The New Yorker Radio Hour - Mark Cuban Wants to Save Capitalism from Itself

Episode Date: June 2, 2020

Mark Cuban identifies as a capitalist, but the billionaire investor, “Shark Tank” star, and Dallas Mavericks owner has been advocating for changes that point to a different kind of politics. Cuban tells Sheelah Kolhatkar that the economic crisis now requires massive government investment to stabilize the economy from the bottom up; he’s pushing a federal jobs program that would warm the heart of Bernie Sanders. “We are literally going from America 1.0,” he said, “to trying to figure out what America 2.0 is going to look like.” Plus, Katy Waldman picks three novels that provide comic relief; and Susan Orlean gets a life lesson in origami. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Mark Cuban's life story is like a capitalist fairy tale. A working-class kid from Pittsburgh gets into technology early, and he becomes a prolific investor, a billionaire, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and then one of the hosts of ABC's Shark Tank. When I was starting audio net, which turned into the streaming industry, basically, I had people, coming to me, throwing money at me. We had zero in sales, nothing. Not one person understood what we were doing.

They just knew based off of what we were showing. But Mark Cuban's politics have been veering in an unusual direction for a billionaire. He recently tweeted that the government should hire millions of unemployed people to assist with COVID recovery. And he also tweeted this. Now is the time to train or pay, stay-at-home parents and caregivers as well. ideas that might have come from Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Our business correspondent Sheila Colhatcar talked to Mark Cuban earlier this month. You have been advocating recently for things like a much higher federal minimum wage

and payments to individual workers from the government, putting health of workers ahead of profits, which is a somewhat radical notion in some circles. You know, the number one thing that I've been trying to push is a transatlantic. additional federal jobs program. In order for the economy to come back, and in order for people to feel a little bit more confident about their lives, they're going to have to be more jobs. I mean, we've lost 30 plus million jobs. We have another 20 million people who are underemployed. So there's 50 million people who are on precarious work positions. What I proposed is that we look at the things that we need as a society and as an economy and start hiring people for those jobs. And I'll give you

the examples. We need tracking and tracing. That's a given and testing. Why not hire two, three, four million people, whatever the number is. Train them, you know, within all the HIPAA regulations and privacy requirements to be health care workers that can implement tracking and tracing and also testing for that matter. Pay them, you know, at least $30,000 a year plus benefits. Now you have that number of people who are confident that they have jobs and are willing to become consumers. Would you have ever thought that you'd be advocating for a big expansion of the federal government prior to this pandemic? Hell no. That was a very quick answer.

Yeah, hell no, no, absolutely not. But these are unique circumstances, unfortunately. So what happened? When did you start to realize this was different from other kinds of economic crises? Yeah, I mean, because it happened so quickly, it was so compressed. We've never had a scenario where business was just shunct. shut down, you know, across the country for the most part. And so when you get this compression, you can't go back to the old dogmatic ways and say, this is the way it worked before,

because there was no before that's applicable. And so there's not a Republican way, you know, trickle down doesn't work. And even a democratic way of just random spending and just, you know, find ways to spend money and inject it into the economy. That won't work either. You need to create, in my mind, a scenario where you create jobs that people, have confidence, they'll be able to retain. All those companies who are able to borrow money, whether big or small, if there's nobody buying their products or services, they won't survive. So this has to be a bottom-up solution, not a top-down or trickle-down solution. Some of these ideas just sound almost progressive to be. Has that something you've struggled

with at all? I mean, have you thought about? No, no. Look, I'm independent. I could care less about how it's categorized or labeled, don't care at all. We literally are, you know, in my opinion, going from America 1.0 to trying to figure out what America 2.0 is going to look like. Progressive, you know, dogmatic perspectives are out the window. Conservative dogmatic perspectives are out the window. There are no rules that work. We have to solve a problem. There are people's lives on the line. I'm curious to know, how would you rate the Trump administration's response so far in terms of their economic policy actions. Has the CARES Act done what it was supposed to do?

