Odd Lots - Mark Cuban On Why The Government Should Directly Hire Millions Of People

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

How should the government address the economic crisis? On this episode, we talk with Mark Cuban, the Shark Tank co-host and billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who has been outspoken about what he sees as necessary to address this crisis. He explains to us why he thinks the government should directly get in the business of hiring millions of people, along with other ideas to keep people employed and stimulate demand. We also talk about the NBA, his plan to fix healthcare, as well as his future political ambitions.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenpaw. And I'm Tracy Alley. Tracy, so obviously on this podcast we speak with mostly I would say either economists or sort of like market practitioners in one way or another, traders, investors and so forth. Yeah, or some policymakers sometimes. That's true. We also speak with policymakers. But it's interesting because, I realized, like we don't really, and maybe we should fix it and maybe we should address it, we don't really speak with that many people who are actually engaged in sort of what people would call business. I mean, trading, investing, building, you know, fintech companies,

etc. is a business. But in terms of the day-to-day business of running actual things, consumer operations, making payroll in a crisis, that has not been typically a sort of a big area for us. No, we sort of talk about the economy from a theoretical level, and of course, the economy is comprised of people and businesses and, you know, people who run businesses, and we probably should be talking to them. Yeah, and especially right now, of course, in the midst of this crisis, because, again, you know, we talk about all these things like payroll protection policies and what kind of stimulus would be good to get the economy roaring again once the acute health crisis, passes. But again, you know, there are people who actually have to make the decision. People

actually have to go out and hire. People who have to go out and sort of reinvest in new things in the world. And obviously, the degree to which they're inclined to do that is going to be quite determinative of what kind of recovery we can expect to see. Yeah, absolutely. So we're talking to a business person today, yes. We are. We're talking to, going to talk to a very well-known business person today, a very outspoken person, someone who had lots of thoughts on policy, all kinds of things related to the crisis and so forth. No reason to have any spoilers or further front clearing. We're going to be speaking today with Mark Cuban. He is the owner of the NBA team, the Dallas Mavericks. Lots of people know him from the show Shark Tank

and his investing in startups, very active on Twitter and social media in terms of fleshing out and sounding out policies right now during this crisis. Also someone who people suspect may have political ambitions of his own one day. And so a sort of great person to discuss everything that's going on right now. I would like to preface this entire interview by saying that I know nothing about basketball or the NBA. I'm going to try really, really hard. All right, well, let's bring in Mark. Mark, thank you very much for joining us. Mark, what's the deal? Tracy was just asking this on Twitter.

Can you give us the 30-second explanation of how the NBA salary cap works? Tracy was trying to cram doing some homework before the podcast. And so it's like, how does that work? She wants to know. I'd rather calculate high digits to try to explain the salary cap. Okay, well, fair enough. Anyway, thank you for joining us. As we've been doing throughout all of our episodes during this crisis, I want to make a note that it is May 12th today. And the reason that's important is because who knows how the world will look in a few days when this comes out. But it is, here we are, May 12th, about really two months into this crisis in its most intense form because it was actually March 11th the day that the NBA was canceled. So two months in, Mark, Just from your perspective, all the different things you're involved in, how does the world look to you right now, sort of big picture and with the businesses that you operate and invest in? Uncertain, confused, cautiously hopeful, looking for guidance, looking for leadership.

We just don't know who to trust with our lives effectively. And that's keeping people from doing things the way we've always done them. So you invest in a lot of small businesses. Could you maybe give some specifics about how your portfolio companies are getting impacted right now? What are the biggest problems that they're currently facing? The biggest problem is the fall in demand. You know, there's just people are very hesitant when it comes to buying products and services right now unless they're related to things you can store in your home.

