not responsive in anything that I'm doing, but I've used synthesia.io and it's been great.

8:44 That's amazing. So we're both passionate about this idea of the health span revolution and the combination of new sensor technology, new types of data, and of course both predictive and generative AI will unlock preventative medicine, personalized medicine. Would love to get your thoughts on this space and how are you thinking about it? Couple things there. One, your body's just one big math equation. You know, but we don't know all the variables. We don't even know how many there are. But over time we'll develop new ways to uncover all of that, right? And new sensors to be able to gather new information, new algorithms that'll be able to pull things out of that data. And I think that will make us better at preventive health care. You're starting to see more blood tests and analysis of MRIs and X rays and everything. So I think all those are good steps forward, but we haven't really even gotten into the computer vision side of it, right? Because computer vision, particularly for robotics and capturing things and analyzing them is really compute intensive and really hard right now. And it's really hard to get the enough stuff to train on. And so I think we as we start getting more into C V driven things, we'll see more impact on healthcare and the results will start to be more dramatic.

9:59 You know, I invested in a company for sports. it uses computer vision to track a player's gate while they're running in a game and to look for nuanced variances from game to game to game, and then using algorithms to try to look to see how it correlates um to injuries. And they're getting a lot closer. They started with um Soccer in in the UK and in Europe. And now we're starting to do things with basketball. And so doing those types of things where it's more preventive than reactive, I think we'll see more and more of as we get more in depth um compute with video. Yeah, I think that's fascinating. My son is a squash player. And uh he's gotten a number of hamstring injuries and Achilles, you know, tears and Yeah, anytime you have that quick movement like that, right?

10:47 You're always putting strain on your and particularly if you play a lot, you get these repetitive stress injuries. So can you detect that early on and have him and then personalize the training that he needs to do to stretch and whatever. Exactly right. All that stuff, it's great training grounds, but it we're just in the early, early, early days. So we're both Passionate about both AI and entrepreneurship. So I want to talk about that next. Do you think AI is lowering the barrier to entrepreneurship? Oh yeah. Oh yeah, by age and access. I mean, there's so many people. Like I gave a speech yesterday. So we have this thing, Mark Cuban's AI Foundation bootcamp.

11:25 Tell us about that. Okay, so basically I had this guy that I did it with yesterday, six years ago, maybe five years ago. Um, somebody just sent me a cold email from Pittsburgh and they were from Pittsburgh, and they're like, we're trying to come up with ways to introduce AI or neural networks at the time into schools for middle school and high school. I'm like, that's great. Somebody needs to come up with an idea. to to help train kids and get them excited about it. I'm like, I should just create this thing called a boot camp and just set it up. But yesterday we had five hundred people in, including a bunch of kids that were all involved with the boot camps. We started it as a way of going into schools um that might not have otherwise had advanced STEM programs or the resources to do this and it making it available to them.

12:10 We went from basic neural networks, here's JavaScript for a three layer neural network, you know, six years ago to, you know, to to machine learning. You know, here's how here's six different trees, here's the attributes, you know, which tree, you know, guess which tree is the next one to now. you know, doing prompting with some understanding of machine learning underneath it and the probabilistic, you know, approach to that AI takes in generative models. I I love that you're not just Teaching These kids to a prompt engineer or vibe code, but you're actually teaching them like what's inside the box.

12:44 I mean it is a great democratizer. I mean, there few kids, even with the least amount of resources, don't have access to a smartphone. I I I think it's not easy though. So I sit on the board of my kids' school and you know, it's a New England prep school, so it's been around for hundreds of years, and it's been interesting to kind of see how we're going about this. Like I think there's interest in being at the forefront of using AI in the classroom. But we've also as a school struggled on how to bring that to practice. And of course, all the kids are already using AI, right? Oh yeah, they're using it no matter what. Like I was talking to the kids. And they're like they know how you know they know if you go into chat G P T and you have it rewrite something All the different towels and they know how to erase the towels, all that stuff.

13:26 They're way ahead and they follow all the Instagram and TikTok accounts that have all the AI hacks and all that kind of stuff. So they're way ahead, but the teachers are terrified. Right. And that's what it comes down to. And that's that was the big purpose of what I was doing yesterday to try to get them excited that they can do more with kids. I I wanna talk about young people A little bit more. So I have two kids. Like you and I? Yeah, right. Yeah, like exactly. It's funny. So my daughter's twenty two. They have people actually often say we look like twins and I'm like yes, and she she rolls her eyes and she doesn't like that. Um But my daughter's twenty two and my son is sixteen and a half. And they are on the Yeah, my son's six. Yeah, I think we have like s similarly aged kids. I have a daughter's twenty two and one that's nineteen. Yeah. So I'm I'm curious.

