Very strange. Five, four. We'll talk about it. Three, two. Yes, and we're live. Hello. Hey, Joe. Welcome. Thank you. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Sam Harris sends his regards. Yeah, Sam's a beautiful man. He is. I love that guy. And he's one of the reasons why you're here. So universal basic income. This is what this is all about.
Yes, that's what my campaign for president is all about. That's an interesting focus of a campaign and very unusual. Four years ago, you'd never even thought that that would have a chance at all. But this is a subject that has been gaining momentum.
And I made a big shift, because I had my friend Eddie Wong on once, and he was the first person to bring it up. And my initial knee-jerk reaction was, get the fuck out of here. Like universal basic income, just gonna give people money, they're just gonna be lazy, nothing's ever gonna get done, that's a terrible idea. And then I started paying attention to the rise of AI and automation, and how many jobs are gonna get taken away. And then once you see the actual numbers, it's pretty staggering.
Yeah, and that's how I got there, Joe. Like I spent the last seven years running an organization that I had started called Venture for America. And we helped create about 3,000 jobs in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Birmingham, New Orleans, other cities around the country. And I saw that we're pouring water into a bathtub that has a giant hole ripped in the bottom. And that for every 5, 10, 50 jobs that my entrepreneurs are going to create, we're going to lose 5, 10, 50,000 jobs.
It's not something that people intuitively suspect could be a real issue either. It's one of the ones where you kind of have to like go shake people like, hey, look at this. This is coming. There's a cliff. We're going towards this cliff. It's darker still in that. So when I was digging into the numbers, I found that it's not this cliff that we're heading towards. It's actually more of a curve that we're on. What I've been telling people is that we're in the third inning now.
where one of the main reasons why Donald Trump won in 2016 is that we automated away four million manufacturing jobs that were based in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, all the swing states you needed to win in the center of the country. And a lot of that was just manufacturing work. And if you go to a factory, you'll see it's just giant robot arms as far as the eye can see. So it's not just that you have artificial intelligence on the horizon. It's that we've been eating away at the most common jobs in the US economy
uh... for almost twenty years now and is just now hitting a point where it's pushing more and more unskilled men in particular out of the workforce
Are there other alternatives that you've considered other than just universal basic income like educating people about this being a real issue and perhaps pushing them or directing them towards other occupations? Yeah, so that's the recipe that most people are attracted to. So I just want to unpack the numbers a little bit more so people have a sense of it.
I was just with a bunch of truck drivers in Iowa last week. And there's a guy, Dennis Bogaski, that gave me a ride from Altoonetta, Grinnell, and Iowa, where I've been campaigning. And the truth of it, Joe, is that there are three and a half million truck drivers in this country right now. It's the most common job in 29 states. And the average trucker is a 49-year-old guy with a high school education, maybe ex-military like Dennis was. And they're making like $50,000 a year. So then if you say, hey, I'm going to retrain,
half a million truck drivers, for what exactly is like issue number one. And then these guys didn't love school 30 years ago. It's not like driving a truck has made them really excited about the idea. And then the new job you're training them for, I looked into the data as to how good we were at retraining, let's say displaced manufacturing workers in the Midwest when we started decimating their jobs.
And we're terrible at, like according to independent studies, government funded retraining programs had a success rate of between 0 and 15% in real life. Like this is what actually happened to the workers of Michigan and Indiana and Ohio. And so if you say we're going to retrain these people, then you also have to come up with a way for us to become amazing at something that right now we're really, really bad at. And if you were an employer, which you are,
Would you rather employ a 50-year-old former truck driver with health problems who got some certificate program? Or would you rather hire a 25-year-old kid who went to community college is probably cheaper, has lower expectations, and his skills are natively going to be a little fresher? I mean, if you were an employer, you'd probably choose number two.
I agree, but I'm trying to look at this through rose-colored glasses, I guess, trying to think if there's a way that these people can adapt. You know, I mean, some will, for sure, you can retrain and rescale some people, but if you look at even the conversations we're having around this, where
People legitimately talk about retraining coal miners to be software engineers. Stuff that on the face of it makes no sense. But the reason why we're stretching for that is because we're looking for some kind of retraining oriented solution when the numbers show that that's just not going to be the recipe. Therefore, actual success.
And this is where this whole learn-to-code controversy is coming out online, where people are actually getting banned for writing learn-to-code. It's really a hot subject on Twitter. And it's very confusing, too. And I haven't really gotten an explanation for why that's such an offensive thing to say. But people are getting banned for even- Yeah, I'm sure all this I know. Showking around, saying learn-to-code.
It's very weird, but the idea behind it is that it's kind of preposterous to ask someone who doesn't have an education to do something that's as difficult as code computer language.
Yeah, and unfortunately, we're going to get to a point where AI can do some basic coding at a certain level. So if you think about the impulse to say learn to code, what it's really saying is you need to do something that the market values. It's like, hey, being a truck driver, the market's not going to value that much when the trucks are driving themselves in the next five to 10 years. So what does the market value? And then people are like, well,
coding and STEM and engineering skills. And so there's a drive to try and push people in those directions. But if you look at the numbers, about 8% of American jobs right now are in STEM fields, like in technology, engineering, math, et cetera. So you're talking about 92% of the population that is not in those fields. And it's unrealistic to expect that 92% to somehow shift into the 8%.
Right, and there even places for them there. Yeah, that's true too. Even if they perfectly seamlessly transition, there's too many people for those jobs. Yeah, so I've been driven to universal basic income in part because I've been looking at the numbers. The five most common jobs in the United States right now are administrative and clerical work, retail and sales, food service and food prep, truck driving and transportation and manufacturing.
Those five jobs comprise about half of all American jobs. Only 32% of Americans graduate from college. So the average American is a high school grad, doing one of these five jobs. And if you look at it, technology is already doing a number on each of these jobs. Like the first administrative and clerical includes call center workers. And AI is in the process of taking over that job. Retail and sales, 30% of malls are closing in the next four years. So the danger here is to think of it as
Artificial intelligence is coming. It's actually already eating up the most common jobs in our economy and it's driving Americans into distress in various ways in the numbers.
Now, when you're talking about universal basic income, there's two questions to come up. How much money and where is it coming from? Yeah. So first, I want to say that if you look at the heritage of universal basic income, it's a deeply American idea where Thomas Paine was forward at the founding of the country. And then Martin Luther King was for it. Milton Friedman, the godfather of conservative economists was for it.
And one state has had it in effect for 37 years, where everyone in that state gets between $1,000 and $2,000 a year, no questions asked. Yeah, it's Alaska. And they fund it with oil money. And what I'm going around telling people is that technology is the oil of the 21st century.
So I know you spoke to another guest about, hey, how do you get, let's say, approximately $3 trillion a year to fund universal basic income? And the first thing is it's not actually $3 trillion. And the reason why it's not $3 trillion is that if you look at what we're currently doing, we have, we're spending about $1.5 trillion right now on 126 welfare programs and social security. And so if you show up to someone's door and say, hey,
Here's a dividend of $1,000 a month. But if you're already getting more than $1,000 in stuff, we're not just going to stack it on top. We're just going to say you're guaranteed $1,000. And if you're already getting more than this doesn't touch you, you can keep your current stuff. If you're getting 700 in food stamps and whatnot, then you can just get 300 on top. So the 3 trillion actually shrinks a lot very fast because of the fact that about half Americans are already getting
various income support from the government. So the real price tag is closer to about 1.8 trillion if you say everyone who's 18 and up.
Now, for context, the entire US economy is now $20 trillion, up $5 trillion in the last 12 years, and the federal budget's $4 trillion. So you're looking at $1.8 trillion. It's a lot of money. But it's actually manageable. And one of the things that I haven't heard discussed here with you is that when you put money into people's hands, the money doesn't disappear.
Like, if I gave you a thousand bucks a month, it probably would not make a big difference in the economy because they're just going to your account somewhere and nothing would happen. But we all know that right now, most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. 57% of Americans can't afford an unexpected $500 bill. So you put $1,000 a month into their hands. It's going to go right back into the economy. They're going to spend it on food, child care,
car repairs have been putting off the occasional night out. And then all of those businesses end up hiring more people and then we end up getting some of the money back as tax revenues. So of the 1.8 trillion, we're going to get back, let's call it 400 billion in new tax receipts because everyone's going to be spending more money.
We're gonna save one to 200 billion on things like incarceration and homelessness services and emergency room healthcare. I was in New Hampshire last month and a prison guard said to me, this is a prison guard, he said we should pay people to stay out of jail because we waste so much money when they're in jail. Like he sees all the waste in the system. So if you imagine a society where everyone's getting a thousand bucks a month,
That's like it's a great incentive to try and stay out of jail because you stop getting it if you wind up in jail. And it reduces recidivism because when you come out of jail, at least you have $1,000 a month waiting for you. And then you're less inclined to commit a crime and head back in. How much crime do you think you'd actually prevent, though, by giving people $1,000 a month? I mean, most of the people that are doing crime, whether it's thievery or assault, they're not thinking this out.
You know, this is just either a way of life for them, either, you know, they've got real mental issues or a pattern of behavior that they can't break. I really don't think that a thousand dollars a month is going to fix any of that. Well, it's not going to fix all of it, for sure. I mean, we'll still have jails. It's not like, you know, silver bullet. Yeah.
at the margins, would it keep like that person who's falling through the cracks and feels like they have no place in society? And maybe they, you know, it's like the people around them are also like, Hey, you know, you don't have any value and you get a thousand bucks a month. Maybe like it keeps them off at the margins. And everything we're talking about is at the margins. I mean, everything is like this statistical curve. And you're taking the people who are let's call it like the last 10 to 20%. But if you reduce our
incarcerated population by 10 to 20%. I mean, that's billions and billions of dollars. So you're saving money on a bunch of things we spend about a trillion dollars on right now, like health care, incarceration, homelessness services. And then the magic is that if you have $1,000 a month and you're a parent, so you feel this, that studies have shown that your kids are healthier, better nourished,
more likely to graduate from high school and get further education, mental health improves, relationships improve, domestic violence goes down, hospital visits go down, and your worker productivity goes up. I mean, you're an entrepreneur and CEO, so you know when you run a company, you say, I'm going to invest in my people. I'm going to treat them well and try and train them and give them resources because you know that'll increase your productivity as an organization. In the public sector, we have the opposite.
approach. We're like, if I can just avoid spending money on you, then I'm going to somehow save money. When we end up spending that money in very, very dark, costly, counterproductive ways in the back end, because they wind up in our institutions, and our institutions just spend a truckload of money.
So, if you look at the cost savings and the value gains and the economic growth, that actually gets you back about a trillion dollars of the 1.8. This is like the trickle up economy because none of the money disappears. It goes right back into the economy. And the way you get the last 800 billion or so is related to what we think is happening with AI and all these advanced technologies. Because if you look at who's going to win with AI and
self-driving cars and trucks. The savings from robot trucks are estimated to be $168 billion a year, just from that one thing.