You know, the companies I have that are. selling athletic equipment, you know, those are doing well. Companies that are selling food products, those are doing well. Companies that are selling pretty much everything else are not, or their businesses down at some percentage. And so, you know, people trying to get, we're trying to gauge when consumer demand will come back. And that's the most difficult aspect of trying to figure out what's next. So how, in your view, what's been done from, the, you know, setting aside what the right approach to the health crisis is. We've seen, we saw the CARES package passed at the end of March with the idea of helping at least small

businesses keep employees on their payroll to not to prevent the unemployment crisis from getting worse and for people to have businesses to be, to go back to work to when the health crisis lives. We've also seen a range of things from the Fed. In your view, how effective have those measures been at least dampening the pain from this to some extent? You know, I'll refer to Mike Tyson who said everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth, right? And the CARES package, the plan was great. The initial timing of it was great. It was, it happened very quickly. The implementation was too slow. And so when we got, you know, the day the NBA was canceled, March 11. And,

people started really realizing that there were issues that we were going to have to address from a health perspective. And then, you know, relatively quickly for Congress, you know, the beginning of April, we had a CARES Act for stimulus. But unfortunately, from that point in time till the time small businesses, small medium-sized businesses actually got funding was several weeks. Add to that the fact that there wasn't enough money, add to that the fact that there was uncertainty about how the money can or should be spent and what would be the case for forgiveness. And that caused a lot of small businesses to hesitate. And that led to a scenario where, you know, a month in, a month after the CARES stimulus was passed,

businesses really weren't able to take the steps necessary to try to continue as much business as usual. And that really created a cascading negative effect that worries still in right now. now. So the concept was good. The plan was good, but the virus punched us in the mouth and the execution wasn't near where it needed to be. I'm just curious, but if you were designing a sort of stimulus or policy package to help small businesses in the current crisis, what would it look like? So two questions there. One, what would I have done April 1st? And the answer to that was I would add a bank overdraft program where I would have allowed small, medium-sized businesses to just write checks without them bouncing so that and then the Fed would make the banks whole on a

daily basis because that would have allowed companies to continue business as usual and banks understood what their spending policies were because they see all their bank statements and banks already have fraud parameters in place so it would have been the the approach that had the least amount of friction but that you know that's April 1st here we are May 12 six weeks later and we're we're in a different set of circumstances And so now we've got to take, we've got to look at the consumer demand function as opposed to the continuity function that we're looking at on April 1st. And for consumer demand, it goes to the whole concept of how do we build confidence. How do we give consumers confidence that they're going to be able to retain their jobs, that they're going to be able to keep their salaries at the current level, and that that in turn will lead to the confidence to spend money on things,

other than just on things other than just necessities rather than spending just on rent, utilities, food, the basics, and then saving everything else. And to do that, you're going to need a federal jobs program. I want to get to that federal jobs program in one second. Just a real quick question, though. I really am interested in that idea of just sort of make it simple, payroll overdraft, let people continue, let companies continue to spend and pay their employees at the level that they were pre-crisis. Would that be, ideally a program that would apply even to companies that are larger than the small businesses covered by the PPP?

I mean, you'd have to model it out and do the math, but effectively it could be, right? Because the key, you know, and again, hindsight is always 2020. And so the key was continuity, right? What was the path of least resistance to allow businesses of, and it could have been of any size to continue working as they were? Now, the question I would have added then is if we were going to be supporting bigger companies, you know, companies that had more than 500 employees, some companies that may be public entities, you know, what would I do as the negotiator for the taxpayers in those circumstances?

And I probably would have asked for something in return for that overdraft protection because larger companies typically have other means of raising capital. They have stronger balance sheets. They have, you know, they may have public stock. They may be able to get loans from banks or from the public markets. And so I would have tried to negotiate something for the taxpayers in response. So just going to the federal jobs guarantee idea of the federal jobs program, it's kind of unusual to hear someone from the private sector,

someone who invest in a lot of different types of businesses actually advocate for that. And usually private businesses don't. really want the government to get too involved in the labor market because then they're basically competing with the government for labor. Give us a sense of why you're in favor of this. Why does it interest you? As a long time fan of Iron Rann, it's very counter to who I am. I didn't know that. Yeah. And I'm not a objectivist type. I'm not an all-in. I've modified my positions over time. But we're in a unique circumstance. Never in the history of this country or any advanced economies have we seen the loss of more than 30 million jobs in a period of two months.