No, but it wasn't because of the plan. It was because of the execution. And so the plan itself was great. The PPP program effectively was to try to get money into businesses' hands so that they can retain their employees immediately. The word immediately means everything. The fact that it took so long to get money into company's hands and by proxy into employees' hands,

that's created a different set of challenges, and that's been the problem. It does seem to me that the federal money that was earmarked for these different sort of bailout programs. You had the PPP program, these sort of loans that turn into grants. Then you had the different piles of money going to the Federal Reserve to go to larger companies. What do you make of the fact that the restrictions on those different piles of money seem to be so different? I mean, it does seem to be that the smaller you are, there are a lot of restrictions, a lot of hoops you have to jump through. And the largest companies have the fewest restrictions. There's nothing to prevent them from using money. They get through

the Fed buying their debt to do stock buybacks, even as they're laying people off. You know, what do you make of that? It's wrong. It's absolutely wrong. Any money that goes to a big public company, there should be a reward for taxpayers for loaning it to them. If we had given $25 billion to Boeing, Taxpayers should have gotten warrants. They should have gotten options. They should have gotten preferred distributions. That has to take place with any monies going to bigger companies, period in a story. And on top of that, if there's anything that's given to executives in that company, on a peri-pursu basis, it should be given to employees.

So just to pick numbers out of the air, if the CEO makes a million dollars a year and is given a million dollars in warrants options or stock repricing, then there should, the same. same amount of grants and opportunities should be given to the lowest end worker for 100% of their earnings. This truly should be capitalism at its best, coming up with solutions to very severe problems with the reward, not necessarily going into an individual's pocket, but going into the taxpayer's pocket. I mean, these are very appealing ideas and they make a lot of sense. But again, it's a very heavy involvement of the government. You're almost suggesting a situation where the government is telling companies who gets paid what. And I could imagine that the corporate world being very resistant to being told how much they can pay,

they want to pay CEOs, whatever they want, and they want to pay workers. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy how it works, right? When business is good, all CEOs are capitalists. When business is bad, all CEOs are socialists, right? They want as much as they can get for as little as possible. But, you know, somebody's got to put the capitalist hat on and negotiate. for the taxpayers like they would for their own company, and that's all I'm talking about. It's a form of capitalism, but it's different from the traditional understanding of capitalism.

Is this sort of a new idea of capitalism that you're thinking about? I don't look at it that way at all. I'm just, we haven't had good representation of workers and the economy as a whole by true capitalists, you know, and maybe that turns some people off or rubs people the wrong way, but just about doing what's right. And to me, that's capitalism at its best, maybe with the, a little added dose of compassion, which I think particularly right now is needed, but is also good business. I mean, if you look at millennials and Generation Z, they only want to buy from

people whose ideals they match up with. And those types of points of compassion are good business. And now we just have to apply those same concepts to what we do as a country. You know, the game has changed. You know, we're in a world now where if the people that we live next to, the people that we pass in the streets, the people in our communities aren't doing well, then all business fails. If people can't afford to buy anything but the basics, or maybe not even the basics, all businesses of all sizes fail. And I think people are starting to recognize now that if we don't lift up from the bottom, there won't be consumer demand because this all happened so quickly. Investor and Dallas Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban. He spoke with our business

correspondent Sheila Colhatcar. Now Sheila, Mark Cuban said to you that progressive orthodoxy and conservative orthodoxy are now out the window because of the pandemic. But is anything he just told us not, in fact, progressive orthodoxy? I think if you were to put the question to him, he would say, well, my ideas are very focused on job preservation and job creation, a traditional sort of democratic socialist politician might be more focused on giving money to people, giving social services, social supports and programs to people rather than focusing on the job

element. But I thought it was interesting that a lot of the things that Mark Cuban says that he's for right now in terms of addressing the problem and giving people more money to get through this are not happening because the Republicans, in Congress don't want them to happen. And in many cases, the Republicans are actively blocking these things from happening, the idea of extending unemployment benefits, considering sending more cash aid to families. They're definitely opposed to that idea. They think it will create a disincentive to working, which is their longstanding argument.