So the problem is that the American public is going to see very little of that money. Because the winners are going to be the trillion dollar tech companies that are great at just not paying a lot of taxes. They'll move it through Ireland. Amazon will say, didn't make any money this quarter. No reason to pay taxes. And so what we need to do is we need to put in a new tax that actually gets the American public a slice of every robot truck mile, Amazon transaction, Facebook ad.
And every other industrialized country already has this tax. It's called a value-added tax. And because our economy is so vast, at 20 trillion, a value-added tax that even half the European level generates about 800 billion in new revenue. And that gets you all the way there. So this is much more achievable and affordable than most people think when they start unpacking how the numbers work out. So essentially, it would be the biggest corporations, the companies that gain or that,
Have the largest revenue they're gonna be paying most of this
Yeah, but they're going to get some of that money back, obviously, because one of the things I say to the CEOs, it's like if everyone in Missouri is getting a thousand bucks, you know, Amazon's going to see some of that because they're just going to buy more stuff. That's true for all of the big companies. What I say to CEOs, and I've spoken to groups of dozens of CEOs, what's really bad for your businesses when people don't have money to spend? What's good for your businesses when they do? So they're going to give up some money at the top end, but they're just going to end up getting it back when their consumers end up spending a bit more.
And it's just been actually fleshed out like the real numbers or the projections of how much they're going to get back. Yeah, yeah. So the Roosevelt Institute studied this plan of everyone getting a thousand bucks a month and projected it would create 2 million new jobs and grow the economy by 8 to 10 percent. And then you can model out what that means to each business because in that climate, they're going to see a similar uptick in revenues. Did they factor in all the jobs that are going to be lost?
So one of the things that's a misconception about universal basic income is that it somehow will like facilitate job loss. Well, job losses, though, was the reason for universal basic income in the first place, right? Yeah, yeah, which we're in the midst of right now. Like right now is we're sitting here together. The labor force participation rate in the United States is 63%.
uh, which is the same levels as El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. That's right now. Like, uh, 94 million or so Americans have left the workforce over the last number of years. Now a lot of that's natural demographics, a lot of that's people in school, but about 5 million of it is unskilled men who've gotten pushed out of the workforce. So, uh, so again, this is not like a, you know, we're going to solve a problem that's coming down the pike. Like we're actually in the middle
of this problem. So if you put a thousand bucks a month into people's hands, it actually grows the economy and creates jobs because of more economic activity. Now when you say a problem that's coming down the pike, what are the projections in terms of like the timeline? Yes.
So a lot of the projections are actually pretty consistent with each other, which means they're probably right. So Bain says you're looking at between 20% and 30% of jobs subject to automation by 2030, which is pretty soon. It's like 11 years from now. McKinsey says about 25%.
The Obama White House, literally the last day in office, they issued a report saying, hey guys, we're going to automate away all the jobs and then turn the lights off. They said 83% of jobs that make less than $20 an hour will be subject to automation by 2030. MIT is saying the same thing.
And so we have 11 years to try and accelerate meaningful solutions. And this 11 years is not like it all happens on 2030. It's going to happen between now and then progressively, according to all of the major institutions that have looked at this.
Now, when you take a guy who's working as a truck driver, and he's making $50,000 a year, and you tell him that automation is going to take away his job, but good news, we're going to give you $12,000 a year. That's a substantial loss in income. It leaves them with this feeling of uselessness or hopelessness that they're not contributing. I think one of the things that
people enjoy is earning their own way. It sounds counterintuitive. People don't like free money. They like a feeling of satisfaction, of a job well done, that they've created something, that they've done something.
Yeah, you're 100% right. It's one reason why we call this the freedom dividend. We say, look, it's not money for nothing. You're an owner and shareholder of the richest country in the history of the world. Just like when I buy Verizon or Microsoft, they send me a dividend. Like I don't complain about that. Like you're now a shareholder in this great nation and you get a dividend. But when I was with Dennis, the trucker, who owns his own trucking company in Iowa, the
The role that jobs play in Trucker's lives is vital. And again, I'm a very data-driven guy where men deal with joblessness very, very poorly. By the numbers, we spend between 40 and 75% of our time on the computer playing video games or doing other things. Our substance abuse goes up.
Our volunteering in the community goes down even though we have more time. And we generally spiral into antisocial and self-destructive behaviors. Now, this is not something that's experienced by women in the same levels. Like, women in joblessness, women actually are more adaptable. They're more likely to go back to school and volunteer. They don't spend all their time on the computers the way that we do.
So there's a real problem, and the purpose of universal basic income is not meant to be a job replacement for those truckers, because right now those truckers, and when I talk to the truck drivers, so I've been campaigning for president now for a number of months, so I spent a lot of time in Iowa, which is a really huge trucking hub.
And you go to them and say, hey, guys, you're worried about robot trucks taking your jobs. They're like, there's no way a robot could take my job. That's totally matter of fact. They're like, this is not something that they worry about. Their attitude has transitioned from that somewhat to we should make robot trucks illegal. Or we should make it so that a robot truck cannot displace me. So that's been a big shift. Because a year ago, they were like, it's impossible.
The idea that an American would say, we should make a robot job illegal. We should have some laws that keep you from being free to use robots for your business instead of a person. You should be forced to highlight mandatory unionization or something. That sounds pretty ridiculous.
Well, that's where a lot of them are, Joe. So only 13% of truckers are unionized. So 87% are like Dennis, where they're small independent firms. And a lot of them actually bought or leased their own trucks.
So they took out tens of thousands of dollars in the equivalent of a mortgage to get this truck. And so if they have to compete against a robot truck that doesn't stop, that's existential level stuff. And right now truck drivers have time use regulations where they cannot drive more than 14 hours a day.
So you can't, you literally cannot compete. Because the robot truck's just gonna keep going hour 15, 16, 17, et cetera. So these guys make, some of them make really good money. Some of them make 70, 75, 80 thousand dollars. It's one of the higher paying jobs for men without a college degree.
And so if you look at what they're facing, it's not so crazy that they're like, hey, you need to make the robots illegal because for them, what is the next best economic alternative if the robot trucks take over that job? What are they going to go from? Yeah, it's not crazy for them, but it's a crazy idea to tell a company that they can't do something that's more efficient, safer, and probably economically more viable.
Oh yeah, again, the savings from automating truck driving are estimated to be $168 billion per year, and not just labor savings, but also equipment utilization, because the trucks never stop. Fuel efficiency, because the trucks can daisy chain together, so there's less wind resistance. Fewer accidents, because right now truck accidents kill about 4,000 people a year, so you'd probably save lives. There's a very, very powerful argument for the fact that we should be trying to automate this stuff.
But on the other side, you have literally three and a half million truckers who will fly upon this for their livelihoods to support their family. And there's going to be a lot of passion, a lot of resistance to this. Anyone who thinks the truck drivers are just going to shrug and be like, all right, I guess I had a good run. I'm just going to go home and figure it out. That's not going to be their response.
It's going to be much more likely that they say you need to make these robot trucks illegal, or they're just going to park their trucks across the highway, get their guns out, because a lot of these guys are ex-military, and just be like, hey, I'm not moving my truck until I get my job back, and there'll be a lot of truckers in the same situation. You really think that would happen?
Well, I think they blocked the highway for their job back that's less efficient, kills more people. So I was with these truckers in the truck stop in Altoona, Iowa. And Joe, they have really, really difficult jobs. I mean, I don't know if you knew truckers where you were. But they have this 14-hour window where they're allowed to drive their truck, and they drive most of that. So they have these other 10 hours, and they sleep in their truck. Their trucks have a bed. They go into the truck stop, they take a shower, and there's a laundry.
And they're like plugged into this machine of this truck and the industry. They spend days, sometimes weeks on the road. A lot of them listen to podcasts, probably a lot of them listening right now. A lot of them listen to podcasts.
uh, they're doing it primarily because it's a more lucrative opportunity than the other jobs that are available to them. A lot of them have families that like, you know, like supporting their families. Uh, and so if you say, Hey guys, like, you know, time's up for this way of life.
Most of them, I think, will not. Actually, I look at how much they, frankly, they endure. There's so much endurance baked into that job that I think most of them will be like some of the guys you and I know where they're much more likely to implode or do something where it's self-destructive than they would be to take their truck and park it across the highway.
But you're talking about a population of hundreds of thousands, including many small business owners. And small business owners have a different mentality very often. Like I've been an entrepreneur. I'm a serial entrepreneur for the last 20 years, like you're an entrepreneur. And if you saw this happen, you might say, hey, I'm adaptable. I'll figure it out. Or you might say, hey,
I think I can do something about this. If I park my truck this way, that's going to cause such havoc that it's like hundreds of millions of dollars worth of economic harm very, very fast. And if you look at the Industrial Revolution, which people cite as the precursor to what we're going through, there were mass riots in the Industrial Revolution that killed dozens of people, caused billions of dollars worth of damage, Labor Day is a holiday today because of those riots.
And then we implemented universal high school in 1911, in part as a response to these riots. So according to the estimates, this is called the fourth Industrial Revolution. And we're going to displace jobs at three to four times the rate of that Industrial Revolution. And that Industrial Revolution included mass riots. So thinking that this one will not strikes me as really, really optimistic and perhaps unrealistic.
What do you see coming? When you think that these jobs are going to be automated and then universal basic income is going to supplement, it's going to give them some money, $1,000 a month. But where do they go from there? How do people exist on $12,000 a year? What do they do? How do they adapt to this new world?
Right. So the first thing you have to do is you have to look at what lies ahead if we do nothing. Right. So the way it's going to play out is that self-driving trucks are slowly going to start hitting the highways. Amazon's testing them out right now. And the first stage is going to be that there's a human driver just sitting there as a fail-safe and the truck's going to drive itself. Now, my friends in Silicon Valley are working on tele-operators, which is, so the trucks have right now like a 98%
accuracy level, which is not very high, because you can't have 2% semi-trucks running into things. So the way they're trying to get the last percent or so is they're equipping trucks with tele-operating software, which means that a trucker, a tele-operator in Nevada or Arizona, will beam into the truck and just be able to see out the front like a video game.
like you know it's like drone operating but instead is a truck and you beam in and then you just steer the truck and tell the computers like I got up from here and then you beam out. That's what they're working on to try and catch that last bit of uncertainty.
So the innovations are happening. And again, Joe, we're talking about $168 billion a year. Like everything becomes possible when you're looking at that much money. So in the absence of anyone doing anything, the robot trucks will start reducing shifts of various truckers. I would say six to 10 years from now. And so then there'll be a bunch of reactions. Now, trucking firms already have
massive shortages. They can't find enough people. That's one reason why they're trying to automate this job as fast as they are, because they're literally like, you know, they're short like a couple hundred thousand truckers right now. And people don't want to go into this field for a variety of reasons. The main thing being it's like extraordinarily brutal on you physically. Very, very bad for your family life too, because you're away all the time. Yeah.