And you can add to that the underemployed on the uncertainty of employment for another 20 plus million. So we've got 50 million people who have job uncertainty or have no jobs at all. And that's what changes my perspective. And with that, we've got the PPP program. and we've got other potential programs coming from the government. You know, the Democrats are starting to propose some new things now. But those things are kind of putting businesses in a state of suspended animation. You know, they're not quite sure how to spend the PPP money because they're caught in the catch 22 of, you know,

I have to spend this in eight weeks and bring back all my employees within that eight week term if I want this loan forgiven. But my state isn't even allowing me to open up or open up fully, which I think in a lot of cases is smart. but it's just a set of circumstances businesses are facing. So they're in a state of suspended animation. The jobs program, on the other hand, gets the ball rolling to do things that are productive that this country needs right now. We need tracking and tracing on a federal basis.

With states and local municipalities doing tracking and tracing, that creates siloed information because half a tracking and tracing is asking and tracking the information. The other half is doing the technology behind the scenes to do the analytics to understand what we're learning from the tracking and tracing. So that's one silo of however many jobs on a federal basis. You could probably make the case for $2 million or more. Then you have the issue of testing. You know, we've got to create the jobs and create the facilities to create the tests.

And then we have to train people and create the facilities to enable them. the test and then offer it then do the test and then with all that within this realm there's training involved so there's people who will do training you have to make sure everybody understands hippa regulation adheres to privacy concerns so that there's no risk there of information getting out and then you extend it further we've got a growing subset of the population that is is at risk you know and it's not just the elderly but it certainly includes the elderly but there's you know people with issues now, whether, you know, we're finding out new and new problems that the COVID creates. And so all these pre-existing conditions, we have to have people who support those folks.

And so we've already, even prior to this, we're in a scenario where we didn't have enough long-term care facilities or enough long-term care takers. And so building those facilities, create, training those people, there's so many jobs that could truly be productive in our society right now immediately that can start to chip away at the unemployment and underemployment problem we have right now so it makes sense to do this now do I see this as a permanent long-term jobs program no it's intermediary but it's needed right now because it's very difficult for all but just the few businesses that are doing better because of COVID to make long-term or even intermediary commitments for jobs that are productive

And so having this federal jobs program, I think, is a necessity. And do you worry that at some point, I mean, presumably, okay, so a federal jobs program of some sort, have some sort of minimum level of pay, some minimum level of benefits. Do you worry that, say, some of the vendors who work in your stadium could be in a situation in which they're trying to hire people back for when the NBA reopens? and yet there is a more compelling federal job out there that pays people more. That's a feature, not above, right? I mean, in my stadium, AmeriCorp, I mean, in my stadium, Ameri County Center, we actually three years ago went through and tried to do an analysis to make sure that we were getting all of our employees,

A, up to a $15 minimum wage, and B, I wanted to know if any of my employees were receiving public benefits because to me, that was an embarrassment if they were. Now, and I need to say, there's not just my employees. I'm only 50% owner of the arena, but still, I push for trying to get a feel of whether or not those employees were getting any type, as I said, federal benefits. Because to me, that's the ultimate socialism when the government has to subsidize a business's employee. And so if the competition from the government, then let's just say for these jobs, they pay a minimum of $15 per hour plus benefits plus health care, that's not a bad thing. You know, for me, it's worse when municipalities have their own minimum wage and states have their own minimum wage as opposed to a higher federal minimum wage because then you're not on an equal playing field.

You know, if you saw in Seattle where in one part of town, they had to pay $15 and two miles outside that part of town, they could pay far less. And that created inconsistencies and made it tougher to compete. As long as everybody's playing by the same rule, I'm fine with it. It's almost, you know, like the price of a commodity goes up. Everybody has to, that's in that business has to pay the same price. You mentioned that you thought a jobs program could be intermediate or intermediary in the sense that, you know, those jobs wouldn't last forever. And it would just be a sort of bridging program between the coronavirus crisis and getting

somewhere back to normal. What happens to the jobs or what would happen to the jobs? at the end of that sort of intermediary period. And why does it have to be intermediary at all? Well, I say intermediary because, again, I'm concerned about government overreach. I recognize, you know, when you're in the middle of a crisis, things are going to be different.