Sheila, is Mark Cuban alone on this hill? Are there other business leaders saying similar things? There are. You've even seen the CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase say recently, you know, we need to take this as an opportunity to rethink capitalism. I've personally spoken to Wall Street executives. I think a lot of people, even conservative Wall Street executives, recognize the uniqueness of this situation. And a number of people have expressed to me privately, listen, you've got to give people money to get through this. or there's going to be an uprising. There's going to be tumult. And the government has to help people through that or you're going to have a real problem. You can find Sheila Cole Hatcar's work at New Yorker.com.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Katie Waldman is one of the most voracious readers I know, which is good because that's her job. She writes the page Turner column for the New Yorker, and she's always got a pile of the most interesting

and on-point books of the moment around. And while some people are talking about the big, serious books that they're finally going to tackle, Katie Waldman recently wrote a piece about something quite different. We're here to talk about comic novels, and that has definitely been wonderful. And actually kind of a change of speed for me, because I'm more of a wallower by nature than an escapist. So I was doing a lot of kind of grim reading. I was working on a piece about diaries, and I was reading Civil War Diaries, and Anne Frank's Diaries, and it was all about enclosure and loneliness.

And suddenly I thought, you know, I actually don't need an even worse reflection of the way that I'm feeling. I would like to feel something completely different. So I started reading comic novels. And so the first novel that I want to recommend is not going to surprise anyone, but it's Right Ho Jeeves by P.G. Woodhouse. He is wonderful. He has written 23 of these Bertie and Jeeves stories. And Rite Ho Jeeves is widely regarded, I think, as the crown jewel. Jeeves is the butler. He's stoic. He's brilliant. He's impeccable.

And then Bertie is the colorful, well-to-do, fashionable young master who's really friendly and loyal and wants to help those close to him get out of scrapes. But he is unfortunately a bit of a dodo. And he has a glorious lack of self-awareness. Katie, did you want to read a passage from this novel? Sure. Well, I should introduce this by saying that right-ho Jeeves is in what is known as the rebellious period of the Bertie and Jeeves relationship. So Bertie is quite offended that his friends are leapfrogging over him to consult Jeeves. So he is quite insulted and he tries to take a soothing bath to take his mind off of the indignity. When one has taken the trouble to whack out a highly juicy scheme to benefit an in-the-soup friend in his hour of travail,

It's pretty foul to find him giving the credit to one's personal attendant, particularly if that personal attendant is a man who goes about the place not packing mess jackets. The discovery of some toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn't played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let it go, it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most careworn. Ten minutes of this, and I was enabled to return to the bedcham much more the merry old Bertram. The thing that people comment on all the time and you can't help but love in Woodhouse is just the sentences, the language, the sound of it, the kind of jokes that you can't help but love in Woodhouse is just the sentences, the language, the sound of it, the kind of jokes that you. seem inimitable. Where does that come from? I mean, it's a great question because I think he creates these very ornate cataracts of nonsense. Like, this person doesn't necessarily know where his sentence

is going to end, but neither do you, but you're in it together. Presuming that you're not just plowing your way through a stack of woodhouse day after day, what else is on your hit parade? Well, I wanted to bring up Richard Rousseau's novel Straight Man, in part because it partakes in a long and glorious tradition of grumpy professor novels. Straight Man is about an English professor named Hank, who is kind of wisecracking and anarchic, and he has all these problems in his department. First of all, there's no money, so he has no budget. Second of all, his colleagues are backbiting and rude, and one is physically violent. Third, he is estranged from his wife. His children are kind of failing to launch.