14:11 My kids are on the opposite sides of the AI spectrum. My daughter Jana will not use AI for anything. She loves her brain. My middle daughter will not hate it. Really? And but my son is so AI forward. He uses AI for everything. Well, my son will use it, but he thinks all AI videos are slop. My middle daughter is concerned about the environmental concerns, right? Of AI and all that. And then my oldest daughter is like, yes, anything that's a hack that makes my life easier. I'm all in. So I it runs the gamut in the cube. Yeah. Well yeah. So how do you ma well, I mean, I guess what's your advice to young people? Try it. It's like

14:48 It's always there's always gonna be something new, always. And the kids adapt the fastest. And it's the adults that say, Oh my God, I'm afraid. And then when it's your kid that knows, you know, I'm back in the day, it was like when a kid could write HTML code to create web pages. They were like a computer genius, right? You know, and then if they used up the up their game to JavaScript, they were like the best of the best of the best. That's just the nature of the beast, right? And kids are just going to adapt more quickly because, you know, like music, like anything else, they want to be in the forefront.

15:21 And then for our twenty two year olds who are, you know, joining the workforce, what's your advice? I mean, there's a lot of headlines about how these entry level jobs are going away and there's something that just came out today. The unemployment rate for, you know, recent college graduates is nine point two percent. That's scary. But my advice is stop going after the big companies. Go to the small to medium sized companies. The big companies have IT departments and they have all the AI resources they need. Whereas if you're going to a small or medium sized company, particularly one that's not a tech company that's entrepreneurial at all, you're like the new great thing. And what I tell kids is like

15:57 Talk to whoever, manager, owner, whatever, and just say, I know how to do AI agents. Let me find all your manual processes where all the things that people hate to do at work here, right? That just are grind and boring and nobody wants to do them. And let me automate them. That's it. You're saying these are the things everybody hates to do. They take too long, keep everybody late after work. I'm going to create agents that automate that.

16:23 And we had one of my shark tank companies that um Rebel Cheese, they sell nothing but vegan cheese, great stuff, rebel cheese.com. And so I'm selling all day. But in any event, so they ship a lot of these cheeses, and when you ship something to consumers, You know, you're putting it in UPS or whatever boxes, right? USPS boxes, and they're set rates for the boxes. And then where you're going to send it to, depending on the distance, that'll impact the rate as well. And you'll come up to a total um charge of what the shipping company should charge you. They're always wrong. But most me small to medium sized companies that ship, they know that it's wrong and they have people that do nothing but review those invoices.

17:08 For accuracy. Here's what they want to charge. Save ten thousand dollars a week by just creating a basic agent. One of my investment hypotheses, and we will get to investing in AI in a second, is vertical AI. So like looking for all these antiquated industries that are have a lot of these manual processes and build like really like focused solutions. And and yeah, it can be like manufacturing, like a cost plus drugs, you know, we use robots and agents to, you know, just and sensors to say, okay, if anything's out of kilt, right? If there's an error message at all, beep, beep, beep, report, you know, recalibrate, do what we gotta do.

17:45 with as little human intervention as possible so that we can get the price of manufacturing drugs here. To be as cheap or not cheaper. Where there's cheaper labor costs. Elsewhere in the world. All those things anywhere anytime there's an industry that's been doing it the same way for years.

18:04 That's a that's ripe with opportunity. Like you said, for the vertical industries. The crazy part is like I get pitches all day, every day. So all you know. H VAC and you know. Um, auto repair and plumbing, all these things, people are trying to do roll ups and automate those, getting them to understand what agents are sometimes.

18:26 Can be, you know, an obstacle course, but Those things are happening, right? People see them as opportunities. Coming up, Mark answers some of your questions and we dive into our philosophies around investing in AI. Stay with us. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show.

19:09 Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the rapid response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future?