But I want to, I just, I mentioned intermediary, not to say that those jobs cannot be continued, but we just need to reevaluate at some point. Okay. And then just going back to the discussion about wages, is one of the criticisms of current policy in the crisis is that a lot of workers were trying to, and a lot of small businesses as well, we're basically trying to figure out whether it was better for people to stay on the payroll under PPP

or to take unemployment benefits. How do you sort of calibrate the unemployment payment versus actual salaries? You don't. It's a real problem. I mean, you've got a lot in businesses I'm involved with as well as others. you have employees that make a lot more money on the new unemployment with the $600 enhancement than they do going back to work. And so the Department of Labor, maybe it was the Treasury, had to literally April 27 issue

a letter saying that if an employer puts in writing that they offered an employee's job back and that employee refused because they were making more money from unemployment, then that doesn't prevent full reimbursement under PPP for that employer. And so you're seeing it as a real problem because, you know, you can't blame anybody for preferring the $600 enhancement, you know, plus the state unemployment if that pays more than going back to work. So it's a real issue. And I think it's 39 weeks for the unemployment program.

So we're looking potentially at 30 more to go. And, you know, on one hand, you can say, well, it allows people who really want jobs to go get them because the number of people they're competing with is reduced. But on the other hand, at the end of that 30 weeks, things can get really bad. Mark, I want to get your take on health policy because obviously with this extraordinary, I mean, this is a health crisis first and foremost, lots of people losing their potentially losing their employer sponsored health insurance. it's a potential moment where the country might rethink our general approach to health care. And one thing that I've heard some people say is that if we severed the link between employee and employer with health care,

that perhaps more people would be willing to take risks in their lives. Maybe they would do a startup. They would be willing to leave their company to do something entrepreneurial, but because of benefits and so forth, that's a pretty dangerous jump. I'm curious from your perspective, again, as both a large employer and also an investor in sort of smaller companies for whom benefits is a very big burden, perhaps a reason not to take risks, whether you think there's an opportunity to rethink the structure of U.S. healthcare. Absolutely. I think it should be rethought. I'm not a big fan of most health insurance coming

from an employer. The question then becomes, how do you structure it? Is it a single payer? Is it, you know, an enhancement of the ACA. You know, with the ACA, you always had that opportunity to just buy your own health care through the program. And then when you look at single payer, I'm not a fan of a single payer. I'm more a fan of a hybrid with a safety net. In other words, and actually I've spent more time on this than than most people realize. You know, what I proposed and the Rand Corporation is actually evaluating it And we're reevaluating now because the number of people who are ACA eligible will go from 46 million to who knows what. It could be 76 million. But the way I've always felt about it is I looked at the top 5,000 corporations in terms of employment and 96% of them self-insure.

And so when you look at what the opportunities are for this country, I ask the question, why can't the United States of America self-insure? And why couldn't we put together a program where at some percentage of the federal poverty level, and I use 250%, the only cost for any type of health care would be a $25 copay with limits for things where there's repetitive co-pays like pregnancy and stuff like that. And then anybody above that pays a means-tested amount of their income for all health care, no matter what it is, including drugs, up to 10%. And so when we did that, the numbers came out and they were incredible. The users, because now under the ACA, and this was geared towards 46 million ACA potential users, those people who prior to COVID would have been eligible for the ACA saved $63 billion because they didn't have to pay premiums into the system. The government themselves, the government itself saved, you know, a few billion dollars a year

but covered all 46 million people that were eligible instead of $12. million that were actually using the ACA. So long story short, you know, my orientation is, yes, you want to separate it. You want to make it those who can't afford health care. You want them to have full care, you know, at only the copay amount. And you can argue depending on the savings, whether you can get rid of the co-pay. And then for everybody else who's making more than 250% of the federal poverty level, you do it on a graduated level.

So no matter what the cost of your health care, if you're making, you know, if you're single and you're making $60,000 a year, I think you pay 3% of your income, but you don't start paying that 3% until you actually use the system. So one of the underlying challenges, and this is going to be exacerbated with COVID, is that hospitals like to pretend that they don't know their actual cost. And so they'll put out this information saying that for Medicare, you know, one of their arguments against single-payer Medicare for all is that they lose 9% on Medicare pricing and even a little bit more on Medicare.