So he has all these somewhat ivory tower problems. And kind of the climax of these various simmering pots is he ransoms a goose from the university duck pond and declares that he will kill it unless someone gives him a budget with which he can get things done in the English department, and it just gets crazier from there. I've never read this. It sounds great. I never thought of Richard Russo as a really funny writer, but somebody who's kind of...

It's an interesting point because I think he... When I first founded, I was in middle school, and I thought it was the most charming book I had ever read. And now, you know, rereading it, it's not entirely lighthearted. The stakes are somewhat high. The emotions are real and often painful. And you kind of see that he's made a conscious decision to laugh instead of cry.

And that's his way of claiming agency. There's a real understanding there that comedy sort of glows the brightest when it is set in a tragic frame. What's next on your reading list? So this one is called Lightning Rods, and it's by Helen DeWitt. Have you heard about this book? I haven't. She is a wonderful author. You may have read The Last Samurai, which was Praise to the Heavens.

But this is a slightly smaller and a little bit weirder work. It's an office sex comedy. And the idea is that there's a lot of ambient sexual tension in the American workplace. And so this one guy has the idea to deploy temp workers that provide anonymous sex to people in a corporation and a company so that they don't sexually harass the actual female employees. That is a bizarre sounding novel. Yeah, well, one thing that's kind of funny about it is you haven't seen Better Call Saul, have you? The sort of Breaking Bad spin-off? I have.

Oh, okay. So he's a very, the main character is very Saul-like. He's kind of hapless on one end, but also this kind of silver-tonged opportunist with flexible morals who we actually start to think in his rhythms because DeWitt inhabits his thoughts. and that itself is somewhat audacious and funny. You keep hearing about readers who say, okay, now that I've got this, you know, thanks to this terrible thing, this opportunity, that I'm finally going to read and then fill in the blank.

Do you have anything like that on your list? I should finish Moby Dick, right? Yes, yes. Yes. Do you always come up short with Moby Dick? You know, I actually really love it. It's very enveloping. I just, I don't.

have that drive to finish it because I like having it there as something that I can always make a little bit of progress on. Well, here's to good reading. Thank you so much, Katie. Thank you. Katie Waldman has more recommendations for comic novels, and you can read her on books new and old at New Yorker.com. Now, if you're thinking that while you're spending so much time at home, this might be the chance to master that craft that's always alluded to you, we've got a little cautionary tale. A few years ago, the New Yorker Susan Orlean attended Origami USA, a gathering of the hardcore of origamiists.

Here's Susan. I always love reading about and writing about people who are inordinately passionate about something, which is kind of a nicer way of saying people who are obsessed. So, of course, I love origami people. I went to the convention to see one origami person in particular, a Caltech trained physicist named Robert Lang. Robert had been doing cutting-edge research and lasers,

but then at the peak of his career in physics, he gave it up to become a professional origami artist. Every origami fan at the convention wanted to be in a class with Robert. He's the da Vinci of origami. Maybe he's the Obi-Wan Kenobi of origami. Maybe he's the Secretariat of Origami. He was teaching a session on a model of his call, the Taiwan goldfish.

It's Opus 716 in the Ove of Robert Lang. This is Robert Lang. He's going to be presenting his Taiwan goldfish. Thank you, Robert. You're welcome. So are we ready to go? Okay. I had already told the folks here,

we're using 10-inch foil-backed paper, American foil, aloe foil. Over the years, Robert has folded flat sheets of paper into an unimaginable array of things, including rhinoceroses, cuckoo clocks, unicorns, nearly every kind of beetle known to mankind, and in one of his most famous demonstrations, the head of Drew Carey. There was a plot line where Drew Carey took up origami, and they said, well, we want him to fold a big origami model of himself. so would you fold a life-size Drew Carey, which I did.