Something like 88% of truckers have an early marker for chronic disease, like substance abuse, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, something along those lines. And now people think that the job's gonna disappear in the next five to 10 years, so you can't get people in.
So if you play out what happens when the robot trucks start reducing shifts, then there'll be people trying to flee the field of trucking. And then if it becomes really dramatic where the robots start driving, let's say between Western Pennsylvania and Nevada, and then human beings get in in those states and then take it the rest of the way, because the robots won't be reliable enough to drive in urban areas. They'll be reliable enough to drive on an interstate where they just have to make a few decisions.
Then there'll be a massive depletion of truck driving opportunities. And then in my mind, a lot of suicides, a lot of self-destruction. And I don't say that lightly. I say that based upon the fact that that's what happened to the manufacturing workers, where if you unpack what happened to the manufacturing workers of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, suicide rates spiked to a point where now our life expectancy as a country has declined for the last three years because of suicides and drug overdoses.
It's the first time that's happened since the great flu pandemic of 1918. Like we are actually coming apart as a country by the numbers. So what happened to the manufacturing workers will then happen to the truckers but at an even more dramatic scale.
So you'll see truckers going home and drinking themselves to death or doing drugs and overdosing or killing themselves. And then eventually there'll be an outbreak of violence because some truckers will say instead of killing myself, how about I go bust up a robot truck. And there are already truckers that are doing things like blocking Tesla recharging stations at electronic vehicle battery stations because they don't like electronic trucks.
Those are pickup trucks, though. Those are assholes. I mean, this is not like people doing it because they think that these Tesla recharge stations are taking jobs away. They're just being dickheads. Exactly, Joe. So if you're gonna be a dickhead, even though it really has nothing to do with you, imagine when you actually think your livelihood's being threatened. Then you can see it getting revved up to a much higher level.
So I'm running for president in large part because I think we need to get in front of this set of problems. We have to say, look, if we're going to save $168 billion a year, maybe some of that should go to the truckers and give them a soft landing.
Maybe we should have this universal-based income where everyone feels like they're getting 1,000 bucks a month, which is not a work replacement. It's not going to make their lives easy. They still need to work. But at least it takes the edge off. It takes like the existential threat off. And also their kids getting it. So they feel like, OK, my kid actually has some kind of path to the future. And it's not like if I lose this trucking job, not only am I going to struggle and suffer, but my kid will too.
So my plan as president is to install a trucker transition czar and say, look, it is your job to try and manage this transition for the three and a half million truckers. And Joe, we haven't even talked about the five million Americans who work at truck stops, motels, diners, retail establishments, all the places where the truckers stop every day just to get out and eat a meal and live a life.
I mean, if you imagine those communities when the trucks don't stop, there's going to be a drying up of economic vitality on a level that's unprecedented in many of these communities. This is something that I'm just becoming aware of over the last year or two. When you're out on the campaign trail and you're talking to media and you're discussing this with people, how many people have no idea that this is coming?
Well, what I say to people, Joe, is I say, hey, have you noticed stores closing on your main street? And then they say, yes. And then I ask them, why is that? And then they reflect for a minute. And then they say, Amazon. And I'm like, yeah, that's right. Amazon's getting $20 billion of commerce every year. And it's now tipping your malls and main street stores into oblivion. And like, is that going to get better or worse?
So some people say it's like how the robots, like the robots are yours away. And then you're like, no, it's not robots actually like walking around your neighborhood. I mean, of course, that's unlikely. But Amazon soaking up the business that used to go to your mall. If you go to their fulfillment center, it's robots as far as the eye can see. If you go to their
their warehouse, you know, it's also robots as far as far as the eye can see. So when you ask how aware are people that this is happening, it's one of those truths that as soon as you point it out, they're like, oh yeah, like I knew that was what was up. It's just for whatever reason, I'm like the only person just laying out the facts and being like, guys, it's not your imagination. Like we actually are
getting rid of the most common jobs in the US economy, filled by high school graduates, and then replacing them with a handful of jobs for higher skilled people in different places. And then we're pretending that the first population is somehow going to access the new opportunities. When the odds of them getting up and moving to Seattle or whatnot and becoming a web designer or like logistics manager or
big data scientist or something like essentially near zero. And so this is what gave rise to a lot of the anger that God Donald Trump elected because they looked around their communities and were like, hey, I used to work in this manufacturing plant, this manufacturing plant no longer exists. For whatever reason, like I'm being told that it's somehow like my fault that I wasn't adaptable enough.
like I didn't, you know, I didn't somehow become a coder or something ridiculous. Then I have to say, Joe, and this is like something that I've picked up from Dennis in part. So I'm with this trucker in Iowa. And he says to me, he says, like, I don't think that Democrats care about people like me. And he says that to me while I'm in his truck. And I'm just like, I can understand why he feels that way, but that's
incredibly destructive because there is a point at which democratic party used to be very very heavily aligned with working-class americans and there is now some kind of uh... pathology that if the person who's suffering is a white man of a certain background in the suffering somehow is like somehow diminished but it doesn't count as much if they're a trucker uh... and that's something that i find really
destructive. It's like we have to start acknowledging the source of the problems. One thing I'm saying to people is like, look, it's not immigrants that are taking these jobs away. Just facts, it is not immigrants. It is the fact that technology is pushing our economy in a direction that makes it harder and harder for many Americans to get by based upon this current, I trade my time for money model.
Now truckers seem to be the big one, right? Yeah. Cashiers are another one. Yeah. What are the other jobs that are going to be killed by automation? So the next obvious one is call center workers. Of course. Where there are two and a half million call center workers still in the United States. Generally high school graduates that make about $14 an hour.
Now, when you and I call a company, we're like pounding keys trying to get a human because the AI is so annoying. It's like, hey, just give me a person. But over the next number of months, AI is going to become indistinguishable from a person. Yeah, like the new Google answering service that comes with the Pixel phones. It's amazing.
Yes. And so that two and a half million call center population is going to shrink a ton because after you get AI software that's better than one of them, it can be most all of them. That's not like 5,000 jobs. That's potentially 500,000 jobs.
I was at a conference of CEOs, and I asked how many of them are looking at having AI replace back office workers, like various clerical functions. Every single hand went up. There's going to be a lot of clerical work having systems talk to each other that's going to disappear.
CIO type of like a major bank said that his estimate was that's about 30% of the bank's workers, fall into that category. So you're looking at call center workers, you're looking at back office workers, you're looking at insurance brokers, insurance is a very highly automatable industry because it's a lot of information getting passed back and forth.
cashiers, as you said, truck drivers, delivery drivers, Uber drivers. I heard that it goes even as far as medical procedures. There was a recent automated medical procedure where they did surgery on a grape. Yes. Yeah. Do you see that? Yeah, I saw that. And China has already had just a complete automated dental implantation because China actually has a real shortage of surgeons. And so their incentives to try and automate this are very, very high.
Now, the interesting thing here, Joe, is that let's say I made a robot surgeon tomorrow. That was awesome. Could do better work than a lot of people. Right now, the economic incentives still are not necessarily for everyone to use my robot surgeon because the regulations aren't there yet in the US. And so health care is a really interesting one. Another one that's very clearly going to get taken up by AI is radiology and looking at tumors on a film.
because it turns out that AI can see shades of gray that a human eye cannot. And it can reference millions of films where the most experienced doctor can probably reference thousands.
And so radiology, I'll tell you, medical students are running from radiology as fast as they can, because they know that's gonna get taken up by AI. Man, this is such a bleak forecast. It's very strange when we stop and think about all the different things that human beings find value in as far as their occupation, like, hey, I'm a this, I'm a that, this is what I do. And the idea that these things are all gonna go away, it's kind of disturbing.
Oh, and when I was digging into the research show, it's been happening and it's tearing us apart. I mean, I referenced the fact that, so here are some things that are all time or multi-decade highs right now in the United States of America. Suicide, drug overdoses, anxiety and depression, mental problems, financial insecurity, people being unable to pay their bills, all of these things are at record highs. And one thing I know you've talked about in the past that I think you'd really find
fascinating. So there have been studies as to what happens to your mind when you can't pay your bills. And when you can't pay your bills, you're stressing out, like, if I pay this, I can't pay that. And there's always the time, money, trade off. It's like, oh, if I spend extra time commuting, maybe I can save a couple bucks.
And so what it does is it actually constrains your bandwidth to a point that your functional IQ goes down by 13 points or one standard deviation. So just if you say to someone, hey, here's a bill you can't pay and then you give them IQ test, their score actually goes down.
by 13 points a lot. That's like a really huge effect. And so what we're doing right now, Joe, is we're actually making our population less rational, less reasonable, more impulsive, more subject to bad ideas, nastier, more subject to things like racism and misogyny too, because it turns out what happens with most of us is you need executive functioning to resist like racist and misogynistic impulses. And so if I make you cash strapped and make it so you can't pay your bills, you're actually more likely to be like, yeah,
What we're talking about, again, it's not this speculative future, it's that we've been doing this for years, and it's actually pushing our population into a mindset of scarcity, of nastiness. And that's why universal basic income is so crucial, because it gets the boot off of people's throats, and it replaces the mindset of scarcity with a mindset of abundance, and rationality, and optimism, and capacity.
Like, I'm an entrepreneur, you're an entrepreneur. I'll tell you, very, very few entrepreneurs start businesses at a scarcity where they're like, oh, I can't pay my bills. I guess I'm going to start a new company. You know, like most of them. But $1,000 a month is even enough money for most people to pay for their rent. Well, the great thing is again, this $1,000 is yours no matter what. So right now, let's say you're doing a normal job. So if you make a million dollars a year, you still get $1,000 a month.
Yes, yes, you do. I mean, it's opt in. So you could opt in and take it, which most Americans would because it's still a thousand bucks a month. Yeah, people get greedy. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, thousand dollars to get my nails done. Yes. Or give it away if they felt like it. Yeah. So those are the things that are at like all time highs is like all these negative social indicators. Here are things that are at all time lows.
Getting married, starting a business, having a kid, moving for a new job. All of those things are at historic lows in the United States of America. Having children, really. Yeah, we're at record low birth rates right now. And it's largely because people feel too strapped to have kids. I mean, that's literally where we are. When you say record low by like what percentage?
You can look up right now. Jamie, I don't know if you want to look this up. But the stories have come out of this last year saying that Americans are now at the lowest rate of childbirth that has been the case in decades or ever. Yeah, that's a conversation that I have with people whenever they say that they're worried about population. The population is growing so fast and overpopulate. Here it goes. One point.
eight zero births per woman 2016. What does that mean? From 1970 at a high to 1964. Yeah. Well, it seems fairly, fairly similar from 1980 to today. No, that's still, I mean, it's actually above. If it goes from 1.8 to like, if it goes from even something like 1.9 to 1.8 is like a pretty significant drop. There it is. U.S. birth dip to 30 year low.