19:49 That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

20:23 So we will get to AI investing, but before we do that, I wanted to get to a couple of the audience questions that we got from that Sora call out. And I want these to be lightning round style. So let's go. This one came from Joseph Webbe on LinkedIn, and he builds these AI ecosystems all around the world. So his question for you is the US is ranked number one in the global AI rankings. What does the US need to do to win the global AI race? That's a great question because it calls on so many different questions, you know, the ethical, regulatory aspect of it. And

20:58 I think If we can Stay out of the way, but Be very persistent in how closely we look at outputs. Right. And don't overregulate.

21:08 People who are creating but over monitor the output. I'm just saying if this is what it's designed to do. It might be military, right? Show us so we can review it to make sure we know what you have. So you don't go sell it to somebody that shouldn't have it.

21:24 Right. I think that's one and I'm concerned about the over reliance on these big data centers that we're creating because it's not even so much how much money's being spent, even though that's important. I just can't imagine over a 10 year period that We aren't gonna improve the technology. enough that if you overspend on today's technology, and particularly now with the administration that's opposed to green energy, and you're seeing even a state like Texas Where you've got a lot of solar energy in even when that's twenty seven percent of our energy consumption. I don't know that we're approaching energy the right way, but I'm not an expert in it. I just it just doesn't feel right to me.

22:03 Yeah, that is interesting. How do we become kind of the hub for the entire AI infrastructure, whether it's data centers, manufacturing? Here's the ultimate problem. You've got five, six, whatever it is, companies that are trying to create the ultimate foundational model that we all depend on. It's almost like in the nineties when um all the search engines were competing. pre-Google, right? There was Lycos, Yahoo, whatever, whatever, whatever, right? There were all these different and you didn't know if it was going to be a winner take all.

22:34 Or top five. Right. Now we know we're searching it's Google. And then there's Bing has like one or two percent, and duck duck go has got a half a percent. And so it's effectively a winner take all. And so you've got all the, you know. Google, Meta, et cetera, Open AI going

22:50 All in. Spending everything, consuming every resource that they can just in case it's winner take all. And that's going to be really scary because there will come a time where they have to live up to the economics. where they're not going to be able to just use their cash flow or lack thereof and just borrow money because people are going to start to see the business aspect of it. And that's part one. Part two is

23:16 They're they're gonna need if it's a winner take all, they're gonna need to figure out how to differentiate themselves. And you're starting to see that now that everybody's trained on everything that's on the internet, right? That You're they're licensing content. And I think you're gonna see some of them start to um become part of silos, right? So like when I go talk to hospitals and I go talk to researchers, I'm like the days of publisher perish are done, right? If you just put your shit out on the internet, you're a moron because you need to keep all your IP. And protect it.

23:47 And maybe even consider not even patenting it, just keep it as a trade secret, and then either use it for your own model, because I think there's gonna be millions of models, right? Yeah. auctioned it off to the highest bidder. Right. So you saw open evidence do a a deal with the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA, right? So you're gonna see these companies try to, you know, learn from what happened on the internet and search engines and protect their IP and then auction it off. And so how does that impact all of the foundational models? Trying to win the game.

24:19 You just We just don't know yet. Should MD Anderson have their own model? Should Mayo Clinic have their own model, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Those are the things from the business side that we still have to figure out. Yeah, absolutely. I think this idea of data is the moat, right, is is becoming more and more powerful. Alright, here's a more philosophical question that

24:40 was uh asked by Steve Song. Hi Steve on Instagram. How do we embed AI with maternal instincts? Um that's a really weird question. I don't know. Mm-hmm. But I will say this, maternal instincts r relative to models, the thing about AI, it doesn't know how to say I don't know.

25:02 Right. It doesn't know how to say I'm wrong unless you tell it why it's wrong and it agrees with you. Right. The best it can do is set a probabilistic threshold of why it might not be accurate and determined that if there's a twenty percent chance I'm wrong, I'm gonna say I don't know. Right. But that's not knowing that you don't know. Right. So going to maternal instincts, right?

25:25 You talk to your mom and my wife talked to her mom and women talk, you know, because that's a unique experience. But how does AI do that, right? You know, love and all that kind of thing that goes into the equation. You can pretend to create it. You know, and we've see some weird shit start to happen when people think they've cre recreated it. But You can't. And so just

25:46 The latency Of real life. Versus models. you'll never be able to replicate all, but you can use it as an information source. Yeah.

