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Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner, joins Yahoo's Reset Your Mindset at Work special

Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner, joins Yahoo Finance's Julia La Roche for Yahoo's Reset Your Mindset at Work special.

Video Transcript

JULIA LA ROCHE: Mark, thank you so much for joining us.

MARK CUBAN: Thanks for having me, Julia.

JULIA LA ROCHE: All right, Mark, well, you have been incredibly vocal throughout this COVID-19 pandemic. And you and I have talked about something that you call an American reset. What do you mean by that?

MARK CUBAN: You know, when everything's just upside down like it is right now, everything changes. You know, and that creates new opportunities. The people who have been trying to do business like the way it's always been done are uncertain about how to bring their businesses back. Large companies are uncertain about their legacy industries and businesses. And when you have all that uncertainty, that creates an unbridled amount of opportunity. You know, sometimes out of tragedy comes opportunity.

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JULIA LA ROCHE: But my question for you is it seems like you're really optimistic. How do you navigate that when there are so many people who are hurting? We're talking about tens of millions who have filed for unemployment, people who are seeing their very livelihoods hurt. And also we're having a conversation about mental health right now, which has become a crisis in and of itself. How do you remain so optimistic?

MARK CUBAN: It's brutal. I mean, it's horrific. There's no way to sugarcoat it. There's no way to spin it. It is just awful. But at the same time, the only way to solve those problems is to really focus on trying to solve them or trying to come up with solutions or at least where you can't solve them, suggestions, or even if I can just impact on the margins and make it better for just a few people. You know, and that's why I'm optimistic because I want to keep that grind going. I want to keep that-- you know, that eye on in trying to help. And you know, there's a-- it feels good to help people, you know? And that's what keeps me optimistic, you know, just trying to have an impact.

JULIA LA ROCHE: I think one of the things about you, Mark, is it's about leadership. You have been calling out leadership or lack thereof on both sides of the aisle throughout this, and it's something that we do need. So how do you assess the leadership? How would you grade the leadership in Washington DC? How do you great the administration's response to this crisis?

MARK CUBAN: Well, it's not just the administration. I think politically, we got off to a better start, right? I think the president was a lot more open minded. He was a lot more deferential to experts and scientists when we needed it. And then something flipped, and he went in a completely different direction. But it's not just him, right? Because again, I don't-- it sounds like I'm throwing him under the bus because I just-- I think he could have done better. But when you have imperfect information, you make imperfect decisions.

But then you look to Congress, right? And there's really nobody that stands out that we can trust. And let's just talk about something that was horrible that happened that really came from the Democratic side, as best I understand it. When we looked at the PPP program, right? The reason why PPP was a good idea was that if you could get money to small businesses with 500 or fewer employees quickly-- the operative word being quickly, if not very quickly-- once they had that money in the bank, they would be able to-- they would have the money to retain employees.

The longer that money was delayed, the more likely that they were going to lay people off or fire them. Well, why was that money delayed? It was delayed, in a lot of respects, because the Democrats kept on trying to get funding for museums and kept on trying to get funding for all these other things. And every day that was delayed out of that just made things far worse and added to the unemployment.

And then part three, we have treasury, right? So here's-- where we are right now, we've got all these companies that-- we've-- that are basically in a state of suspended animation, right? They may or may not be able to open up. They laid off employees, but they can't get them back because they can't afford to bring it back either because they can only open up partially, if at all, and because 68% of people who are on unemployment make more off of unemployment than they do from their former job. So the employees-- the employers can't afford to bring them back. So they're stuck in Never-never Land. That's a huge problem.

JULIA LA ROCHE: Yeah, Mark, I think you bring up some really good points too, and I should have mentioned at the top of this, a lot of people know you as an investor on "Shark Tank," and you really do have a pulse on the small and medium-sized business community, as well as your own experience in corporate America. So thank you for bringing up those issues.

So I guess my question for you, Mark, is how do we kind of restart or get back to growth? Because a lot of it, the PPP and the stimulus checks, it's kind of a Band-Aid for a wound, if you will. So how do you jumpstart the growth--

MARK CUBAN: Right.

JULIA LA ROCHE: --when you can't even operate at full capacity?

MARK CUBAN: Great question, Julia. So let's start with reality. The primary reality is no business can survive without sales, and two thirds of the economy is consumer-generated demand. And so we've got to get to a scenario where consumers have enough confidence to go out there and spend money. And so there's a couple of ways that we could do that. You got it?

JULIA LA ROCHE: Yeah, I got it.

MARK CUBAN: Hey, it's happened to me, too.

JULIA LA ROCHE: Oh, the world we live in.

MARK CUBAN: It's happened to me. So--

JULIA LA ROCHE: Yeah.

MARK CUBAN: There's a couple of ways we can do that. One, you've got to make it so people have confidence in their jobs, right? And--

JULIA LA ROCHE: Right.

MARK CUBAN: --we're going to have to have a transitional-- not permanent, transitional-- federal jobs program. And so we're going to need to hire people, millions of people, you know, preferably for testing, tracing, tracking, supporting vulnerable populations, long-term care, you know, giving people jobs that they know are stable so that give them the impetus to spend money.

Two, we're going to have to have a perfectly timed stimulus program. So what does that mean? Well, I talked about companies in suspended animation. You've got all these PPP companies that can't fully open, can't bring back the employees because they're making too much already, but that ends on July 31, right? That's when that-- the CARES program employment stimulus ends.

And so I think we need to do a debit card program where we give money literally to each household and have-- make it use it or lose it, whether it's $1,000 or $1,200 or whatever that number is every couple of weeks and say, you have X number of days to use this debit card or you lose the money that's been deposited on there. Because by doing that and timing it right, that's going to create demand for these companies so they can afford to bring their employees back after they're off of all that unemployment CARES enhancement.

JULIA LA ROCHE: Mark, I always love how you come with new ideas and solutions and you think about how to problem solve. It just seems like that's in your DNA. Now, I've asked you a couple of times on Yahoo Finance's live programming if you're thinking about that presidential run in 2020. We're getting down to the wire here.

MARK CUBAN: Right.

JULIA LA ROCHE: I would love to pose that question to you. And also, if you were in office, what would be one of the fundamental things that you would change that we have not yet mentioned in this conversation?

MARK CUBAN: OK, so it's highly unlikely because of timing, as you mentioned, but stranger things have happened. So you know me, Julia, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm never going to say no. But to answer your question directly, healthcare, right? We haven't even had a basic discussion about what happens to healthcare now that, you know, we've got 39, 40 million people who are unemployed and who knows how many, because they reduced hours or reduced wages, are underemployed.

So we went from an environment where we had 45 million people who are eligible for the ACA and 150 million who were on their employer payrolls that could get insurance programs through-- health insurance through their employer. Now, those numbers can be completely backwards where we may have 90 million people or whatever-- you know, 45 plus 30, let's say 75 million people who are eligible for the ACA and maybe only 110 on employer-based insurance.

That creates a whole set of issues in terms of having people have a safety net and being able to be-- to take care of their families if somebody get sick, you know? And not just from COVID, from all the other things we get sick from. And so no one's had even the briefest conversation about that. That's awful, right? Again, that goes back to leadership from both sides. And so that's the first thing I would do.

JULIA LA ROCHE: Well, Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, investor on "Shark Tank," thank you so much for joining us on "Reset Your Mindset."

MARK CUBAN: Thanks for having me, Julia, always fun.