case pricing. And that's absolutely not the case. They, you know, they kind of fudge these things called Medicare cost report. So all this is, all this radical change and horrific pandemic is an opportunity for us to rethink how we support hospitals and how we allow them to do their accounting. It shouldn't be activity cost accounting. There needs to be one standard for all hospitals that receive public funding. And they need to publish not their pricing. The pricing is important, but more important is their costs. What are their actual costs for doing business without burdening the accounting, burning their costs with all the fancy things that they build and all the buildings they

built. And so if we're really going to try to get to a cure and really deal with the issues we're facing with health care, the underlying principle is what are the actual cost for providers? Until we get there, you know, we're not going to really ever have a strong solution. Tracy, I got to say, Mark's answer sounds like it would have been good, would be good on a presidential debate stage. I'm just saying, it sounded very good. I'm just saying, just throwing that out there. Sounds like he's done, it sounds like he's done some work on it.

Maybe he's using odd lots for practice, huh? Mark, do you have presidential ambitions? I go back and forth, honestly. I put it to my family to vote on, you know, a year ago and they voted no. I was the only yes. and it was more a reaction to what's going on in the country than a presidential ambition, just to be blunt. You know, as we go forward, before COVID, after COVID, we need people who truly understand

technology and its impact. If you look at the changes that we're going through right now, you know, work from home, online buying instead of in-person buying, you know, trying to get manufacturing because we're too dependent on external manufacturing, you know, in Asian and, you know, and rest of the world countries, to address those things requires at least a basic understanding of technology, and none of our candidates have that. And so if we're going to push for it and try to get companies to bring back manufacturing, we're going to have to invest in robotics because we're third or fourth at best in robotics globally. If we're going to deal with

jobs and understand the impact of technology and jobs because of AI, you're going to have to understand at least the basics of artificial intelligence. We don't have that skill set in our leadership right now, and that creates competitive problems for the country. And so, again, there's people who know these things better than I do. And if there were candidates that presented themselves that do know this stuff better, I'd be more than happy to take a back seat. But that's kind of my logic behind it. Okay.

Well, just on that note, I actually wanted to ask you, when you sort of survey the big picture changes that are going to come from coronavirus for the business landscape, you know, clearly there are both challenges and opportunities, are there any particular sectors or industries that you get excited about that you think could actually benefit from some of the changes that we're seeing? Yeah, I mean, just look at the technology industry. We went from the analog to digital evolution to being hybrid digital and manpower-driven. You know, you can look at Uber and Lyft as an example of, you know, being a hybrid of technology

and putting independent contractors to work, or some might argue, employees to work. Now, as we advance toward Uber-Lift with self-driving cars or autonomous vehicles, I think we're going to go into a new age of the economy, if you will. And so in order to get there and understand the ramifications, you've got to have people investing in it, and I think that's just a unique opportunity right now. How do you get from a hybrid digital physical economy to almost totally digital economy? And I think that's where there's going to be unique opportunities. That's not to say all physical commerce goes away.

Obviously it won't. You'll buy things. But I think they're going to be delivered at some point. You know, you order online. You might just, you know, with ambient voice, you might say, Alexa, you know, giving my typical grocery order, have it delivered on Tuesday at 3 p.m. and some sort of autonomous robotic system picks it from a warehouse, puts it into an autonomous vehicle which delivers it right to your doorstep,

and depending on how your house is configured, may even put it right into your refrigerator. And so there's all kinds of changes and opportunities that are coming, but they're going to be very disruptive, and so we've got to be cognizant of that as well. Now, is that going to happen in the next two years? No. Over the next 20 years, yes. Before we move on, and I want to get to a few other things, including sports or a couple other quick business questions, while we're talking about politics and stuff, do you have much communication? Do you talk to people in the White House or other parts of the federal government? And also just on sort of some of the logistics stuff, getting like PPE equipment into hospitals and so forth. Is that something that you feel is, what's your communication like there? And how do you think that's gone?

Okay, so two different questions. One, do I communicate with them? Yes. When the president put me on the sports council, that was only one ceremonial call, but then they assigned me a liaison that I talked to, if not every day, almost every day, be a text phone or email. And so they're very responsive. The one thing, you know, I've probably given them 50 ideas. The one thing they did do was I'm working with an organization called the AIAHA, which is an industrial hygiene association. And those folks put together a website called Back to Workstafely.org.