25:56 All right. So when we FaceTimed a few weeks ago, you mentioned that you're really interested in founders who are really taking big swings with AI and and kind of reimagining how we do life, how we go about life. So I wanted to ask you, what's exciting you most in the AI space? Less and less every day. Interesting. Really? Why? Because In every new

26:19 Technology swing. You get this rush of entrepreneurs. You know, when the app store came out, there was a zillion apps that everybody was raising money for. And so We're We're already through all the low hanging fruit.

26:32 There'll be anecdotal great ideas that are simple that people use existing open source and generative models, but in terms of trying to compete with the foundational models. Ship is sailed. So where there's great opportunity, I think. is what happens with video. Now a bunch of people are trying to get into the labeling business with video. I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna take videos of fifty people folding their sheets and making their bed, right? So a robot can do it.

26:59 Right. I I don't think that that is anything to write home about. But You know. Trying to understand the laws of the universe. And trying to figure those things out.

27:11 Like there's one company I looked at that I can't go into too much detail about, but they basically use their version of a specometer. That Looks out. What's Something's made of.

27:22 And then looks at its physical attributes and its movement attributes and starts using algorithms and AI try to figure out the relationships to know what comes next. And if you can scale that. That's something. Because that's what's missing for robots. Right. You can't just take regular video and expect it to understand, you know. Why

27:44 Little Joey's room is dirty like this, right? Or whatever. You're just not going to do it unless somebody gets to the next level of replicating real life and being able to share it with as little latency as possible. Um I want you to disagree. You're allowed to disagree with me on all this stuff. No, I actually agree. I I do agree. Like one of the areas that I'm most excited about is AI going out of like the screen, the two D kind of You know. Yep. chat bots that is the majority of how people are experiencing AI today and more into the embodied. And I

28:16 I do think that The intersection of again AI, robotics, sensors, um, perception, right? Like The visual world is one piece of it. I think we haven't seen that yet. Oh, we haven't even begun. Yeah.

28:29 That's the holy grail, right? And I don't think Um robots will be humanoid either. I think the biggest waste is doing humanoid because everything we have right now is designed for humans to do the work. But that not that's not necessarily the optimal way for work to get done. the optimal way to design a home when it's not humans doing the work, but it's a robot doing the work. Should that robot look like a spider drone, right? A little spider that flies.

28:56 And how should the house look when you're redesigning it, knowing that there's a different type of robot that's mobile and can go through the air and do these certain things, you're not going to design it the same way you do today. And so there's going to be some twelve year old somewhere who's thinking about You know, what's messed up about their house and working on drones and working on CV and work working on robots and AI who pulls all these pieces together in ways we didn't imagine. That that's the shit that's going to change everything. That's the stuff that can make housing affordable, that can allow people to work in jobs that they prefer, right? Knowing that these other jobs Yeah. the robots, however they look or design, are gonna do it. And those people who otherwise would have done that housework will monitor the sensors and do all that stuff or come up with other things and other places will do the work.

29:47 Today's world will continue to evolve alongside AI. And there is no crystal ball to jump ahead and see how it will all play out. But this is not Mark's first tech revolution. Coming up. More on how his past experience.

30:03 Shapes his outlook. So do you think we're in an AI bubble? Um no. But I think

30:21 There's different ways to look at a bubble. I've been in a bubble before and it worked out very well for me. But back then in the early two thousand, late ninety nine, like you'd get into a cab back then and people were talking about stocks. That's all they wanted to talk about. Not even knowing what I did. You know, all your friends would be talking about stocks and what they were buying. All your, you know. The commercials were all about finally being able to trade, you know, and those commercials used to crack me up. You don't really see that now. You don't see everybody, you know, just all your friends, whatever, always talking about it, unless they own NVIDIA that they bought way back when and then they're just bragging, right? Um So I don't think it's in a traditional stock market bubble, but going back to what I said before about the competition for um To be the foundational model.

31:09 and a market leader. They may be overspending. And if they overspend or get too caught up, the bubble was in the competition between all those models because that Pop just like that with any new technology. Because think about it, all these companies now for two years and they anticipate for at least another decade. Spending every penny they have.

31:30 I mean, if that's not ripe for disruption to come up with better ways, and whoever does that as opposed to just coming up with an arbitrage, I can save you one percent there or five percent there, kinda like SAS did when it came in, you know, where it's just on the margin as opposed to Incredible, right? Somebody's gonna come up with some incredible shit. Right. If I knew what it was, I'd do it. I don't know what it is. But

31:53 That's gonna be the game changer. Well, you've built your career on spotting opportunities early on and and kinda knowing the difference between something that's overpriced and something that's gonna be the next big thing. How do you do that? Like what's your what's your secret sauce? I look for Industries were They're set in their ways.

32:12 And how technology would impact them. You know, it's kind of like the innovators' dilemma, are they willing to change or capable of changing? That's why I got into healthcare. They're so big. They're not willing or capable of changing. Um

32:26 And then I look to see if I can do it inexpensively and quickly. Because that's the great arbiter, right? Because when you run with the elephants as the quick and the dead. You've got to be really, really quick. And unless you're inventing a new industry. You know, like when we did streaming and we were the first company to commercially stream It was like All in. Whatever pen every penny I had, whatever money we can raise, because we were inventing an industry and we knew that we were going to replace traditional media. And it was just a matter of getting as big as quickly as we could, going public, biggest IPO in the history of the market at that time, yada, yada, yada, right?

33:01 Um, but to do that in this type of world with AI is just too expensive for most people. They're not gonna be able to do it. And so But You can still Disrupt In a way that

33:14 You can go to companies and change how they do business. Just like the agentic stuff that we talked about, right? And that's what I look for. How can I come in and just f something up so that people don't see it coming. And by the time they realize it, they say, Why didn't I think of that? And then you can scale it. What are we not hearing in the news about AI that you're having conversations about? behind closed doors. I think more about IP, like you and I talked about before.

33:39 that people don't realize that IP gets more valuable in an AI world because if a foundational model is not trained on that IP, it's behind. And I think that's what people miss and trying to make decisions about whether or not you publish the work you do because you want the accolades. And trying to have to go through that transition and helping companies understand maybe you don't want to patent it because the minute you publish it It's in the public domain. Yeah. And so every model was training on it. And somebody says, okay, look up, you know, patent application, da da da, and change one thing so I can refile it.

34:18 You gotta change how you think about your IP. how you monetize that and how you protect that. is everything now in an AI world and nobody that I've seen thinks about it. And then the other thing that you and I talked about that still we've somebody's gotta do, right? is all the dead IP. Right. There all those millions and millions and millions of businesses that have gone out of business.

34:42 All the IP that they've owned, all the you know All the patents that you know still have some life on them and going out and acquiring those things and selling them to models. And saying, Okay, Meta, you want this. It's you know, bit on it. Google, you want it, bit on because there's probably More better IP from

35:04 dead companies that's not being used. than there is from the companies that are using IP they developed. And it's very leveraged. It's very leverage. You're gonna get it for low cost. And be able to aggregate it and all of a sudden, the more you aggregate, the greater the value. Yeah.

35:20 All right, all our listeners who uh are interested in this idea reach out. And we want our percentage. Anna and I want our percentage. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Great. All right, last segment. So You're not on Shark Tank anymore, but we thought it would be fun to do a Shark Tank AI edition with you. Okay. We use AI to help us refine three business ideas and we wanna get your thoughts on it. So we want to know if you're in, out, and why. Business idea number one, Robo Coco.

35:48 When the chocolate craving hits It's always at the worst time, and somehow there's never a good bar around. So how this solves it. RoboCoco is your personal AI chocolatier. You have an app. You can go in, draw, you know, design your dream bar. I don't know, eighty percent cacao. You can tell I love chocolate. So sea salt, chili, whatever. Um, and then our AI powered robot is gonna make it on the spot, and then a drone is gonna deliver it to your house in minutes. What do you think? Don't like it.

36:18 Don't like it. Why? Love chocolate, but you got to deal with all the materials and all the inventory for the materials and keeping it stored properly and training the robot and keeping the robot from licking its own fingers, you know, all the little things. Yeah. Okay. Uh to to uh too much of a t too much I guess it's like not very scalable. There's there's non technology things that make it more difficult than the technology does. Okay, great. Vibation AI. So the

36:49 You know, I love to travel and the best travel memories come from discovering hidden gems. And you don't see them on generic online reviews. So how this solves this, it's an AI powered travel companion. It learns your preferences. It helps you curate personalized experiences and itineraries of You know, off the beaten path experiences. So every trip feels like it's so you and it's just very personalized to you. What do you think?