Mm, fertility rates sink further below replacement level. But the thought is that this is because of education, and that this is because of people who are waiting longer to have children, and that this is a byproduct of industrialization and modern world, and that the more educated and affluent people get, the less likely they are to have children. It's not the sign. As far as everything I've read about it is that it's not a symptom of people doing poorly. It's a symptom of people doing well.
You know, there are definitely cases where richer countries just have fewer kids. And that's cool. Because they concentrate on their careers, right? Is that the idea? But the darker part of this, Joe, is that right now, if you're a non-college educated person in the United States, the odds of you are ever getting married less than 50% now for the first time.
Ever and then people are having fewer kids to play devil's advocate though the the marriage thing might be people looking at it and go God my parents got divorced my brother got divorced everybody else got divorced. What the fuck am I doing? There are a lot of good reasons for it is You know as a as a happily married man myself me as well. I always tell people don't do it I tell people don't do it. It's just it's too risky
Yeah, so you can look at, to me, certainly, getting married and having kids like an act of prosperity or optimism. There are reasons why it's going down otherwise. But if you look at things like starting a new business, I mean, that being at multi-decade lows, there's no positive spin on that. People moving between states is now at multi-decade lows. People moving for a new job, multi-decade lows. I think this is the product of automation or it's the product of a bunch of different factors.
internet purchasing and marketing and think people buying most of their goods and clothes and stuff. It's a range of factors, but one of the big problems, and keep in mind, I spent seven years helping entrepreneurs grow businesses in 18 cities around the country between 2011 and 2017. That was actually my job. My job was to be the job creator guy.
And so when you go out to these places, you see that the dynamism is getting sucked up by certain markets to a level that's unprecedented in our history. The disparities between Cleveland and San Francisco or St. Louis and LA are much, much higher than they've been at any other historical period, both by the numbers and after you actually go to the places, you're like, wow, this is not flourishing the way that you'd hope.
Do you feel like an economic Paul Revere in a certain sense? Like the robots are coming. The robots are coming. I do. It's weird, man. Well, the comparison I make is that if the United States economy is like an elephant, you know, the parable of like the people like, you know, blind people, you know, touching the elephant. So I'm an entrepreneur. I sold a company to a public company that was a national education company is based in New York. What is the parable of blind people touching an elephant?
So what happens is they're like seven blind men and they get asked like what does an elephant look like? And then one of them is touching the trunk and it's like an elephant looks like a snake and another one's touching its leg and it's like an elephant looks like a tree trunk. So that's the way most people experience the economy is that they're like touching a part of the economy and they're like this is what it looks like or feels like.
So, I've had this really strange set of experiences where I sold a national education company to a public company. I lived bicostally between New York and San Francisco for the last five years. I've operated in 18 cities around the country. I was in a pointy in the Obama administration in DC. So, I've actually seen the elephant, if you know what I mean. Like, I whole elephant. Yeah, like, I'm like hanging out with
the tech wizards of Silicon Valley and I'm like, hey, you know, we can automate these jobs away and they're like, oh yeah, we're gonna automate this job. So it's not a mystery and they're not bad people. It's like, hey, it's my job to like make stuff work better. And if you gave me a choice between making things work better and creating abundant opportunities for the other people, I would choose that. But I do not have that choice. I have a job to do, you know, this is my job. And what I tell people is like, who's responsibility then is it to go tell the people, look,
It's technology, it's transforming the economy in fundamental ways, and we need to make it so that everyone benefits, and it's not just that this hyper-concentrated set of winners, and then this huge army of relative losers, and it's the government's job. But at this point, we've given up on our government as anything like, it can't really do anything, and so now it's no one's job. And so somehow, Joe, it has become my job, and it blows my mind too sometimes.
Coming from a place of being a serial entrepreneur to this presidential candidate is kind of warning people about the upcoming technological apocalypse as it were. How did you make that transition and what was your motivation to get involved in this to the point where you're actually running for president on this platform.
Yeah, so a seller company in 2009, and that was the financial crisis, like Wall Street had crashed the economy. And I had personally taught these kids who'd worked at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and McKinsey. And I was like, man, we need smart kids to do something other than just head to Wall Street and Silicon Valley. And we need to have them go to Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, and New Orleans start businesses.
So I quit my job. I donated low six figures to start this new organization. And then we trained hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped create several thousand jobs. So that was like my wholesome give back. I was like, hey, I'm like the guy who just believes in entrepreneurship. Because just like you, I freaking love entrepreneurs. And I was like, so here's the joke I used to tell. I went to law school. I was an unhappy lawyer for five months.
And so what I tell people is if you're a clueless, ambitious 22-year-old who came out of college, and you say to your parents, hey, I'm going to go to law school, they're going to say, that's great. It's really easy to find the law school because they're just there, just apply to it. And the government will give you $100,000 loan. No questions asked.
And then if you say to your parents, hey, I want to be an entrepreneur, your parents will think that's stupid. It's hard to find. And no one's going to give you $100,000 loan. So we have this huge oversupply of indebted law school graduates and a huge undersupply of entrepreneurs was my thinking. And so I was like, OK, how do you fix that? So I started this organization venture from America to try and fix that.
And so imagine being this guy getting medals and awards for helping create jobs around the country, and then realizing that automation's coming like a tidal wave and that your efforts that you're getting applauded for are really not going to do the trick. And then Donald Trump wins the election in 2016. And for whatever reason, in my opinion, the media is just not being honest about all the economic drivers.
They're blaming racism, Russia, Facebook, the FBI. And if you look at the voter district data on a district by district basis, there's a straight line up between the adoption of industrial robots in that voting district and the movement towards Trump. It's a straight economic story where we blasted away 4 million manufacturing jobs.
in the swing states and Donald Trump is our president. So imagine being me and then seeing that and being like, okay, I get it. This is an economic technological story. And then I went to people in Washington DC. I was like, hey guys, what are we gonna do? We're in the third inning of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country. And the third inning has brought us Donald Trump. The fourth, fifth, sixth innings are gonna be horrific. What are we gonna do?
And then the answers I got were somewhere between disappointing and horrifying. Where if you go to mainstream politicians, you're like, what are we going to do? The answers I got were literally, number one, we cannot talk about that.
Number two, we should study that. We cannot talk about that. That's verbatim. Really? Yeah. And why were they saying that? Because it seems alarmist, anti-progress, or you're throwing stones at big tech companies, and it's like, I'm not throwing stones at anyone. I'm just pointing out the fact. So number one was, can't talk about it. Number two is need to study it.
And the number three was the point you made originally, which was we must educate and retrain Americans for the jobs of the future. And then when I was like, hey, we're terrible at that by the numbers, then they'd literally be like, well, I guess we'll learn to get better at it then. So I came back to my home in New York City and I was like, oh my gosh, we are so backward and far gone, certainly as a government.
And so then I was grappling with it, and I'm a parent like you are, and I looked at my kids and I was like, am I really gonna bring them up in this shit show? Is this really the plan? And so then I was like, okay, how would you actually solve this problem if you had to do so? And so then I said, okay, universal basic income rebranded the freedom dividend after we did a bunch of tests, because it tests much better as the freedom dividend than universal basic income.
And then try and make the rules of the economy work better for more people as fast as we can before this automation wave really crescendos. What do you mean by that? Well, to me, what I'm saying is retail and truck driving are the two major, major, obvious sectors that are going to get displaced. Being a retail worker is the most common job in the United States right now. The average retail worker is a 39-year-old woman with a high school education making between $11 and $12 an hour.
So what do those workers do when 30% of the malls and stores close in the next five years? And then truckers are next in line by the five to 10 year mark. So it's like we have to get our acts together before these populations end up getting displaced.
And we know Americans don't have a ton of savings to fall back on. It's not like they'll be like, oh, let me take a month off to think about it. That's not the real life situation. Most Americans live in experience. So this is all 2017 where I'm doing the data research and saying, OK, what's the plan?
And then when I went to various politicians, I was like, there is no appetite for making this case. There's no appetite for anyone even talking about this. So the only thing I can see that would have a realistic chance of accelerating meaningful solutions to this automation wave in a five to 10 year time frame is if I run for president and I either win, which is very doable, I can win.
Or I mainstream this set of considerations to a point where other politicians are willing to tackle something like universal basic income and make it a reality in that timeframe. Anyone can win, right? I mean, it is possible. I mean, there are voters, people are voting, but do you really believe that you can win? Well, Joe, I wouldn't be running if you wouldn't, right? I believe that. But if you were not you,
No, I appreciate the question and I've been very upfront the whole time is that if my ideas and policies become front and center and we get this done Then if I'm not president United States like I'm perfectly happy with that like I'm on the record just being like I'm just trying to solve problems I'm an entrepreneur trying to solve a problem that said
I'm already pulling at one percent nationally. I'm tied with Kirsten Gillibrand and other national politicians right now as we're sitting here. I have no idea. Kirsten Gillibrand. She's a senator from New York. So that was supposed to be like a national politician. But normal morons like myself are not aware of that. Like I wouldn't have known that you were running if it wasn't for Sam.
No, I appreciate that, man. But now, happily, everyone who's a fan of yours, which is apparently everybody, no, no, no, no, it's a running. But so you're right that most people have never heard of Andrew Yang, and I'm already polling at 1% enough for me to make the debates. Are you running as an independent? I'm running as a Democrat because the mechanics make it such that that is necessary for you to be able to actually succeed and win.
But I can go through with you the mechanics and you might enjoy this because I know you and Sam and others sometimes talk politics and presidential politics. So I'm an operator. I'm an entrepreneur. And so you get to and be like, OK, what does it take to be president? So there are two rules to run for president. One is you have to be 35 years or older, check. And then the second is natural born citizen, check only rules. That's it. So then you get into the process and you say, OK, the first two states to vote are Iowa and New Hampshire.
Now, there are going to be about 20 people running for president as a Democrat this cycle. You probably knew that, right? So you look at the Iowa caucus. Iowa has a population of 3.1 million, but only 171,000 Iowans participated in the caucus in 2016 because it's a very high investment. Now, they changed the rules, so this year it's going to be closer to like, let's call it 250,000. But if you have 20 candidates,
To finish top three in a field at 20, you probably need about 40 to 50,000 Iowans to get on board. So you say, hey, do I think I can be president of the United States? The threshold question is this, can I get 40 to 50,000 Iowans on board with the idea that them and their family members getting $1,000 a month is a good idea that that would actually help improve their lives? Well, I'm sure it would help improve their lives, and I'm sure they would agree with you. The question is, what are the other thing? See, I don't think most people are aware
that this is coming. And I think you educating people and explaining all the statistics and seeing the forecast, particularly from your position as a serial entrepreneur who has a deep background in business and you have a deep understanding of this, you're helping in a tremendous way by educating people. But I think most people have, it may be illogically, but they have different concerns.