And now that there's a link to that on the CDC site and other sites, and we've also made it available to local and state municipality. So that was a positive. You know, I've been very vocal with them. Some of the issues I mentioned with you guys in terms of what's working and what's not working for PPP. The last suggestion I made to them was yesterday where I said that part of the problem for small business, businesses, particularly in states that are trying to get open back up, is that there's no forgiveness for any money that needs to be spent to upgrade just for a sake of example,

a retail store for safety measures, you know, buying masks, upgrading the air conditioning system so you don't recirculate anybody, any germs that from somebody who may came in, updating your bathrooms, dealing with replacing, you know, all the rules for new restaurants. Those should have been, businesses should be able to take that right off the top. and not impact their forgiveness. And so that was the last thing. And so we'll see what they come back with and whether or not they agree or disagree.

Okay, well, I did all this NBA preparation, and it would be a shame not to use it. So I'm going to try. So Joe's right. I did tweet out asking what the salary cap issue was for the MBA. And all I learned is basically like no one understands it and they understand it even less in the current situation. Can you maybe give us a sort of high-level summary of why uncertainty around COVID is such a problem for the NBA?

Because our business shut down. And the salary cap at its base says the players get approximately 51% of revenue. And then there's an expected level of continuity and there's no continuity. And so our business is closed like many others. And so what happens is the, is the ultimate question and I don't have answers and we'll find out. It's not just my decision. Obviously, it's a collaborative decision between the Players Union and the MBA at the commissioner level. So I'm just as curious about what's going to happen next as everybody else.

So, you know, we've been talking about big changes coming to different industries. Could you imagine that the current crisis forces a big change for the NBA, either in terms of the salary cap and the way the league actually does its financials or in terms of the way it gets its revenue? I think the way it gets its revenue could change, particularly if we won't have fans for games, which is the most likely outcome right now, particularly if we try to finish this current season. And so that's going to be disruptive. And so, you know, we've got a great relationship with the players union and our commissioner, Adam Silver, is talking to them on an ongoing basis. And so we're all going to have to be agile, resilient, and adaptive.

I mean, there are no rules right now that, you know, there's no way really to anticipate what comes next because like I mentioned right off the bat of all the uncertainty. We're trying to be good corporate citizens. We're trying to let people in need get tests. We're not, you know, at least in the state of Texas and other states where there's a shortage of testing. You know, I've never been tested.

Our players, to my knowledge, have not been tested. And so we're trying to take a backseat to people who are in greater need and allowing them to have, you know, what's turned out to be a scarce resource, unfortunately, tests. And so as long as that continues to be the case, it's very difficult for us to make a plan on what comes next. So it's difficult to make a plan on what comes next, unclear if the season can be salvaged. Do you think it can? And what kind of things, what could it possibly look like? I mean, you mentioned almost certainly there won't be players, or there won't be fans in the stands. But what could it just sort of look like operationally?

What would be plausible at this point? Hotel California. You enter, but you never leave. We find a huge facility hotel that can support all of our players, which is 450, give or take, plus essential personnel to put on games. And we have those games in a central location. and we play them for made for TV. But I think that would be great.

I think, you know, basketball fans and NBA fans around the world would love it. I think, you know, we as Americans have a proclivity towards sports and supporting our teams and we miss it. And I just think it would be great to give everybody something to cheer for and get excited about. So I'm all for resuming the season, you know, not just for economic reasons, but for morale reasons in the country. And I think I think there's a chance we'll do it. But again, it comes down to testing. It comes down to having the science. And so I have to defer to the doctors and the scientists, but I know the NBA is working closely with them.

So speaking of things that basketball fans watch, I'm curious if you've been watching the Michael Jordan documentary and whether there was anything in there that surprised you. A lot of things surprised me. And yes, I have. You know, it's just so different. It was a different era of them talking about, you know, smoking cigarettes. and drinking at half time. You know, guys just taking off because they're mad at their playing time, renegotiating contracts,

talk about the CBA changes. You could just see it being so different because it's pre-social media. You know, Michael, walking out to a sea of cameras, you know, today's kids, they just, they have their own cameras. They don't need all the media cameras. And so, yeah, it wasn't necessarily surprising, but it was just, you know, kind of a wake-up call to how much things have changed. It was also fun to see an empty-day

the competitor because he owns the Charlotte Hornet, so we've gotten to be good friends, and he's certainly still a competitor, but it's just a different level of competitor when he was actually playing it, and that's been fun to watch. Mark, I love that idea, you know, the sort of the big centralized Hotel California.