But they rewrote that out of the script so it never made it to air, which is sort of too bad. Now, I am the lowest level of origami artist. In fact, I really shouldn't even dignify myself by calling myself an artist. I like folding paper. Normally, I would not be the target audience for Robert's class. So, let's get started. And we're going to start with the color up and fold the paper in half from edge to edge. This was step-by-step instruction on how to fold Roberts Taiwan goldfish.

It's this really beautiful creature with a hinged mouth, a long, elegant tail, and all the proper goldfish fins trailing off in a kind of poetic way. And it's really hard. So hang on, hang on, don't go so fast. And bring it back. So I cheated. I was sitting next to a friend of Roberts, another professional origami artist, and he kept leaning over and helping me fix my mistakes.

Here's where we were. I'm going to bring this raw edge to line up with a diagonal existing crease. As I do that, I'll have to make a squash fold of the layers in between, squash that, and flatten. a little close-up, there's the crease, fold it over, and I squash fold a little hood, and then press it flat. There is a problem. And we're ready for our next step.

I mean, it's going to be... Origami is an ancient art form that nobody would ever describe as a growth industry, but we're also now recognizing that it has enormous technological potential. In fact, in 2012, the National Science Foundation awarded millions of dollars for research into the scientific applications of folding. And this gave a huge jumpstart to the field. There have been all of these applications that people have demonstrated

using origami and solar arrays and airbags and telescopes and things like this. One of the really cool ways origami is being used now is as a foldable Kevlar bulletproof barracks. for police to use. So it's 12 layers of Kevlar, and you grab it, and it unfolds and creates this sort of arc-shaped barrier. Because it's folded from one sheet with no seams, there are no weak places. The next step is going to be a crimp. Crimp is a mountain-vallied.

The mountain exists. The mountain fold is this vertical crease that we made. early on. The valley fold's going to run out in this. Is there something innate that would make someone good at origami as opposed to just being studious? It's hard to put a finger on precisely what it is, but to be really good at origami, you need to be able to visualize what the paper's doing and visualize kind of what's going on inside a stack of layers. You know what I just thought of. This might be ridiculous, but I wonder if people who are good at origami would also be good at cutting hair because it's three-dimensional and it's lots of layers.

And I have to research that. But it's just, you know. You know, I don't know any hair cutters who come to the convention. I'm drawing this connection because I'm really bad at cutting hair, much as I always love to cut, like, my boyfriend's hair. And I'm also quite bad at origami. And so I think there's a connection. Now, in origami, if we mess up, we throw it away, grab a new sheet of paper.

You have to have a little more care and precision when you're cutting someone's hair. You get a new boyfriend, which is what I did. Just get a new person. Here's a little bit stretched out. You can see this side is half of a reverse fold. Going to do the same thing on the other side. I should have had it. I remember when we first met, you said something to me that I've never felt.

forgotten that paper has a memory that once you fold it, you can never entirely remove the fold. Am I remembering this right? Yeah. Once you fold it, the paper has a memory because the fibers and the bonds between the fibers are permanently changed, and so it'll always know that fold. Well, it's funny because it's something I think about often, because there's something kind of profound about it. It feels, it seems like it's kind of about life too.

Yeah, the engineers have a way of, you know, reducing a profound concept to a technical term. It undergoes plastic deformation. It just means a permanent change. And lots of materials do that as well. If you take a sheet of metal and you fold it and then you try to unfold it, you'll be left with a little divvick that you can't really get rid of. But paper, yes, it remembers that fold. but then it's also happy to fold the other direction.

And that is unusual. It's really cute. And the very last regular fold, I'm going to open it out and reverse fold it forward so that, there we go. You get a mouth. That is the mouth. That is. And once you have the mouth,

then you can put your fingers inside, round the body, and bring the fins out. That's our finished goldfish. Our visitor was successful. It looks like so. Well, with a little help. Susan Orlean with the origami legend, Robert Lang. Susan's most recent book of nonfiction is called The Library Book. I'm David Remnick, and that's our show for today.

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