So how do you address these other concerns? I bet if you polled people, what are the issues? What are the issues in this upcoming 2020 presidential race that who's going to beat Donald Trump? How do you do it? This is like on the Democratic side, the idea is like anyone but Trump, right? I mean, they would be so happy if film a blank. Tulsi Gabbard, you, whoever.
on the republican side obviously it's trump unless someone comes along or he goes to jail for those of the two possibilities yet what are the other issues
and that you feel that people are really concerned about that you can perhaps shed some unique light on. Sure. So the three big policies I'm running on are one, the freedom dividend because a lot of Americans are seeing their paychecks not keep up with their expenses. Number two is we need to get healthcare off the backs of
businesses and families and move towards a single payer system. Medicare for all because as an entrepreneur, it makes it harder to hire people. When you do hire people, you want to make them contractors and not full time employees. Makes it harder for people to start businesses because they're concerned about keeping their health care for their families.
So we got to get healthcare off the backs of businesses and families and try and make the economy more dynamic. And we spent twice as much on healthcare as other countries do to worse results. Right now we're in the worst of all worlds. And the third thing is, and I reference my wife when I talk about this, my wife is at home with our two boys, six and three, one of whom is autistic. And what I say is like, what is her work valued at in GDP?
And then people think about, and they're like, I don't know, and I'm like zero. Because GDP doesn't consider that actual economic contribution. And then I say, we have to do is we have to actually evolve from GDP as a measuring stick, because it actually doesn't work for us. It's almost 100 years old. We made it up during the Great Depression.
Self-driving trucks are going to drive GDP way up, but it's going to be very, very bad for many people and communities. So we have to actually change the measuring sticks to something that would actually make our economy work for us, make it so that the market serves us instead of all us being inputs to the market. Because if we're all inputs to the market, we lose to robots and AI hands down.
And it's not like it doesn't matter if you were like a really conscientious hardworking truck driver or like a really lazy sloppy one. It doesn't matter. Like, you know, it doesn't matter if you were like a really diligent radiologist or like a doesn't matter. So we have to shift the market's emphasis to actually fuel our well-being and change from GDP, which is again, this archaic measurement we made up to things that would actually correspond to how we're doing things like health, how childhood success rates, environmental quality. How do you quantify that?
How would you quantify that in a way that would be Translatable to the average voter? Yeah, so we have measurements for most of these things and again if you look at our numbers right now You'd see it's like what like how many people listening to this know that America's life expectancy has declined for the last three years You know that to me would be like a pretty important measurement, but you think that's because of
Is it because of suicide? Is it because of drug overdose? Is it because of obesity? Diet? What is it? The two causes that people point to the most are that drug overdoses and suicides have overtaken vehicular deaths as the most frequent deaths in the United States. I didn't know that suicide was on that list. I knew that drug overdose had taken obesity, but suicides have overtaken obesity as well.
Suicides have overtaken car accidents. I'm not sure about it. I'm sorry. I meant I meant car accidents. I'm a spoke so Car accidents used to be number one. Yeah suicides are higher than car accidents now. Yeah, so suicides
drug overdoses and then car accidents, or suicides and drug overdoses like eating. I think drug overdose is number one. Number one. And then suicides number two. Wow. And so that's why life expectancy is declined for the last few years. And you think that the very much likely, there's at least some of the number of the suicides are related to economic disparity.
Oh, yeah. I mean, if you look at the suicide rate, it's particularly pronounced in 50 to 54-year-old white Americans, which are the population. I mean, you resemble that. That's me. Yeah, that's you, which resembles the population that right now is just reaching a point where they're like, hey, my job skills don't have any
You know, like utility in the marketplace and then they go home and they just like, you know, start looking around and being like, what am I doing? I mean, it's really dark. It's punitive. It's punishing. And we've put our citizens in this situation where we all see ourselves as economic inputs. What the market says we're worth is what we're worth.
And if we're worth less, then it's our fault. And so the next move is to say, okay, I guess, you know, this place, there's no place for me here. I don't mean it sounds skeptical, but I just don't believe that $1,000 a month is going to fix that. It seems like that would be a good thing. Certainly not moving in the wrong direction, certainly moving in the right direction, but it seems that there needs to be some sort of a
massive rethinking of civilization itself. If you're going to have that many things that are going to be automated and that many people that are going to be out of jobs and feeling that the world that they prepared for no longer exists.
It seems like we need a step further, another move. 100% brother, and that's one reason why the freedom dividend doesn't solve the problem. The problem is fundamentally one of reconstituting means of structure, purpose, and fulfillment in people's lives, particularly in men's lives. How do we do that?
So one important aspect of that is to actually start measuring how we are doing as a society and saying that's actually where we're trying to go. So instead of using GDP, using some sort of other quantifiable method of measuring health and happiness and fulfillment. Yes. Levels of engagement with work.
in mental health. I mean, we have measurements for that. We are sophisticated enough to do that. And then if we say, then as president, I'm going to be up there in 2021 being like, oh, here's the state of the union. And here's like the data. And then we're going to say, you know, we're going to try and do, we're actually going to try and move those measurements in the right direction. So let's try and get drug overdoses down by 50% in two years. Let's try and get our mental health up a little bit, like in these ways.
and then make it so that that person who's at home being like okay like you know like there's not a job for me i'm getting a thousand bucks a month that does not solve all my problems it takes the edge off but then we can hopefully start reconstituting what that person's purposes in their community in their neighborhood and so
One of the things that I'm going to point out is that if you pump a thousand bucks a month into that neighborhood, it ends up creating a whole new rung of opportunities for the people in that community. Some of that money goes to youth leagues and churches and nonprofits and creates jobs right there in that community. One of the examples I use is if you're in a town in Missouri with 50,000 people, and let's say you really like to bake,
But starting a bakery is a dumb idea because people just do not have money in that town to buy your baked goods. But then I pump $60 million a year into that economy. And a lot of that just circulates right there in that town. Then if I start a bakery, it's a good idea. And I know if my bakery fails, I'm not going to die. I can at least go home and get my dividend. And then if I go to other people and say, hey, you want to help me out with this, then they also think it's a better idea than they would have. So the money is not the solution.
The money helps set the stage for the solutions. So does the measurements. So does if you, because right now, if like you don't even know that your life expectancy is declining, that's kind of hard to solve that problem. So if you say, look, this is actually how we measure how we're doing. And then you go in and say, okay, like local government, NGO entrepreneur, because right now, like our entrepreneurs, none of our entrepreneurs are working on trying to make that dude's life better.
You know, it's like, that's not... You can only do so much. Most entrepreneurs are just trying to succeed. I mean, it's very difficult to start a business, right? And then actually have it work out well. The idea that they're going to look out for truck drivers.
Yeah, it's not realistic. But at least we can start moving ourselves in that general direction if we start, because as a CEO, you know this, you make what you measure. You're not measuring it, you have no chance. If you start measuring it, you at least start to open up the chance. But what you're saying is the most profound, which is like we need to reconstitute meaning.
for many, many Americans. And that's what, to me, the most destructive aspect of that, you know, again, like the mental health indicators and like the suicides and the rest of it, is like there's a real loss of meaning for many, many people here in this country. Well, obviously we're talking about a large scale, but if you go back to the time before trucks and truck drivers, that was not a viable occupation. It wasn't something people did, but yet they still found a way to occupy their time.
Do you think that there needs to be some sort of an education and some sort of a method of explaining to young people in particular that you have to think of something to do? Because most of the things that you think you can do won't exist.
so we have to think of what are the other possibilities and be creative and do something with your life that only a human being can do which is a really weird way to think about it because most of the things you used to be able to think that a human being could do for a living are now going to be done by robots but i don't think
I think there's a giant gap between the understanding that you have and the understanding that the average person has and this could be a real problem and trying to Expand this platform. Well, we have to inform you I gotta tell you though Joe when I say this to people they're like that makes perfect Yeah, it does make perfect sense. That's what's scary about it But I'm not I'm not disagreeing with you in any way shape or form I'm just thinking man for young kids for young kids and you know, you're a parent I'm a parent but what so our education system
has a lot to be desired. And one of the things I'm saying is it's making all these kids think that college is the end all be all and it is not. And so that's one issue is that we need to try and prepare kids for different kinds of paths instead of saying college, college, college. Because they're going to college, they're getting loaded up with record levels of debt. College has gotten two and a half times more expensive, even though it has not gotten two and a half times better.
And the reason why it's gotten so expensive is because they've just gotten really bloated administratively. And what would you do about that? Bernie Sanders wants to have some sort of a free university. He wants to do it across the board, have education to be 100% free. I mean, look, I love that on paper. One of the things that I hate is talking to my friends about college debt. Friends that are in their 30s and 40s.
Yeah, it just stays with them like a wet blanket that you can never get out of. I used to call my school loans my mistress because I was writing a check to like another family in another town. I was like, I hope they're enjoying themselves. It's like I was setting like $900 a month to buy loans. And what's crazy is that if something devastating happens to you in any other form, you can file for bankruptcy, but you never escape your student loans. No matter what happens to you.
That was just some lobbying on the part of the financial companies, man. They just lobbied the cap out of it. That is dirty. That's really dirty. When you think about how many people that run corporations that have racked up, I mean, just think about what happened with the savings alone crisis. Completely, man. And those guys skated.
Whoo! The vast majority have, they're carrying around zero, zero burden from that. The vast majority, no one went to jail, except a few people. I'm not really anybody. Yeah, real criminals like Bernie Madoff went to jail. You know, a few people went to jail. But that's about it.
you know you'd have to be a real fucking thief to go to jail and these people that just they they did this and got away with it and and profited in redistributed all this money into their own personal accounts and yeah but the whole economy sideways yeah but heaven forbid you take out a bunch of school loans and then things go south like you can't get out of it i mean i i know uh... a guy who's in his fifties is an ophthalmologist who's uh... deeply in debt still
So it is crazy. And if you look at it just economically, it's a massive burden on people starting businesses, starting families, buying homes, instead of living with their parents. It's possible. It's possible to fix, for sure. So the first thing you do is you go to the people that are currently in debt and say, look, we're going to give you a path out. And there are ways to do it. You can have a payment plan. One of the things I'm proposing is like a 10 by 10 where if you commit 10% of your wages for 10 years and you're debt-free.
And that means if you're not making a lot of money, then you can save a whole lot. And the schools at this point have long since forgotten about these loans, because they got paid off already. This is just these financial companies that are holding the loans. That's important for people to understand, because people think, well, if you don't pay them, the colleges are going to go away. No, no. So if you're the government, you can be like, hey, loan company, guess what? Good news. We're going to take this off. And it's a stimulus. Because like you said, we've done a lot of things that were supposed to be a stimulus.
give $4 trillion to the banks and be like, that'll stimulate the economy. Nothing's gonna stimulate the economy better than getting student loans off the backs of freaking young people, because they'll actually do what they're supposed to do, which is actually spend money in the economy. Take chances. Take chances, start businesses and the rest of it. I mean, one of the reasons why our business formation rates are at multi-decade lows is that we are up to $1.5 trillion in school debt. It's like 38K ahead. That was like 100 billion
In 1999, so we've gone up 15X since then, and it's crippling us. It's insane. Anyone who thinks that's not burning the economy. So President Yang will be like, hey, guys, it's a stimulus. But this time it's a stimulus of people. We're going to forgive some of the student loan debt, because half that stuff was generated in morally anyway. A lot of it was just schools lying about it.
about just to get people in the door. The second thing you do is you go to the schools and say, hey, guys, why are you two and a half times more expensive than you used to be? That's kind of weird, because as far as I can tell, there's been no massive quality change. And the reason is that they've hired a lot of administrators. It has not gone to faculty. It has not gone to facilities. It has gone to just administrative access and bloat. And then say, OK, you can do whatever you want. But if you want access to federal loans, which they all rely upon for their lifeblood, like without it, they die,
If you want your students have access to federal loans, you have to bring your administrator to student ratio in line with what it was like in the 1990s. And then the schools would screen bloody murder. They'd be like, I can't do that. That's impossible. And you'd be like, well, I have a feeling you're going to figure it out.
that they would start bringing it down. And you would realize it doesn't impact the student experience at all. And I understand it, because I've run a large nonprofit organization that I've started. And your very natural tendency is just to hire excellent people. And then before you know it, you're like, have excellent people, like, you know, vice deans of everything. But then over time, that ends up building a very large cost structure that gets passed along to the public.
So you bring the costs down. Now, you said before, Bernie is like free college for everyone. The problem with that solution is it pretends that college solves the employment problems of young people. And anyone who's coming out of college knows that that's not real. The under employment rate for recent college graduates today is 44%. So you had like a 50-50 shot. If you come out of college, you're doing a job that doesn't really require a degree. And 94% of new jobs created right now are gig temporary or contractor jobs that don't have real paths forward or health care benefits of the rest of it.
Yeah, I was reading something about people... Actually, it might have been in that... The book that I was just telling you about, Yuval Noah Horati. It was... I always say that guy's name wrong. It's a tricky name. Yuval Noah Horati. Yeah. 21 lessons for 21st century. I think he was talking about...
How many people plan on not being in the same job in 10 years because that job won't exist anymore versus what it used to be? It used to be that people would think that they were going to get a job and they would stay in the job. And now they're planning that they're going to have to move, that they're not going to be able to keep the same job. And as automation kicks in, this is obviously going to bottleneck. It's going to get even worse. Yeah. Yeah, completely.
The ideal is that you end up trading young people to be really, really adaptable and have low cost structures and just be able to, you know, become entrepreneurs. And I spent seven years trying to train young people to do just that. But one of the things I've discovered is that we're overemphasizing college. And what we're under emphasizing is technical, vocational and apprenticeship work. Because a lot of that work, believe it or not, it's actually really hard to automate. Like, you know, we're not going to automate an air conditioning repair person or a plumber anytime soon.
And for sure, craftsmen, people who build things. And it's good for your mental health and a bunch of other things. So right now, only 6% of American high school students are in technical or vocational training. In Germany, that's 59%. Give you a sense of what the gap can mean. So what we're doing is we're over-prescribing college. We're saying college, college, college for everyone. It's not really working that well. And then we're still treating people who are working in trades and everything as somehow
Not in great careers, but a lot of those careers are actually really awesome and they pay great and people enjoy them. They're persistent. So right now we're going to automate away. It's a lot easier to automate away a lot of repetitive cognitive work than it is non-repetitive manual work. Because actual robot digits, if you can imagine what it would take to have a robot plumber come into your house, that stuff's really, really
tricky. There's a lot of fine motor work. You have to unscrew pipes and stuff. That stuff's not going to get automated for a long time. You know what is going to get automated? A lot of entry-level cognitive tasks, a lot of journalism tasks, a lot of bookkeeping, a lot of stuff that college graduates think they're going to get a job in, and then those jobs are going to disappear. I was a corporate attorney for those five unhappy months, and my friends are working on AI that can automate away a lot of basic legal work.
So these college guys are like, oh, snap, don't know what to do. I'll go to law school and load up with another 120k in debt and then the legal jobs are not going to be there for them. It's often the problem of the parents giving them pressure to go into college as well because they don't want the kid to become a loser. And if the kid, where I grew up in Boston, if you went into the trades, if you abandoned the idea of how
I learned in going to college and just went right into like learning to be a carpenter something like that people look at you like oh, he sold yourself short, but there's so many people that I know that went to school that just got university degrees and then they got out and they were fucked. Yeah, it's so common. It's so common that they thought there was going to be this path of
and this path just didn't exist once they got out, or it was far, far more difficult than they were led to believe. Yeah, if you look at it, about 32% of Americans graduate from college right now, and that level has been more or less constant for a long time. It's not like, hey, I've got another 20%, I could get into college. Like right now, the college completion rate in six years is about 59%. So like four out of 10 people who start college are not graduating in six years, and a lot of them are just not gonna finish ever.
So the people that have other paths available to them, we have to build those paths up. And this is one reason why I'm so into the freedom dividend instead of something like free college. Because why would you subsidize something that only the top third of the population is going to use?
You know, and it's a highly inefficient costly system anyway, like you're allowing money into that. You're much better off putting a thousand bucks a month into every 18 year old's hands. Didn't they go to college? Great. College is partially paid for. They go to trade school. Great. Trade school is partially paid for. They start their own business. They do something creative. Like they want to do something to help. That's great too. Like you can actually start building more varied paths and make it so that people don't feel like I need to get into this institution or else my life's going to be over.
Now what are the primary concerns that people have outside of what you're talking about so far with automation taking away jobs and student loan debt and these things? What are the other things that you think that you're going to have to talk about in order to get people to take you really seriously?
You know, I mean, the hot button issues, you know what they all are. It's like immigration and climate change is a really big one. And, you know, I mean, I can talk about those at length. So my father and mother met as immigrants from Taiwan at UC Berkeley. My father is a PhD in physics. He generated 69 US patents for GE and IBM over his career. So I'm like, immigrants are awesome. Immigrants come in and, you know, it's like big stuff happened for
big American companies. So I'm very pro-immigrant and I think people would expect that just to look at me. And so what I say is first, it makes no sense to educate international students and US universities and then send them home to compete against us. That makes no sense. Like if they're going to come to the US and study, we should just staple a green card to their diploma and be like, hey,
You got to diploma. Great news. You can stay here and work because I personally know tons of awesome internationals who would definitely help make the US more dynamic and competitive that go home and start the companies there and you're like, oh, no, like how that happens. Right.
That's great for people who come from a privileged background, who have the opportunity to come here and become educated. But what about people who are poor, who are trying to make it here from South America and Guatemala and Mexico? There are three paths available to you for the approximately 12 million people who are here undocumented, many of whom from Mexico and Latin America. Not frankly, they're not the profile I just described, for the most part.
So there are three approaches. Number one is you can pretend to deport them because it's completely unfeasible to deport 12 million people. I mean like whole regional economies would collapse like you can't do it radically like it doesn't make any sense. Number two is
You do nothing which is our current path and then you have massive problems too because they're constantly interacting with your schools and your hospitals and they're getting into car accidents and like you know it's like just not knowing who the heck is who is an untenable situation for any advanced society. So number three is you create a pathway to citizenship and then you integrate them into society but it's like a long-term path
that takes a number of years and you need to keep your nose clean and pay taxes and work hard. That seems to be the most feasible. Yeah. And so that's where we should go. And some Republicans were on board with that until they paid a political price and then they ran the other direction. So that is really the right path for people who are here undocumented. But I say to people a lot that the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian guy who likes math.
So Donald Trump's like, build a wall and I'm like, look, I mean, we ought to enforce a strong border, especially in a world where everyone, every citizen is getting a thousand bucks a month. You ought to enforce a strong border. But at the same time, people who are here, they're making our communities a lot more entrepreneurial and dynamic, many of them. I mean, at the high end, half of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are other immigrants or children of immigrants.
And that's true in a different way in terms of like the dynamism of these immigrant communities. So what I say to people is like, if I'm president, people will see that you come to this country and you work hard. Your son or daughter can become president of the United States. Now, what do you do though in this scenario that you just described if someone comes here and they don't work hard and they don't keep their nose clean and they are still here and they're not a citizen yet?
Yeah. So, you know, so then, then they operate in the informal economy and the way that they have, and the truth is that even if we have this pathway, they're going to be a significant proportion of people who just do not trust us enough to actually say, Hey, I'm here and I'm going to like enter the pipeline. There's going to be a lot of, uh, there's going to be a lot of people that, um, don't subscribe, but
That's where it is right now. We're not making the situation actively worse. We can at least improve the situation for a really significant proportion of them. Yeah, for a significant proportion of them. And the other situation would be tax revenue. How many people that are here illegally are not paying taxes? I would imagine it's an enormous number.
Yeah, there'd be a real economic boost if we can integrate them into the formal economy, because there's a lot of cash going back and forth. Right. And that's what I'm saying is that a lot of people might decide, Hey, you know what? I don't even want to be a citizen because if I'm a citizen, I have to pay taxes or I could work as a labor or work as a, you know, on construction sites or whatever, whoever's willing to hire them and work for free work rather with free taxes.
Yeah, and so that would still be going on. There are limits to what sort of appeal you can have in terms of having people raise their hand. Have a path to real prosperity, have a real path to citizenship would be very nice.
enormous for them because a lot of them have kids. A lot of them have kids who don't know other life but here. So another issue I think you'll like that comes up on the campaign trail is what to do marijuana. And I'm for full legalization, remove it from the federal control substance list. And I would go a step further and pardon everyone who's in jail for a low level nonviolent drug offense because it makes no sense to me to have people
behind bars for things that are legal in parts of the country. So my plan as president is on April 20th of 2021. I'm going to mass part in everyone who's in jail for a non-violent, drug-related offense. I'm going to high-five them on the way out and I'm going to be a very popular man that day. We're going to be a lot of traveling to high-five all those folks.
I know. I'm going to have to go to a lot of places and high five, but I really want to high five them. Really? Yeah. I mean, that would be the funnest freaking occasion. Yeah. So, you know, that's something that comes up that to me, you know, it's obvious that marijuana, you know, is an important remedy for many people who are like in various, struggling with various like health problems and everything else. Our friends were in that situation.
and that it's certainly much less dangerous than, for example, some of the opiates that have been getting prescribed for the same things. Yeah, what do you do about that? That's a question that I have because I was just reading something about some new approved drug that's more powerful than fentanyl, which seems to me to be completely insane. Like we already have fentanyl.
And you make a mistake on one of the things that happens with people that overdose is especially old people that are in pain when they're using fentanyl or using any kind of opiate on a regular basis. They sometimes forget if they took it.
And, you know, look, it's a fucking opium. I mean, they're very powerful. And if you're high on that stuff and you forget whether or not you took it and you go and take it again, you're dead. And that's a giant issue. They're too damn powerful. And the idea that you need something that's more powerful than that seems to be insane.
I agree with you. It's irresponsible. The entire opiate crisis was generated in part by the fact that the feds let Purdue Pharma just go crazy prescribing hundreds of thousands of OxyContin prescriptions. And that company got fined $635 million, which sounds like a lot until you realize they made like $16 billion. And those drop in the bucket. Yeah. So those people are now some of the richest people in the country on the backs of American communities.
And it just keeps morphing because it went from oxy to heroin to fentanyl and then you have people who are struggling with this addiction. So to me, to me, it was federal negligence that unleashed this plague. I mean, you got to hold the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma accountable because literally now they're profiting from one of the treatment drugs. It's really obscene what they're doing. They're just like, hey, my non-addictive wonder drug turns out it caused a super plague of lethal addiction for
Now, hundreds of thousands of Americans, but now I'm gonna sell you a new drug and try and make money on the back end too. So you gotta get as much money as we possibly can from that family in particular. But then you have to make resources available and try and get people to depend on these drugs less like on the front end, from the doctor end. So it's like, look, why are you prescribing these opiates? Like, there's a doctor, I quoted my book, where he's like, you have never seen a lethality rate
for something prescribed for like a non-life threatening condition. It's like literally like a non-trivial percentage of people you prescribe an opiate to will be dead in five years. And the thing they came to you for in the hospital wasn't life threatening. It makes no sense. It's crazy.
So we have to make treatment resources available, but this is a very human problem. It's not a money problem. Like, you know, you can throw money at some problems and it works. This thing we should throw money at to try and give people a fighting chance. But then you have to support the people coming out because it's a brutal, brutal process trying to become whole and healthy if you're an addict.
It is an unbelievably brutal process, and I have family members that are affected by it, and people with hurt backs that got on these pills, and next thing you know, they can't get off of them, and it's just, it's devastating, and it's so common. It's just all throughout the country. It's everywhere. And they'll prescribe me for nothing. I had my nose fixed, I had a deviated septum, and the doctor prescribed me two different kinds of opiates, and I said, I'm not in any pain.
And he said, uh, yeah, but you could be. So here. And I'm like, but I don't think this is a good idea. I'm like, I don't even want anything. He goes, well, just take these just in case. I want to tell you, I, I'm not playing tough guy. It just didn't hurt. Yeah. It was a little annoying. I was like, my nose feels weird, but I didn't need fucking opiates. Seriously, man, they're just willing. Like here you go. Come on. What are you in pain? Here you go. Come on. Take a little of this. Take a little of that.
Yeah, and I have a guarantee for you that their incentives drive them more towards dispensing those drawings than they're not dispensing those drugs. Yes. And it's in large part because the incentive structure of our healthcare system is so revenue oriented. Yes. It's like, if I do more stuff, if I give you more stuff, I make more money. Yeah. If I decide you don't need it, I make less money.
And that is one of the things that's driving us all into this, this unhealth is that if you went to a doctor who legitimately was like, you know, I don't think you need this stuff, like that, that would be the way many of them would see the problem if their paycheck was unrelated to the amount of activity that they were doing.
Yeah. When you look at all the issues that plague this country, and you think about the possibility of you actually winning and becoming president, and then you look at what happens to presidents when they win, and the amount of just aging that happens to them. Do you worry about that? First of all, Asians age very well. Yes. So you've got that going for you.
And I'm married, and we've got two kids, so I don't think she's going anywhere. They'd be kind of tough for her to start over at this point. One of my nightmares and errors is I win, and then I can't get stuff done the way that... That's the fear. You've talked about this too, where good people go in a government and they get stuck like flies in amber, because the system is just designed to keep you from getting anything done.
But one thing I will say is that if you imagine a scenario where the Asian man who wants to give everyone a thousand bucks a month becomes President of the United States in 2021, everyone's going to know how I want. It'll be like, all right, guys, it's dividend time. And then Democrats will be like, yeah, I like money for families. That's great. And here's the great thing, Joe, is that then Republicans are going to look at it and be like, wait a minute.
This is a net transfer for rural areas, for red states on the interior. Am I really going to stand in the way? Like constituents? Getting this dividend? And you can imagine me being like, hey, what state wants to pilot this first? If we can every state that would be into it, we can actually get this done. This is a bipartisan thing. It's not left or right. It's forward. And keep in mind, the state that has been demonstrated to love this dividend is Alaska, which is a deep red conservative state.
It was a Republican governor that passed the plan in the first place. He said, who would you rather get the oil and the money that government is just going to screw it up or you, the people of Alaska and then the people of Alaska were like us, please. Wasn't that to incentivize people to support their idea of drilling in some controversial areas, though?
There was probably a whole basket of motivations, but now that thing has been in effect for 37 years as wildly popular. So what I'm suggesting when you say like, hey, you become president, you can't get anything done. It's like, I can get one big thing done because I think it's going to be really popular among not just progressives, but also independents, libertarians, like Milton Friedman is the patron saint of libertarian economists, loved this plan.
Because what libertarians and conservatives hate is government making people's decisions. What they like is economic freedom and autonomy. I just spoke at a libertarian conference like Liberty Con and was like, guys, like the freedom dividend would help people enjoy actual economic freedom.
Because you get a thousand bucks a month like you know that makes you more free to do all sorts of things like you can like you know say you can like make better choices and as long as the government is Completely like you know, it's like what you do is your business. So This can actually become something we can get done the freedom dividend is a great name to it's like the Patriot Act Yeah, people excited freedom. We're all about freedom who can be against freedom and vote against that and
Yeah, who could be against the freedom dividend? Come on, what kind of asshole do you have to beat? This has got to be taking up a tremendous amount of your time. Are you doing anything else in addition to doing this? Are you setting aside everything else in your life other than your family obligations?
I have two jobs, man. One, help accelerate society to try and deal with this historic transition we're in, and two, stay married. Those only things I'm about. Wow. That's a powerful path. Now, when you're looking at the opposition and you're looking at all the other people that are running for president and whether or not they're going to be there by the time the elections roll around,
What are you saying? It's really interesting, Joe. Holy cow. One of the funnest things about running for president is you run into all the other candidates on the trail in Iowa, in New Hampshire. I'm just hanging out backstage with the gang. It's so interesting and fun.
It is weird sometimes, but I've really liked most of them. And so sometimes people ask me like, hey, who do you want your running mate to be? And I'm just like, it really depends upon who I just click with best. Because we're just going to be on the trail all the time together. So having met a bunch of them, I got to say, most of the candidates are really genuine patriots who just want to try and do something positive and they see the countries heading in the wrong direction. I could work with most all of them. It turns out who I think is going to be there in the end, man. It's really interesting.
Uh, I mean, one, one reason I like, I will say that apparently the mainstream press had it out for Bernie last time where they were just going to like, I have a friend who worked in the media and they were like, just like, you know, kneecap Bernie. Why was he going to kneecap Bernie? Um, well, it's like, like there's definitely something going on where like certain corporate media companies have certain candidates. They kind of want to tip the scales for a little bit and people don't want to like tip it against.
Well, they thought that Bernie was going to get in the way of Hillary winning. Is that the idea? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they, they, they were in the Hillary camp for sure. Yeah. And so that wasn't just the media that was also the DNC, which is now on the record. So now happily, certainly the DNC has turned a totally different leaf where the DNC is like, we're not going to do anything that like it interferes with Eddie Woods prospects. Well, what they did was a disaster. Yeah. Disaster in terms of public image too.
Yeah, yeah, it was both substantively and like perception wise, the disaster for them. So this time I got to say, and that team is turned over almost entirely, like it's almost totally different people. Right. And then the media, we have the sense that, you know, they're still feeling out who they're going to try and put the thumb on the scale for. So Bernie is still running though, right? It looks like he's running.
You want to know something that's really stupid, but it changed my opinion of him. He was being grilled by someone with the airport with a camera, and he was pretending to talk on the phone. But you could tell he wasn't really on the phone. The phone was white. And I saw that and I was like, ew, you can't do that. You can't do that. You can say, I'm not giving impromptu interviews. Thank you very much. And keep walking, like if you want to interview me.
do it through the correct channels, but he didn't do that. He pretended to be on the phone. It's a weird thing, because if you're willing to do that, that's just deceptive. Especially if you can actually see the deception, which is clearly... Yeah, you can see it in the video. You can see the video. The fucking phone is not on. It's like you can see his text messages.
And he's like, and the guy's saying to him, you're not on the phone. I can tell you're not on the phone. And he keeps walking. It's like, I know that's a stupid thing, but it's like, huh.
We all, you know, we all suss out details about different people in different ways, you know, and like, you know, it's like, I think one reason I'm so grateful for this opportunity is it's like, you know, like you actually can get a sense of different people in different environments and it does end up impacting your, your perception. So, I mean, people made decisions on much lesser data points than that.
Oh, sure. That way. Remember what the fuck's his name from Vermont? How are Dean? The Dean scream man. The freaking new Hampshire's. What he's from? He was from Vermont. Oh, it was Vermont. Yeah. That scream killed him. Sank him. Do you remember the Chappelle Show parody? The Chappelle Show parody of that was hysterical. That's funny. But the fact that it was just because it was a lot like, as a person who works in front of audiences a lot, when you're yelling into a microphone, like,
You hear, especially if you don't have monitors in front of you, what you hear is like everything. You hear the crowd screaming. You hear everything. And if you're yelling into that microphone, you're not realizing what it sounds like as a recording. But with him, he was like, yeah!
And that was it. One scream. Imagine. Imagine that one scream literally changed the course of that man's life. One impulsive mind. It might have changed the course of the nation's history. It's crazy. I don't know if that would happen today. I think especially post-Trump, one thing that has happened is we're willing to forgive so much more.
In some ways, yeah, in some ways, no man. I feel like some people, more forgiving than others for different things. For sure. Yeah, it certainly varies. But it would be interesting to imagine what the dean scream would result in today. Hopefully, I'm not the person that tests it out. Yeah, don't scream.
Please don't scream. So what's next now? You're trying to elevate your profile. You're trying to make people aware of your platform and how you're running. What is next? It's good fun, man. I'm enjoying running for president more than I thought I would. That's a great thing to hear. Yeah. So one thing is that when you talk to Americans and like rural Iowa or Manchester, New Hampshire, it's like the really good people.
Like, you know, it's like the stuff that you might imagine is like, oh, people, no, it's like really good, honest, genuine people just trying to make their lives better. People I really love hanging out with our union guys. Like, hang on, the truckers was fun hanging out. I hung out with these union metal workers the other day.
in New Hampshire. I was like, hey, any like, you know, robots going on, like, here in your fields. And then one of them was like, yeah, actually, like, we used to take five to eight guys to bend this rebar to reinforce a bridge. Now they bring in a robot and does it overnight. And then they're like, they're like, hey, good for you guys. You don't have to do this. And then we're like, we just lost a freaking day.
They were like, why are we supposed to be happy about this? Right. So then when I go in, I talk to them about what's going on in the economy. They're like, oh, man. Yeah, like, yeah, that's like a real problem. And union's been losing for years. Like they all know it. Like, you know, membership's gone in half. So just on the campaign trail,
Making the case to different people I was on the daily show last week and that's gonna film pretty soon The next big benchmark for the campaign is the Democratic primary debates in June where they're gonna bring all the candidates up and this is something the DNC Happily seems like they're being really really open about which it's not like hey you need to you know like like have particular things so I'm
I'm very confident that we'll be on a debate stage and then we can just keep on making the case the American people. When you're going to do something like that, how do you prepare? Do you have someone throw fake questions at you and you practice them and practice the answers? Do you work with a coach? How are you going to do that? For that, given the enormity of the occasion, I'm sure we will have something like that. But I want to double back in a conversation you had recently with a guy named Lawrence Lessig about campaign finance reform.
And like there are all these interrelated problems in our society and in my opinion the automation wave is like driving a lot of them because it's making people less functional, making people less able to focus on the big problems in the future. And then part of it is that our political system is held captive by rich corporations and like mega wealthy individuals and like the average voter feels like my vote doesn't matter.
And so, you know, I was talking to Lawrence Lessig is like, hey, how do we fix it? And I heard your conversation with him. And so a solution would be we give every American adult a hundred dollars, democracy dollars, that can only be contributed to a political campaign. And then you end up counterbalancing and washing out.
a lot of the corporate money because all of a sudden if I get 10,000 people on board with me, that's like a freaking million bucks. That's very interesting. That's an interesting idea. I like that a lot. Because the problem, Joe, is that a lot of our regulatory approaches right now are like the negative approach. It's like, don't do this. Don't do that. And the fact is, a lot of the time, it's really hard to actually
like regulate away a lot of this stuff. And so Lawrence was like, you know what, let's just put money into people's hands. I can only go into the political system. And then it makes it so if someone like me appeals to humans, then I get money as opposed to making it so that the people and the money are like two different sides of the equation.
And I got to say, we were talking as a team about being here, and you have the biggest audience of just about any media platform in the country right now, like bigger than cable news, bigger than anything. How the fuck did that happen?
You know, I mean to me you're like a you're the primary voice of reason right now in our society, man That's ridiculous. No, I mean no one step up and take that please I think it's you for the time being brother But what I was saying was that like if if people that listen to this conversation Donate ten twenty bucks to my campaign. They're like ten million people I can all listen to this. That's like a hundred to two hundred million dollars and that's enough
for me to go in and break the money system. I can go in there and just say, all right, let's get money out of politics. And the way we're going to do it is we're going to actually just give people money to be able to restore democracy in a real way. Do you have a Patreon page or anything like that? My website's yang2020.com. And so our average donation is only $19. So we joke that my fans are even cheaper than Bernie's.
The thing with people is you got to make it easy. Make it easy, like have an Amazon one click button. Oh, we were taking Venmo for a while. So, you know, we were like working on it. It was a bit of a pain in the neck, administratively. I also want to say one other thing I did that I think will entertain the heck out of you. I'm giving a thousand bucks a month to a family in New Hampshire and a family of Iowa just out of my own pocket just to illustrate, you know what, a thousand dollars a month will actually like do you and your household good. And I got to pick these people.
We had a bunch of submissions online for New Hampshire and Iowa were still taking submissions. So if you know people in Iowa that could use a thousand bucks a month, just go to yang2020.com, nominate them, and then we'll pick someone and there's no obligation. So it's out of my own pocket.
And there's no obligation. So the FEC was like, well, you know, no problem. It's just like an act of philanthropy or like, you know, a gift. Right. And then a family in Georgia was so touched by my campaign that they're now supplying a thousand bucks a month to a family in South Carolina in honor of Martin Luther King who was for basic income.
So we're really inverting this mindset of scarcity and take, take, take, and being like, look, there's like plenty to go around. We're like the richest and most advanced society in the history of the world. And we can make lives better just by coming together as a people. There is nothing stopping the majority of citizens in a democracy from voting ourselves a dividend.
I love the idea, man. I really do. And I love the idea of trying to find solutions to this obvious issue that's impending. And that just seems like we're not going to escape. I mean, it seems like automation is coming. There's no way to get around it. No way.
There's no way around it for sure. I mean, it's here with us already. It's inevitable. And the danger we're in right now is that if we don't respond to it, then there's going to be a lot of, a lot of anger about the changes that are coming our way.
And so a bunch of techies are actually supporting my campaign. Because a lot of techies are not jerks. They're just like, I'm doing my job. I'm just like, my job actually just tends to result in other people losing their jobs. And so what I say to them, and they agree, it's like this is enlightened self-interest for us all. It's like progress should be something we're excited about. There is a world where we're celebrating the fact that the truckers are getting liberated from their trucks. Because that's a really difficult punishing job.
Especially in their backs. Yes. And so the goal is to try and make it so that people are actually able to be happy about the inevitable. It was a quote in my book, Bismarck, was like, if we're going to go through a revolution, you'd rather undertake it than undergo it. It's like if the revolution's coming, then we need to get in front of it and start making it work for us instead of just waiting for it to tear us apart.
Well, I love the idea, and it would be amazing if you won. I mean, it really would be fascinating. And like I said, I've done a complete 180 on the idea of universal basic income, particularly once I started talking to Elon about it. And he was saying that it's inevitable that you're going to need something like that, that it's coming.
Yeah, and the close on this, man, it's like, okay, so if you accept what Elon said that it's inevitable, which I 100% agree with, let's say you go too early. What is the downside? Well, let's see, you alleviate untold pointless human misery and you have more time to build the institutions and help us adapt. Yeah, that's the downside of you go too early. What's the downside of you go too late?
The downside if you go too late is literal disintegration and catastrophe, because it's not like society will magically reorder itself. If you're like, OK, guys, we're a little bit late to this. But now we're going to start putting checks into people's hands. So the incentives to go early are
Like pretty much all the incentives. It's like going too late is literally society ending. So if you accept what Elon says, which I agree with, that look, this is inevitable, then there's no point in trying to like, time it.
Right. Now particularly if you accept the fact that all of the signs you would expect if we were displacing labor already there, man leaving the work for us, like drug overdoses, video games, like it's all right there in front of us if you just like take the rock and like flip it over. Yeah. And the thing I'm going to say, you know, a friend of mine, Andy Stern said, is that our government is terrible at most things, but it is excellent at sending large numbers of checks to large numbers of people.
Roughly and reliably. Yeah, we have to lean into one of the only core competencies our government has that we can trust and then it will let us make our own decisions like this is very much about human empowerment and the alternative is too terrible to contemplate last question because I guess no discussion of presidential policy and the possibility of someone like you running this country is how
How do you feel about international relations and the obvious issues of dealing with other countries and what's going on with China and Russia and the interference of our democracy and all the different various issues that we've experienced over the last particularly over the last couple of years with Russia?
Yeah, sure. So about Russia, when you and I were talking about this before we went on air, when I'm president, I will say, look, Russia, I get it. We have tampered with other people's elections for years and decades. Like we America have done that.
You've done it to us for the last number of years. It is going to stop right now. And if we have any credible evidence that you are tampering with our information and our democracy, we will take that as an act of hostility and aggression. And we will retaliate in some way that will make your life very, very painful and inconvenient.
and the people of the United States will support me on this. And so here is your drop dead date, like turn off the bots and if we find that your bots are still going after this date, I will just bring the evidence to the American people and then we will act and you will not like it one bit.
Now, if, I mean, I'm thinking 80, 90% of Americans would get behind that and be like, how are we just like looking at it being like, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? And in this one, I actually feel a little bit for the tech companies because it's very difficult for the tech companies to to prevent this almost impossible.
almost impossible to identify and if you go back to sam harris' podcast we were discussing which is called the war of information that i think that's what's called information war war of information for a recent podcast in the last couple weeks uh... they detail how there's essentially
just giant groups of people that work for the Russian government that pretend to be people that are involved in Black Lives Matter, pretend to be people that are involved in Texas culture, southern culture, and they're just sowing seeds of argument and dissent. And they are laughing their asses off. Laughing their asses off. And making funny memes. Like some of their memes are really hilarious. But to them, this is the greatest ROI they've ever seen. They didn't even invest, like return on investment.
You're such an entrepreneur, YouTube man. I don't have a man hanger. I have a normal freaking house. So they invested not even that much money, but they found this underbelly they can just freaking slice into. And so they've spent best estimates like low tens of millions of dollars and it's caused us how much damage, how much harm? A real impact. You couldn't even put a dollar figure on it.
So you have to just say, look, I get the tech companies are going to try, but they're not going to be able to pull it off. So just go on and just say the world and say, hey, this is to Russia, but anyone else, same thing. If you tamper with our democracy, we're going to come down and you like a ton of bricks. And if we're not quite sure, we're still going to come down and you like a ton of bricks. I don't need 100% certainty on this. I need a legal standard. I need like 80%, 85%.
And the American people would be about time because if we can't trust ourselves or each other or what we're seeing, and this is before deep fakes and the rest of it starts hitting, like if you're actually going to believe in democracy, then you have to start protecting our information as fast as possible. And you also, in my mind, have to start, and this is a local issue, but I'm in New Hampshire and Iowa talking about this stuff, their local newspapers are all dying.
It's like thousands of local papers just winking out of existence because they used to rely on classified ads. There are no classified ads anymore. It's all Craigslist and so they all die. And if you believe in democracy, how the heck can anyone vote on anything if they have no idea what's going on there? So there are a lot of unrelated issues. And one thing I'm saying is like, look,
We had a happy time where local newspapers were supported by classified ads. It's over now. But we're still a democracy. You still need some information to vote. So we need to try and find new ways for you to get quality information. The store in our hands up and being like, I guess the Russians are going to just misinform us with bots, and I guess all the local newspapers are going to die. Like you said, these are problems.
And we have to start solving them. If you still believe that democracy is the best form of government, and that's what we're going to carry forward with, which you obviously have to believe, like you have to go with that as your model. And so it's all interrelated, but we have to start thinking much, much bigger about what we can get done because things are slipping away. Things are trending in a terrible, terrible direction.
Well, Andrew, good luck to you. You're a good man. I wish you well. Thank you for being here. I think your message is excellent. And I hope you really make an impact. Thank you, Joe. Really appreciate it, man. President Yang. Man, if I win, if I win, you can do a special JRE from the White House. And that would be a blast. Let's do it. Thanks, sir. Appreciate it, man.
