Shark of the Year

When the show Shark Tank premiered, I made the mistake of watching the first few episodes. Everything gross about capitalism was on display: gaudy displays of wealth, poor people begging rich people for the chance of a life other than a destitute one, rich people condescending to those poor people under the guise of tough love, and all of this was packaged under the most familiar of capitalist motifs - the rags to riches story. Here was a show that offered proof positive that a good idea and hard work was all you needed to get ahead. As you might guess, I didn't last more than a few episodes.

The reason I gave it a try in the first place was because I had been watching the British version, Dragon’s Den, for years. And I didn't find that show off-putting in the same way. Yes, it fetishized the "entrepreneurial spirit," but in the same way that The Great British Baking Show is just cute, so was this. It wasn't mean-spirited, it wasn't just a vehicle for the egos of billionaires, and there was something easier to digest about a show set in a country that has more of a middle class.

For instance, in Dragon's Den, the failure to raise capital didn't mean that your only chance of a life was now foreclosed upon, it only meant you had to go back to your old life, which, truth be told, wasn't that bad at all. But in Shark Tank, you could tell that for many of the contestants, appearing on the show was like being given a lottery ticket out of your shitty life. Raise the capital that you need, and you have a life worth living; fail to do so, and it's back to your old life of debt peonage and privatized healthcare. Losses here could be devastating, and the callousness of the "shark's" only made things worse.

As it goes, I recently made the mistake of watching a couple of recent episodes of Shark Tank, and I was surprised at how much it had changed. All of my criticisms still applied, but the differences were noticeable. Specifically, in the old episodes (as well as in Dragon's Den before it), you'd see maybe one or two "winners" per episode, with the vast majority of contestants being those who failed to raise capital. But in the new episodes of Shark Tank, every single contestant managed to raise their capital, with perhaps a single contestant failing to do so. From a show with many losers and one winner, it became a show with many winners and only one loser.

I'm guessing that the reason for the change is that the producers of Shark Tank realized that ratings were better when the show portrayed winners rather than losers. Granted, if you have no losers then there's also no drama, but if you have too many losers, things just get depressing. So, I suspect that producers realized that most people prefer a hopeful success story rather than a depressing story of failure, regardless of which story happens to be more realistic. And yet, British audiences didn't seem to have this predisposition. After all, Dragon's Den only had the rare winner while most contestants lost, and this is the formula that Shark Tank used at first. However, at some point things changed.

Perhaps, you could chock this up to the more optimistic outlook of Americans versus the more realistic Brits, but I don't think that's the case. Instead, I suspect this change stemmed from the fact that we Americans need the illusion more. When your life is comparatively comfortable, when you never have to worry about things like healthcare, it’s no big deal if your entrepreneurial dream doesn't come true. But when your life is a constant struggle, when comfort is something reserved for the super-rich, it becomes very important to keep the dream alive. Without that dream, life becomes unbearable.

This all made me wonder about the role that billionaires play in our society. From an economic point of view, they're a big part of the reason that we're all poor. But from the perspective of our intellectual lives, there's a way in which their very existence keeps hope alive for the rest of us. So, strangely, from an economic point of view, they need us because they’re getting rich off the sweat of our brows, but from an intellectual point of view, it's us who needs them. Their existence is what allows us to keep on keeping on.

There's something deeply irrational about a process in which the greater our oppression the more our oppressors appear like our savior’s. Nonetheless, this seems a pretty enduring political truth. But beyond this, a peculiar quirk emerges. As our oppression deepens, our need for salvation becomes so great that the image we have of our “saviors” becomes increasingly detached from reality. In other words, our need for salvation becomes so intense that our psychological projections blind us to the truth of who these people actually are. We NEED these people to be our saviors, and it is this need that determines how we see them.

You can see this process at play in Shark Tank, for instance, if in a roundabout sort of way. Not only are many of the "sharks" bargain basement billionaires (outside of Mark Cuban, I’m not sure any actually are), but the one "truth" of the show seems evermore like a fantasy. Specifically, the core truth that has endured from the old days of Dragon's Den all the way through to the latest iteration of Sharks Tank pertains to the nature of company valuation.

The premise of the show has always been that contestants ask for money in exchange for a percentage of their company. Therefore, properly valuing a company becomes very important; if I'm buying 25% of your company, I need to know the value of your company in order to arrive at a fair price. But without fail, contestants have always arrived at valuations that are incredibly inflated, largely due to the emotional investment in their business, and the show has consistently offered a sober lesson in how these things are supposed to be done.

And it's essentially all based on sales. If you have a great idea but no sales, your company probably isn't worth anything (owning intellectual property like a patent might change this). But if you have a seemingly dumb idea but a million dollars in sales, you have a million dollar company. It seems simple, but it's amazing how many people get it wrong, seeing the value of their company as residing in the “brilliance” of their idea rather than in the banal matter of sales. However, business is business, as Willy Loman learns, and business is all about sales. And at its best, Dragon’s Den offered a quick lesson in company valuation.

But this sort of "sober" insight seems almost fantastical in the present day, when the latest tech I.P.O. can raise billions overnight, all of which is seemingly divorced from "the real world" of capitalism. Take the many examples of hot shit startups like Uber, that run at significant losses for years, but that remain the darlings of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. So, the one hard truth offered by Shark Tank, that of company valuation, seems like little more than a fantasy, while the real world of capitalism is actually running more and more like a fantasy world..

Which is all to say that as the truth of our lives becomes clearer (that for the rich, the creation of wealth is a fantasy divorced from reality), our need for illusion becomes greater (that capitalism isn't just a shell game played by the rich, but that it adheres to basic rules, like company valuation). So, even though the past decade should have put to rest the idea that a company's value is based on any real metric, here we have Shark Tank selling the myth that it is. And we believe it, because just like our billionaire saviors, we need to believe that capitalism isn’t just a shell game played by the rich at our expense, but that hard work and a good idea are all it takes to get ahead.

And for an age such as ours, who better to be Person of the Year than a fake entrepreneur and fake inventor, whose wealth seems created more by tweet than industry or ingenuity, and whose self-mythologizing has found the most ready of adherents in a population so consumed by despair that they’re willing to believe that even this schmuck is a genius.