Mark Cuban Wants to Save Capitalism from Itself

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, Wnyc, David, Arts, Yorker, Society & Culture, Storytelling, Books, New, Remnick, Politics

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.9	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.5	Mark Cuban's life story is like a capitalist fairy tale.
0:17.2	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.
0:28.7	When I was starting audio net, which turned into the streaming industry, basically, I had people coming to me, throwing money at me.
0:36.2	We had zero in sales, nothing.
0:38.2	Not one person understood what we were doing.
0:41.3	Yeah.
0:41.9	They just knew based off of what we were showing.
0:43.8	But Mark Cuban's politics have been veering in an unusual direction for a billionaire.
0:48.1	He recently tweeted that the government should hire millions of unemployed people
0:52.1	to assist with COVID recovery.
0:55.0	And he also tweeted this. Now is the time to train or pay, stay at home parents and caregivers as well.
1:01.5	Ideas that might have come from Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Our business correspondent
1:07.9	Sheila Colhatcar talked to Mark Cuban earlier this month.
1:12.2	You've been advocating recently for things like a much higher federal minimum wage
1:16.8	and payments to individual workers from the government, putting health of workers ahead of profits,
1:24.1	which is a somewhat radical notion in some circles.
1:28.9	You know, the number one thing that I've been trying to push is a transitional federal jobs program. In order for the economy to come back,
1:35.2	and in order for people to feel a little bit more confident about their lives, they have to,
1:39.9	they're going to have to be more jobs. I mean, we've lost 30 plus million jobs. We have another
1:44.4	20 million people who are underemployed. So there's 50 million people who are on precarious
	...

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