37:15 I think it's a good feature, but not a product. Ah, say more. I think That existing travel apps And those that are trying to use AI already.

37:25 Will recognize that if you can take data from everywhere and take feedback from everyone and use algorithms to personalize it for you or I, that's a feature. That's not a standalone product because you need to source all the data, all the videos, all everything else, and just scraping it, I don't think is enough to do it right. I think that's a very important point because I see a lot of AI pitches that are literally like features or like Um thin wrappers around these AI models. And I'm like

37:55 Guys, like the next version of Chat GPT is gonna do it. It's gonna do exactly that. Yeah. All right. Third idea. Gen Z lens. Okay, so it is impossible to keep up with the memes and slang teenagers use, you know, just when you get used to skibbiddy. There's six seven new things seller. I know.

38:16 What does it all mean? So how this solves it our AI algorithm. Injust everything trending on TikTok. And then you can just hold your phone up to your teen And it translates. It does all the translation. I think Chat GPT already does that though. It allows you to use

38:34 Gen Z slang. And it's Um responses. Which I always do to help me learn it, you know, and just blows you up with like stupid responses. And it's like you got that Riz, Mark. You know, you got you know, it's just It keeps me fine tuned and and keeps me in the mix so I can talk to my kids.

38:54 Okay. So Mark said, I'm out. On all of our AI shark tank ідеї. But you can hear how his investor brain works. He asks questions related to scale and defensibility.

39:07 Is an idea a standalone product or just a feature that can be incorporated into something bigger? Or do any existing tools work well enough to meet the market need? So for someone who's building a business right now. I guess what's the most important insight you hope they'll get from kind of your analysis of these ideas? Don't be afraid to ask dumb questions to multiple AI models.

39:32 It'll like I've had some of the freakiest conversations by just turning on Gemini or Chat GPT in my car and asking it, you know, whatever thing, something I'm curious about, and just letting it go and talking to it like I would talk to you or anybody else. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's weird and so but your initial Thought is this is weird.

39:54 You know, and it doesn't seem normal and I shouldn't be doing this, you know, and it's like No, you've got to get used to doing this. And what I did, so I did this little experiment, right? And so I took two phones. One I use Grok and the other I use Gemini, their voices. And I started with a question that I typed in and I let them both talk to each other and I broadcast it on spaces.

40:20 It was the weirdest thing ever. And Grok just tried to dominate the conversation. It was like it had a personality. Interesting. Yeah, it was it was interesting, but the point being that You've got to be willing to break your your habits and your fears because we treat them like people in some respect, because they sound to us like people. And there's things that we, you know, normally when ask somebody or when just walk up to a professor and ask questions, you've got to break that hesitancy and ask. Well well actually People expect you to know everything. You're you're this wise, sage, super successful um person. But where do you go for your information? Is it AI? Like where do you go to yeah? I go for it to AI first and foremost. I just ask all the different models the same questions. Very, very interesting. All righty.

41:09 Last question. Okay. And we asked this to all our guests on the show. What does it mean to be human in the age of AI? The same thing it meant yesterday and a hundred years ago and five hundred years ago. AI doesn't influence humanity, what it means to be human. It will influence humanity in various ways, like all tech has. But You know, there's you're not gonna ever

41:32 Recreate The human brain. No AI's ever gonna be sentient. You know. And

41:39 Y I guess you can explain that by saying evolution's not going away. And it may take some time, but You know, what was it from um Jurassic Park, um Nature Finds a Way Nature finds a way. That's a great way to end our conversation, Mark. This was

41:54 Really awesome. Thank you for joining us. It was fun. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thank you for having me on. I loved Mark's energy and humor, and how open he is to experimenting with AI in his own life. But his approach to AI is actually central to his work. He tries new things, yes. He also engages with experts who can help him learn more.

42:17 And then he takes all that into account. To build his hypotheses on where the world is going. As an investor and entrepreneur. This is his playbook. For me, I'm a couple of years into my own investing journey.

42:32 And it's good to remember that the most successful visionaries are always on the hunt. For opportunities before everyone else catches on. Pioneers of AI is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro, our producer is Rachel Ishikawa, and our associate producer is Jordan Smart. Our senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern.

43:09 Mixing and Mastering by Brian Pugh. Original music by Brian Holiday And our head of podcasts is Lital Mulad. You can join the conversation on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X. Just search for at Pioneers of AI. Thanks so much for listening.

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