Do you have like a site in mind that could plausibly pull it off and have the capacity for enough games and all the personnel? Well, there's plenty. I mean, you just have to look at hotels that maybe have an arena and can hold thousands and have thousands of rooms. So Vegas, Orlando, you know, these aren't things.

I'm not involved in those negotiations, so I'm reading them like everybody else, but they make sense to me. Mark, one last question for you. Then we can let you go. But you're in Dallas. Elon Musk, he's been tweeting about maybe ditching California for Texas. Would you like him to join you in the Lone Star State? I mean, I had no problem with that.

But, you know. Would that be a good choice for him? Yeah, of course. I mean, doing business in and around Dallas, Texas is a dream. I mean, it's just so much simpler, so much less friction here. Now, a lot of different perspectives politically, but at the same time, when it comes to starting to running businesses, which I've done my entire professional life in Dallas, Texas, it truly is a great place to have a company.

All right. Mark, really appreciate you taking the time and hopefully you join. join us again on your, your 2024 run. Appreciate it, Joe. Appreciate it, Tracy. Great questions. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Great. Take care, Mark. Thanks, Mark. I guess I didn't realize Mark was a, I'm Rand fan. Yeah. You heard that too, huh? Yeah, I immediately latched on to that. It's interesting because, well, that comes with a certain reputation.

But, of course, what he's talking about is greater government participation in a whole bunch of markets. Right. But, I mean, it, it, it, it, I do think like this crisis because of how intense and how deep it is is sort of really exposing. I mean, what he said right off the beginning when I asked him about the state of the economy for all his businesses, large and small, like it's about demand. And if people, if you're not selling something that you could store safely in your home for a long time, like certain kinds of foods or maybe athletic equipment, like everyone is really hurting until that demand comes back. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the economy isn't really built for demand to just sort of dissipate. It's also really interesting to see a business person, you know, a very successful business person, someone from the private sector, take such an interest in these types of policy matters. And it's interesting that you don't see more of it as well, because of course, the business community, business leaders, they're the ones that are going to have to carry through on all these corporate policies like we were discussing about.

the PPP program, making those judgment calls about whether or not it's better to fire your worker and let them get that extra $600 or whether or not it's better to keep them on the payroll. Lots of decisions to be made. Yeah, absolutely. Also, it's just clear, like, and I, you know, obviously the talk of him, like having potential presidential ambition, you know, that's been percolating for a while. He's talked about it, you know, that he's thought about it in the past. But then when he gave like his like, and now here's the Mark Cuban health care plan. It's like, yeah, that's someone who definitely is ready at some point for a more sort of like public national unveiling of it.

Because I figure you don't just come up with a whole health care plan and score it and figure out what the co-pay are and figure out the correct level of the federal poverty rate you're going to be if you're just planning on sort of keeping that to yourself. What? You don't have your own health care plan up your sleeve, the Joe Weisenball Health Care America Act? I have not gone to a think tank to calculate exactly how much it would cost people, how much cost savings, and all that. So, no, I do not. I have not done the equivalent work. Yeah, it is very interesting to hear him talk about sort of using his own businesses as test cases for certain policy changes. That's, yeah, it's definitely something he's thinking about, isn't it? Okay. Well, great conversation. Yeah.

I learned something about basketball, namely that no one understands how it works. Because I was like, it's funny. You did all the good homework because I was like reading his comments about, you know, federal jobs program and stuff. But I suspect more of our listeners, what people want to know about is like how the salary cap is going to interact with the COVID crisis and so forth. So I appreciate you having done the homework that I forgot to do. Thank you. I made the effort. Okay.

On that note, this has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me at The Stallwart. And you should follow our guest on Twitter, Mark Cuban. He's at M. Cuban. Follow our producer, Laura Carlson.

She's at Laura M. Carlson. Follow the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca today. And be sure to check out all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening.