In this episode, I sit down with presidential candidate, Sam Harris, to talk about his campaign's focus on universal basic income and why it's a good idea. We talk about the benefits of a basic income, how it can be implemented, and how it could change the way we live and work. We also talk about some of the problems facing the middle class, and what it means for the future of the economy. I think you'll find a lot of value in this episode. Tweet me if you have any questions, suggestions, or suggestions on how to improve the podcast. Timestamps: 1:00:00 - Sam Harris's background and early days in politics 4:20 - How he got into politics 6:30 - His early days as a venture capitalist 9:00 - Why he decided to run for president 11:30 - The benefits of UBI 13:00- Why he thinks it s a great idea 16:40 - How it could be implemented in the United States 17:10 - Why it s not a bad idea 18:10- How to implement it 19:10 - What would you like to see it? 21:40 22:20 What s your favorite part of the podcast? 26:00 -- How it s working for you? 27:30 -- What are you looking forward to in 2020? 28:00-- What's your biggest takeaway from this episode? 29:40 -- What s the most important part of this episode of the show? 35: What do you think about it s going to be next? 36:10 -- How do you want to hear from me? 37:00 | What s it's going to happen in 2020 and what s your biggest challenge? 39:00 // 39:30 // 40: What are your thoughts on the future? 41:30 | How would you want me to do it in 2020 & 40: what s the best thing you re going to do in 2020 45: Is it a good thing? 46:40 // 45:10 | How do I think it s gonna be the most impactful? Theme music by my favorite part? 47:00 & 45:00 +46:00/47:00 / 48:30 / Theme song by Ian Dorsch Theme by Ian Bynoe
00:01:51.000So when I was digging into the numbers, I found that it's not this cliff that we're heading towards.
00:01:57.000It's actually more of a curve that we're on.
00:01:59.000What I've been telling people is that we're in the third inning now.
00:02:02.000Where one of the main reasons why Donald Trump won in 2016 is that we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs that were based in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, all the swing states he needed to win in the center of the country.
00:02:18.000And a lot of that was just manufacturing work.
00:02:20.000And if you go to a factory, you'll see it's just giant robot arms as far as the eye can see.
00:02:23.000So it's not just that you have artificial intelligence on the horizon.
00:02:27.000It's that we've been eating away at the most common jobs in the U.S. economy For almost 20 years now, and it's just now hitting a point where it's pushing more and more unskilled men in particular out of the workforce.
00:02:40.000Now, 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?
00:02:58.000Recipe that most people are attracted to.
00:03:00.000So I just want to unpack the numbers a little bit more so people have a sense of it.
00:03:04.000I was just with a bunch of truck drivers in Iowa last week.
00:03:07.000And there's a guy, Dennis Bogasky, that gave me a ride from Altoona to Grinnell in Iowa where I've been campaigning.
00:03:13.000And the truth of it, Joe, is that there are 3.5 million truck drivers in this country right now.
00:03:19.000It's the most common job in 29 states.
00:03:20.000And 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.
00:03:30.000So then if you say, hey, I'm going to retrain...
00:03:34.000For what exactly is like issue number one?
00:03:38.000And that these guys didn't love school 30 years ago.
00:03:41.000It's not like driving a truck has made them really excited about the idea.
00:03:45.000And 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.
00:03:58.000According to independent studies, government-funded retraining programs had a success rate of between 0% and 15% in real life.
00:04:06.000This is what actually happened to the workers of Michigan and Indiana and Ohio.
00:04:11.000And 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.
00:04:19.000And if you were an employer, which you are...
00:04:22.000Would 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?
00:04:38.000I mean, if you were an employer, you'd probably choose number two.
00:04:44.000I mean, I'm trying to look at this through rose-colored glasses, I guess.
00:04:48.000I'm trying to think if there's a way that these people can adapt.
00:04:51.000You know, I mean, some will, for sure.
00:04:54.000You can retrain and rescale some people.
00:04:56.000But if you look at even the conversations we're having around this, where people legitimately talk about retraining coal miners to be software engineers.
00:05:03.000Stuff that on the face of it makes no sense.
00:05:05.000But 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 for actual success.
00:05:16.000And this is where this whole learn-to-code controversy is coming out online where people are actually getting banned for writing learn-to-code.
00:05:28.000And 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 joking around, saying learn to code.
00:05:40.000It'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.
00:05:51.000Yeah, and unfortunately, we're going to get to a point where AI can do some basic coding at a certain level.
00:05:57.000So 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.
00:06:05.000It's like, hey, being a truck driver, the market's not going to value that much when the trucks start driving themselves in the next five to ten years.
00:06:44.000Even if they perfectly, seamlessly transition, there's too many people for those jobs.
00:06:48.000Yeah, so I've been driven to universal basic income in part because I've been looking at the numbers.
00:06:53.000The 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.
00:07:05.000Those five jobs comprise about half of all American jobs.
00:07:08.000Only 32% of Americans graduate from college.
00:07:11.000So the average American is a high school grad doing one of these five jobs.
00:07:14.000And if you look at it, technology is already doing a number on each of these jobs.
00:07:19.000Like the first administrative and clerical includes call center workers, and AI is in the process of taking over that job.
00:07:25.000Retail and sales, 30% of malls are closing in the next four years.
00:07:29.000So the danger here is to think of it as Artificial intelligence is coming.
00:07:34.000It'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.
00:07:44.000Now, when you're talking about universal basic income, there's two questions that come up.
00:07:48.000How much money and where is it coming from?
00:07:52.000So 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 for it at the founding of the country.
00:08:00.000And then Martin Luther King was for it.
00:08:02.000Milton Friedman, the godfather of conservative economists, was for it.
00:08:06.000And 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.
00:08:14.000Yeah, it's Alaska, and they fund it with oil money.
00:08:17.000And what I'm going around telling people is that technology is the oil of the 21st century.
00:08:21.000So 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?
00:09:35.000It's a lot of money, but it's actually manageable.
00:09:40.000And 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.
00:09:48.000If I gave you $1,000 a month, it probably would not make a big difference in the economy because it would just go into your account somewhere and nothing would happen.
00:09:56.000But we all know that right now most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
00:10:00.00057% of Americans can't afford an unexpected $500 bill.
00:10:05.000So you put $1,000 a month into their hands, it's going to go right back into the economy.
00:10:09.000They're going to spend it on food, childcare, Car repairs they've been putting off, the occasional night out.
00:10:15.000And then all of those businesses end up hiring more people and then we end up getting some of the money back as tax revenues.
00:10:22.000So 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.
00:10:33.000We're going to save one to two hundred billion on things like incarceration and homelessness services and emergency room health care.
00:10:41.000I 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.
00:10:52.000Like he sees all the waste in the system.
00:10:55.000So if you imagine a society where everyone's getting a thousand bucks a month, It's a great incentive to try and stay out of jail because you stop getting it if you wind up in jail.
00:11:05.000And 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.
00:11:14.000How much crime do you think you'd actually prevent though by giving people $1,000 a month?
00:11:17.000I think most of the people that are doing crime, whether it's thievery or assault, they're not thinking this out.
00:11:27.000This is just either a way of life for them, either they've got real mental issues or a pattern of behavior that they can't break.
00:11:36.000I really don't think that $1,000 a month is going to fix any of that.
00:11:40.000It's not going to fix all of it, for sure.
00:12:53.000I 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.
00:13:00.000I'm going to treat them well and try and train them and give them resources because you know that will increase your productivity as an organization.
00:13:07.000In the public sector, we have the opposite.
00:13:10.000We're like, if I can just avoid spending money on you, then I'm going to somehow save money.
00:13:17.000When 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.
00:13:29.000So 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.
00:13:38.000This is like the trickle-up economy because none of the money disappears.
00:13:56.000The savings from robot trucks are estimated to be $168 billion a year, just from that one thing.
00:14:03.000So 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.
00:14:15.000Amazon will say it didn't make any money this quarter, no reason to pay taxes.
00:14:19.000And 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.
00:14:30.000And every other industrialized country already has this tax.
00:14:35.000And because our economy is so vast at $20 trillion, a value-added tax at even half the European level generates about $800 billion in new revenue.
00:14:59.000They're going to be paying most of this.
00:15:01.000Yeah, but they're going to get some of that money back, obviously.
00:15:03.000Because 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.
00:15:12.000That's true for all of the big companies.
00:15:14.000What I say to CEOs, and I've spoken to groups of dozens of CEOs, what's really bad for your business is when people don't have money to spend.
00:15:21.000What's good for your business is when they do.
00:15:23.000So 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.
00:15:30.000And has this been actually fleshed out, like the real numbers or the projections of how much they're going to get back?
00:15:37.000So the Roosevelt Institute studied this plan of everyone getting $1,000 a month and projected it would create 2 million new jobs and grow the economy by 8-10%.
00:15:46.000And 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.
00:15:54.000Did they factor in all the jobs that are going to be lost?
00:15:57.000So one of the things that's a misconception about universal basic income is that it somehow will, like, facilitate job loss.
00:16:05.000Well, job loss, though, is the reason for universal basic income in the first place, right?
00:16:09.000Yeah, which we're in the midst of right now.
00:16:11.000Like, right now, as we're sitting here together, the labor force participation rate in the United States is 63%.
00:16:43.000So 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.
00:16:52.000Now, when you say a problem that's coming down the pike, what are the projections in terms of the timeline?
00:17:00.000A lot of the projections are actually pretty consistent with each other, which means they're probably right.
00:17:09.000Bain says you're looking at between 20% and 30% of jobs subject to automation by 2030, which is pretty soon.
00:17:22.000The Obama White House, literally their 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.
00:17:31.000They said 83% of jobs that make less than $20 an hour will be subject to automation by 2030. MIT is saying the same thing.
00:17:40.000And so we have 11 years to try and accelerate meaningful solutions.
00:17:46.000And this 11 years, it's 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.
00:17:55.000Now, 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.
00:18:50.000You're now a shareholder in this great nation and you get a dividend.
00:18:55.000But when I was with Dennis, the trucker who owns his own trucking company in Iowa, the The role that jobs play in truckers' lives is vital.
00:19:08.000And again, I'm a very data-driven guy where men deal with joblessness very, very poorly.
00:19:15.000By the numbers, we spend between 40 and 75 percent of our time on the computer playing video games or doing other things.
00:19:52.000And the purpose of universal basic income is not meant to be a job replacement for those truckers.
00:19:59.000Because 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.
00:20:09.000And you go to them and say, hey guys, you worried about robot trucks taking your jobs?
00:20:12.000They're like, there's no way a robot could take my job.
00:22:44.000But on the other side, you have literally three and a half million truckers who rely upon this for their livelihoods, to support their family.
00:22:51.000And there's going to be a lot of passion, a lot of resistance to this.
00:22:55.000Anyone who thinks that truck drivers are just going to shrug and be like, all right, I guess I had a good run.
00:23:00.000I'm just going to go home and figure it out.
00:23:01.000That's not going to be their response.
00:23:03.000It'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.
00:24:28.000Actually, I look at how much, frankly, they endure.
00:24:32.000There'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.
00:25:12.000I think I can do something about this.
00:25:14.000If 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.
00:25:25.000And 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.
00:25:38.000Labor Day is a holiday today because of those riots.
00:25:42.000And then we implemented Universal High School in 1911, in part as a response to these riots.
00:25:48.000So 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.
00:25:58.000And that Industrial Revolution included mass riots.
00:26:02.000So thinking that this one will not strikes me as really, really optimistic and perhaps unrealistic.
00:26:10.000What do you see coming when you think that these jobs are going to be automated and then universal basic income is going to supplement?
00:26:21.000It's going to give them some money, $1,000 a month.
00:26:45.000And 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.
00:26:52.000Now, my friends in Silicon Valley are working on teleoperators, which is – so the trucks have right now like a 98 percent – Accuracy level, which is not very high because you can't have 2% semi-trucks like running into things off the roads.
00:27:09.000So the way they're trying to get the last percent or so is they're equipping trucks with teleoperating software, which means that a trucker, a teleoperator in Nevada or Arizona will beam into the truck and just be able to see out the front like a video game.
00:27:25.000It's like drone operating, but instead it's a truck.
00:27:27.000You beam in, and then you just steer the truck until the computer is like, I got it from here, and then you beam out.
00:27:33.000That's what they're working on to try and catch that last bit of uncertainty.
00:27:38.000So the innovations they're having, and again, Joe, we're talking about $168 billion a year.
00:27:42.000Like, everything becomes possible when you're looking at that much money.
00:27:47.000So in the absence of anyone doing anything, the robot trucks will start reducing shifts of various truckers.
00:27:55.000I would say six to ten years from now.
00:27:58.000And so then there'll be a bunch of reactions.
00:28:00.000Now, trucking firms already have massive shortages.
00:28:06.000That'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.
00:28:16.000And 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.
00:28:23.000Very, very bad for your family life, too, because you're away all the time.
00:28:28.000Something like 88% of truckers have an early marker for chronic disease, like substance abuse, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, something along those lines.
00:28:38.000And now people think that the job's going to disappear in the next five to ten years, so you can't get people in.
00:28:43.000So 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.
00:28:51.000And 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 those states and then take it the rest of the way, because the robots won't be reliable enough to drive in urban areas.
00:29:07.000They'll be reliable enough to drive on an interstate where they just have to make a few decisions.
00:29:13.000Then there'll be a massive depletion of truck driving opportunities.
00:29:17.000And then, in my mind, a lot of suicides, a lot of self-destruction.
00:29:24.000I say that based upon the fact that that's what happened to the manufacturing workers.
00:29:28.000Where 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.
00:29:57.000So you'll see truckers going home and drinking themselves to death or doing drugs and overdosing or killing themselves.
00:30:05.000And then eventually there will be an outbreak of violence because some truckers will say, instead of killing myself, how about I go bust up a robot truck?
00:30:14.000And 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.
00:30:37.000So if you're going to be a dickhead, even though it really has nothing to do with you, imagine when you actually think your livelihood's being threatened.
00:30:51.000So I'm running for president in large part because I think we need to get in front of this set of problems.
00:30:56.000We 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.
00:31:05.000Maybe we should have this universal basic income where everyone feels like they're getting a thousand bucks a month, which is not a work replacement.
00:31:11.000It's not going to make their lives easy.
00:31:21.000So they feel like, okay, my kid actually has some kind of path to the future.
00:31:24.000And it's not like if I lose this trucking job, not only am I going to struggle and suffer, but my kid will too.
00:31:31.000So 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.
00:31:42.000And 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, eat a meal and, you know, like live a life.
00:31:59.000I 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.
00:32:10.000This is something that I'm just becoming aware of over the last year or two.
00:32:16.000When 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?
00:32:26.000Well, what I say to people, Joe, is I say, hey, have you noticed stores closing on your Main Street?
00:32:57.000But 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.
00:33:31.000Getting rid of the most common jobs in the U.S. economy, filled by high school graduates, and then replacing them with a handful of jobs for higher skilled people in different places.
00:33:41.000And 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 logistics manager or...
00:33:55.000A big data scientist or something like essentially near zero.
00:33:59.000And so this is what gave rise to a lot of the anger that got Donald Trump elected because they looked around their communities and were like, hey, I used to work in this manufacturing plant.
00:34:09.000This manufacturing plant no longer exists.
00:34:11.000For whatever reason, like I'm being told that it's somehow like my fault that I wasn't adaptable enough.
00:34:17.000I didn't somehow become a coder or something ridiculous.
00:34:23.000And I have to say, Joe, and this is like something that I've picked up from Dennis in part.
00:34:43.000Because there's a point at which Democratic Party used to be very, very heavily aligned with working class Americans.
00:34:51.000And there's now some kind of pathology that if the person who's suffering is a white man of a certain background, then the suffering somehow is like, somehow like diminished.
00:35:02.000Like it doesn't count as much if they're a trucker.
00:35:06.000And that's something that I find really...
00:35:11.000It's like we have to start acknowledging the source of the problems.
00:35:15.000One thing I'm saying to people is like, look, it's not immigrants that are taking these jobs away.
00:35:21.000It 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.
00:35:33.000Now, truckers seem to be the big one, right?
00:36:15.000And so that two and a half million call center population is going to shrink a ton.
00:36:19.000Because after you get AI software that's better than one of them, you know, it can beat most all of them, you know, that's not like 5000 jobs, that's potentially 500,000 jobs.
00:37:42.000Could do better work than a lot of people.
00:37:45.000Right now, the economic incentives still are not necessarily for everyone to use my robot surgeon because the regulations aren't there yet in the U.S. And so healthcare is a really interesting one.
00:37:55.000Another one that's very clearly going to get taken up by AI is radiology and looking at tumors on a film.
00:38:01.000Because it turns out that AI can see shades of grey that a human eye cannot.
00:38:06.000And it can reference millions of films where the most experienced doctor can probably reference thousands.
00:38:12.000And so radiology, I'll tell you, medical students are running from radiology as fast as they can because they know that's going to get taken up by AI. Man, this is such a bleak forecast.
00:38:24.000It's very strange when we stop and think about all the different things that human beings find value in as far as their occupation.
00:38:31.000Like, hey, I'm a this, I'm a that, this is what I do.
00:38:34.000And the idea that these things are all going to go away.
00:39:10.000So there have been studies as to what happens to your mind when you can't pay your bills.
00:39:15.000And when you can't pay your bills, you're like stressing out.
00:39:18.000It's like, if I pay this, I can't pay that.
00:39:19.000And there's like always the time-money trade-off.
00:39:21.000It's like, oh, if I spend extra time commuting, maybe I can save a couple bucks.
00:39:26.000And 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.
00:39:34.000So just if you say to someone, hey, here's a bill you can't pay and then you give them an IQ test, their score actually goes down.
00:40:15.000What we're talking about, again, it's not the speculative future.
00:40:18.000It's that we've been doing this for years, and it's actually pushing our population into a mindset of scarcity, of nastiness.
00:40:25.000And 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.
00:41:46.000Yeah, we're at record low birth rates right now.
00:41:48.000And it's largely because people feel too strapped to have kids.
00:41:52.000I mean, that's literally where we are.
00:41:53.000When you say record low, by like what percentage?
00:41:55.000You can look up right now, Jamie, I don't know if you want to look this up, but stories have come out over this last year saying that Americans are now at the lowest rate of childbirth that has been the case in decades or ever.
00:42:08.000Yeah, that's a conversation that I have with people whenever they say that they're worried about population, that the population is growing so fast and overpopulated.
00:42:49.000Fertility rates sink further below replacement level.
00:42:54.000But the thought is that this is because of education, and that this is because people 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.
00:43:08.000As far as everything I've read about it, it's not a symptom of people doing poorly.
00:43:27.000But 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 ever getting married are less than 50% now for the first time.
00:43:39.000And then people are having fewer kids.
00:43:41.000To play devil's advocate though, the marriage thing might be people looking at it and go, God, my parents got divorced, my brother got divorced, everybody else got divorced.
00:44:02.000So you can look at, to me, certainly to me, getting married and having kids is like an act of prosperity or optimism.
00:44:10.000There are reasons why it's going down otherwise.
00:44:12.000But if you look at things like starting a new business, I mean, that being at multi-decade lows, there's like no positive spin on that.
00:44:18.000People moving between states is now at multi-decade lows.
00:44:23.000People moving for a new job, multi-decade lows.
00:44:27.000And you think this is the product of automation or it's the product of a bunch of different factors?
00:44:38.000It'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.
00:44:54.000And 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.
00:45:04.000Like that 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 like after you actually go to the places,
00:45:19.000you're like, wow, like this is not flourishing the way that you'd hope.
00:45:23.000Do you feel like an economic Paul Revere in a certain sense?
00:45:32.000The comparison I make is that if the United States economy is like an elephant, you know the parable of blind people touching the elephant?
00:45:49.000What is the parable of blind people touching an elephant?
00:45:51.000So what happens is they're like seven blind men and they get asked like, what does an elephant look like?
00:45:57.000And then one of them is touching the trunk and is like, an elephant looks like a snake.
00:46:01.000And another one is touching its leg and it's like, an elephant looks like a tree trunk.
00:46:04.000So 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.
00:46:11.000So, I've had this really strange set of experiences where I sold a national education company to a public company.
00:46:18.000I lived bi-coastally between New York and San Francisco for the last five years.
00:46:23.000I've operated in 18 cities around the country.
00:46:25.000I was an appointee in the Obama administration in D.C. So, I've actually seen the elephant, if you know what I mean.
00:46:46.000It's like, hey, it's my job to make stuff work better.
00:46:48.000And if you gave me a choice between making things work better and creating abundant opportunities for the other people, I would choose that.
00:47:34.000Coming from a place of being a serial entrepreneur to this presidential candidate who's kind of warning people about the upcoming technological apocalypse, as it were, how did you make that transition?
00:47:46.000And what was your motivation to get involved in this to the point where you're actually running for president on this platform?
00:47:52.000Yeah, so sell a company in 2009, and that was the financial crisis.
00:47:59.000Like, Wall Street had crashed the economy.
00:48:01.000And 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.
00:48:10.000We need to have them go to Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, and all, and start businesses.
00:48:40.000And so what I tell people is like, 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.
00:48:52.000It's really easy to find the law school because they're just there, just apply to it.
00:48:56.000And the government will give you a $100,000 loan, no questions asked.
00:49:00.000And 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 a $100,000 loan.
00:49:08.000So we have this huge oversupply of indebted law school graduates and a huge undersupply of entrepreneurs was my thinking.
00:49:15.000And so I was like, okay, how do you fix that?
00:49:17.000So I started this organization, Venture for America, to try and fix that.
00:49:42.000They'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.
00:49:59.000It's a straight economic story where we blasted away 4 million manufacturing jobs.
00:50:05.000In the swing states and Donald Trump is our president.
00:50:08.000So imagine being me and then seeing that and being like, okay, I get it.
00:50:14.000This is an economic technological story.
00:50:16.000And then I went to people in Washington, D.C. I was like, hey guys, what are we going to do?
00:50:20.000We're in the third inning of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country.
00:50:26.000And the third inning has brought us Donald Trump.
00:50:28.000The fourth, fifth, sixth innings are going to be horrific.
00:51:12.000And the number three was the point you made originally, which was we must educate and retrain Americans for the jobs of the future.
00:51:18.000And 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.
00:51:25.000So 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.
00:51:35.000And 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 going to bring them up in this shit show?
00:51:45.000And so then I was like, okay, how would you actually solve this problem if you had to do so?
00:51:51.000And 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.
00:52:01.000And 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.
00:52:12.000Well, to me, you know what I'm saying is retail and truck driving are the two major, major obvious sectors that are going to get displaced.
00:52:21.000Being a retail worker is the most common job in the United States right now.
00:52:25.000The average retail worker is a 39-year-old woman with a high school education making between $11 and $12 an hour.
00:52:31.000So what do those workers do when 30% of the malls and stores close in the next five years?
00:52:36.000You know, and then truckers are next in line, you know, by the five to ten year mark.
00:52:40.000So it's like we have to get our acts together before these populations end up getting displaced.
00:52:47.000And we know Americans don't have a ton of savings to fall back on.
00:52:50.000It's not like they'll be like, oh, like, you know, let me take a month off to like think about it.
00:53:31.000Or 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.
00:54:02.000And 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 of the United States, I'm perfectly happy with that.
00:54:16.000I'm on the record just being like, I'm just trying to solve problems.
00:54:18.000I'm an entrepreneur trying to solve a problem.
00:54:57.000I'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.
00:55:04.000But 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.
00:56:15.000Can I get 40,000 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?
00:56:23.000Well, I'm sure it would help improve their lives, and I'm sure they would agree with you.
00:56:26.000The question is, what are the other things?
00:56:29.000See, I don't think most people are aware That this is coming.
00:56:34.000And I think you educating people and explaining all these 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.
00:56:48.000But I think most people have, it may be illogically, but they have different concerns.
00:56:56.000So how do you address these other concerns?
00:56:59.000Like, I bet if you polled people, what are the issues?
00:57:02.000What are the issues in this upcoming 2020 presidential race that, you know, who's going to beat Donald Trump?
00:57:38.000So 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.
00:57:46.000Number two is we need to get healthcare off the backs of people.
00:58:50.000We made it up during the Great Depression.
00:58:52.000Self-driving trucks are going to drive GDP way up, but it's going to be very, very bad for many people and communities.
00:58:58.000So we have to actually change the measuring sticks to something that would actually make our economy work for us.
00:59:03.000Make it so that the market serves us instead of all us being inputs to the market.
00:59:08.000Because if we're all inputs to the market, we lose to robots and AI. Hands down.
00:59:12.000And it's not, like, it doesn't matter if you were, like, a really conscientious, hard-working truck driver or, like, a really lazy, sloppy one.
00:59:26.000We 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.
00:59:37.000Things like health, childhood success rates, environmental quality.
00:59:41.000How would you quantify that in a way that would be translatable to the average voter?
00:59:47.000Yeah, so we have measurements for most of these things.
00:59:49.000And again, if you look at our numbers right now, you'd see it's like, what?
00:59:54.000Like, how many people listening to this know that America's life expectancy has declined for the last three years?
00:59:58.000You know, that to me would be like a pretty important measurement.
01:00:10.000The 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.
01:00:21.000I didn't know that suicide was on that list.
01:00:23.000I knew that drug overdoses had taken obesity.
01:00:25.000But suicides have overtaken obesity as well?
01:00:28.000Suicides have overtaken car accidents.
01:01:07.000I 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.
01:01:18.000Yeah, 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?
01:01:36.000And we've put our citizens in the situation where we all see ourselves as economic inputs.
01:01:42.000What the market says we're worth is what we're worth.
01:01:45.000And if we're worth less, then it's our fault.
01:01:48.000And so the next move is to say, okay, I guess, you know, this place, there's no place for me here.
01:01:53.000I don't mean to sound skeptical, but I just don't believe that $1,000 a month is going to fix that.
01:02:01.000It 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...
01:02:32.000And that's one reason why the Freedom Dividend doesn't solve the problem.
01:02:37.000The problem is fundamentally one of reconstituting means of structure, purpose, and fulfillment in people's lives, particularly in men's lives.
01:02:49.000So 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.
01:02:59.000So instead of using GDP, using some sort of other quantifiable method of measuring health and happiness and fulfillment?
01:04:00.000One of the things that I'm going to point out is that if you pump $1,000 a month into that neighborhood, it ends up creating a whole new rung of opportunities for the people in that community.
01:04:11.000Some of that money goes to youth leagues and churches and non-profits and creates jobs right there in that community.
01:04:22.000One 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.
01:04:27.000But starting a bakery is a dumb idea because people just do not have money in that town to buy your baked goods.
01:04:33.000But then I pump $60 million a year into that economy, and a lot of that just circulates right there in that town.
01:04:41.000Then if I start a bakery, it's a good idea.
01:04:44.000And I know if my bakery fails, I'm not going to die.
01:04:46.000I can at least go home and get my dividend.
01:04:49.000And 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.
01:05:47.000If you start measuring it, you at least start to open up the chance.
01:05:52.000But what you're saying is the most profound, which is like we need to reconstitute meaning for many, many Americans.
01:05:58.000And that's what, to me, the most destructive aspect of the, 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.
01:06:12.000Well, 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.
01:06:22.000It wasn't something people did, but yet they still found a way to occupy their time.
01:06:27.000Do 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.
01:06:43.000So 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.
01:09:33.000You know, you'd have to be a real fucking thief to go to jail.
01:09:36.000And these people that just, they did this and got away with it and profited and redistributed all this money into their own personal accounts and fucked the whole economy sideways.
01:09:47.000Yeah, but heaven forbid you take out a bunch of school loans and then things go south, like you can't get out of it.
01:09:51.000I mean, I know a guy who's in his 50s, who's an ophthalmologist, who's deeply in debt still.
01:09:59.000And 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.
01:10:52.000Because like you said, we've done a lot of things that were supposed to be a stimulus.
01:10:56.000Give $4 trillion to the banks and be like, that'll stimulate the economy.
01:11:00.000Nothing's going to 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, start businesses, and the rest of it.
01:11:12.000I 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.
01:12:16.000If you want your students to have access to federal loans, you have to bring your administrator-to-student ratio in line with what it was like in the 1990s.
01:12:27.000And then the schools would scream bloody murder.
01:12:31.000And you'd be like, well, I have a feeling you're going to figure it out.
01:12:34.000They would start bringing it down, and you would realize it doesn't impact the student experience at all.
01:12:40.000And I understand it, because I've run a large non-profit organization that I had started, and your very natural tendency is just to hire excellent people, and then before you know it, you have excellent people, vice-deans of everything.
01:12:53.000But then over time, that ends up building a very large cost structure that gets passed along to the public.
01:13:01.000Now, you said before, Bernie's like free college for everyone.
01:13:03.000The problem with that solution is it pretends that college solves the employment problems of young people.
01:13:09.000And anyone who's coming out of college knows that that's not real.
01:13:12.000The underemployment rate for recent college graduates today is 44%.
01:13:15.000So you have like a 50-50 shot if you come out of college, you're doing a job that doesn't really require a degree.
01:13:20.000And 94% of new jobs created right now are gig, temporary, or contractor jobs that don't have real paths forward or healthcare benefits of the rest of it.
01:13:29.000Yeah, I was reading something about people...
01:13:32.000Actually, it might have been in that book that I was just telling you about Yuval Noah Harari.
01:14:19.000So, the ideal is that you end up training young people to be really, really adaptable and have low-cost structures and just be able to, you know, become entrepreneurs.
01:14:28.000And I spent seven years trying to train young people to do just that.
01:14:31.000But one of the things I've discovered is that we're overemphasizing college, and what we're underemphasizing is technical, vocational, and apprenticeship work.
01:14:39.000Because a lot of that work, believe it or not, it's actually really hard to automate.
01:14:43.000Like, you know, we're not going to automate an air conditioning repair person or a plumber anytime soon.
01:14:48.000And for sure, craftsmen, people who build things.
01:14:51.000And it's good for your mental health and a bunch of other things.
01:14:54.000So right now, only 6% of American high school students are in technical or vocational training.
01:15:09.000And then we're still treating people who are working in trades and everything as somehow, you know, like not in great careers when a lot of those careers are actually really awesome and they pay great and people enjoy them.
01:15:49.000You know what is going to get automated?
01:15:50.000A 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, but then those jobs are going to disappear.
01:16:01.000I 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.
01:16:09.000So these college grads are like, oh, snap, don't know what to do.
01:16:13.000I'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.
01:16:19.000It'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.
01:16:25.000Where I grew up in Boston, if you went into the trades, if you abandoned the idea of higher learning and going to college and just went right into learning to be a carpenter or something like that, people look at you like, oh, you sold yourself short.
01:16:40.000But 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.
01:16:50.000It's so common that they thought there was going to be this path And this path just didn't exist once they got out, or it was far, far more difficult than they were led to believe.
01:17:00.000Yeah, 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.
01:17:07.000It's not like, hey, I've got another 20% I could get into college.
01:17:11.000Like right now, the college completion rate in six years is about 59%.
01:17:15.000So like four out of ten people who start college are not graduating in six years, and a lot of them are just not going to finish ever.
01:17:22.000So, the people that have other paths available to them, we have to build those paths up.
01:17:29.000And this is one reason why I'm so into the freedom dividend instead of something like free college.
01:17:33.000Because why would you subsidize something that only the top third of the population is going to use?
01:17:38.000And it's a highly inefficient, costly system anyway.
01:17:40.000Plowing money into that, you're much better off putting $1,000 a month into every 18-year-old's hands.
01:17:57.000You 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.
01:18:04.000Now 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?
01:18:15.000What are the other things you think you're going to have to talk about in order to get people to take you really seriously?
01:18:20.000I mean, the hot button issues, you know what they all are.
01:18:22.000It's like immigration and climate change is a really big one.
01:18:27.000And, you know, I mean, I can talk about those at length.
01:18:30.000So my father and mother met as immigrants from Taiwan at UC Berkeley.
01:18:48.000So I'm very pro-immigrant, and I think people would expect that just to look at me.
01:18:53.000And so what I say is, first, it makes no sense to educate international students in US universities and then send them home to compete against us.
01:19:09.000Because I personally know tons of awesome internationals who would definitely help make the U.S. more dynamic and competitive that go home and start companies there.
01:19:21.000That's great for people who come from a privileged background, who have the opportunity to come here and become educated.
01:19:27.000But what about people who are poor, who are trying to make it here from South America and Guatemala and Mexico?
01:19:34.000There are three paths available to you for the approximately 12 million people who are here undocumented, many of whom from Mexico and Latin America.
01:19:42.000Frankly, they're not the profile I just described, for the most part.
01:20:03.000You do nothing, which is our current path.
01:20:05.000And then you have massive problems, too, because they're constantly interacting with your schools and your hospitals, and they're getting into car accidents.
01:20:13.000Just not knowing who the heck is who is an untenable situation for any advanced society.
01:20:20.000So 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.
01:20:32.000That seems to me to be the most feasible.
01:20:56.000So, Donald Trump's like, build a wall, and I'm like, look, like, I mean, we gotta enforce a strong border, like, especially in a world where everyone, every citizen's getting a thousand bucks a month, like, you gotta enforce a strong border.
01:21:07.000But at the same time, you know, like, people who are here, they're making our communities a lot more entrepreneurial and dynamic, many of them.
01:21:15.000I mean, at the high end, half of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are either immigrants or children of immigrants.
01:21:20.000And that's true in a different way in terms of the dynamism of these immigrant communities.
01:21:25.000So what I say to people is, 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.
01:21:34.000Now, 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?
01:21:47.000So then they operate in the informal economy in the way that they have – and the truth is that even if we have this pathway, there are 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 enter the pipeline.
01:22:01.000There's going to be a lot of – there are going to be a lot of people that don't subscribe but – That's where it is right now.
01:22:10.000We're not making the situation actively worse.
01:22:12.000We can at least improve the situation for a really significant proportion of them.
01:22:17.000Yeah, for a significant proportion of them.
01:22:19.000And, you know, the other situation would be tax revenue.
01:22:22.000How many people that are here illegally are not paying taxes?
01:22:25.000I would imagine it's an enormous number.
01:22:28.000Yeah, there'd be a real economic boost if we can integrate them into the formal economy, because there's a lot of just cash going back and forth.
01:22:35.000Right, 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.
01:22:42.000Or I could work as a laborer, or work as a, you know, on construction sites or whatever, whoever's willing to hire them and work for free.
01:22:52.000Yeah, and so, I mean, that would still be going on.
01:22:56.000Like, there are limits to, you know, like, what sort of appeal you can have in terms of having people raise their hand.
01:23:01.000Right, but have a path to real prosperity.
01:23:04.000Have a real path to citizenship would be very nice.
01:23:07.000It's pretty enormous for them because a lot of them have kids.
01:23:09.000A lot of them have kids who know no other life but here.
01:23:12.000So another issue I think you'll like that comes up on the campaign trail is what to do about marijuana.
01:23:18.000And I'm for full legalization, remove it from the federal controlled substance list.
01:23:23.000And 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...
01:23:30.000Behind bars for things that are legal in parts of the country.
01:23:33.000So my plan as president is on April 20th of 2021, I'm going to mass pardon everyone who's in jail for a nonviolent drug-related offense.
01:23:45.000I'm going to high-five them on the way out and I'm going to be a very popular man that day.
01:23:47.000You're going to be a lot of traveling to high-five all those folks.
01:23:59.000So, you know, that's something that comes up that, to me, it's obvious that marijuana is an important remedy for many people who are struggling with various health problems and everything else.
01:24:16.000I have friends who are in that situation.
01:24:27.000That'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.
01:24:44.000One 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.
01:24:55.000And, you know, look, it's a fucking opium.
01:25:16.000The 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.
01:25:26.000And that company, man, that company got fined $635 million, which sounds like a lot, until you realize they made like $16 billion.
01:25:34.000So those people are now some of the richest people in the country on the backs of American communities.
01:25:40.000And it just keeps morphing because it went from oxy to heroin to fentanyl and then you have people who are struggling with this addiction.
01:25:47.000So to me, it was federal negligence that unleashed this plague.
01:25:52.000I mean, you got to hold the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma accountable because literally now they're profiting from one of the treatment drugs.
01:25:58.000It's really obscene what they're doing.
01:26:00.000They're just like, hey, my non-addictive wonder drug turns out it caused a super plague of lethal addiction for people.
01:26:09.000But now I'm going to sell you a new drug and try and make money on the back end too.
01:26:13.000So you've got to get as much money as we possibly can from that family in particular.
01:26:19.000But 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.
01:26:28.000It's just like, look, why are you prescribing these opiates?
01:26:31.000There was a doctor I quoted in my book where he's like, you have never seen a lethality rate from For something prescribed for like a non-life-threatening condition.
01:26:59.000You can throw money at some problems and it works.
01:27:02.000This 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.
01:27:14.000It 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.
01:28:02.000Yeah, and I have a guarantee for you that their incentives drive them more towards dispensing those drugs than to not dispensing those drugs.
01:28:09.000And it's in large part because the incentive structure of our healthcare system is so revenue oriented.
01:28:15.000It's like, if I do more stuff, if I give you more stuff, I make more money.
01:28:19.000If I decide you don't need it, I make less money.
01:28:22.000And that is one of the things that's driving us all into 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 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.
01:28:42.000When 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?
01:29:02.000That, you know, and I'm married and, you know, we've got two kids, so I don't think she's going anywhere.
01:29:06.000It'd be, like, kind of tough for her to start over at this point.
01:29:10.000You know, I mean, one of my nightmare scenarios is I win and then, like, I can't get stuff done the way that, because that's the fear.
01:29:19.000Because you've talked about this, too.
01:29:21.000Where good people go into government, they get stuck like flies in amber because the system is just designed to keep you from getting anything done.
01:29:27.000But 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 won.
01:29:37.000It'll be like, all right, guys, it's dividend time.
01:29:39.000And then Democrats will be like, yeah, I like money for families.
01:30:08.000And keep in mind, the state that has been demonstrated to love this dividend is Alaska, which is a deep red conservative state.
01:30:15.000It was a Republican governor that passed the plan in the first place.
01:30:18.000He said, who would you rather get the oil money, the government who's just going to screw it up, or you, the people of Alaska?
01:30:24.000And then the people of Alaska were like, us, please.
01:30:26.000Wasn't that to incentivize people to support the idea of drilling in some controversial areas, though?
01:30:32.000There's probably a whole basket of motivations, but now that thing's been in effect for 37 years and is wildly popular.
01:30:40.000So 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.
01:30:55.000Like Milton Friedman, who's the patron saint of libertarian economists, loved this plan.
01:30:59.000Because what libertarians and conservatives hate is government making people's decisions.
01:31:03.000What they like is economic freedom and autonomy.
01:31:06.000I just spoke at a libertarian conference, like LibertyCon, and was like, guys, like the freedom dividend would help people enjoy actual economic freedom.
01:31:15.000Because you get a thousand bucks a month, that makes you more free to do all sorts of things.
01:31:43.000Yeah, who could be against the Freedom Dividend?
01:31:45.000Come on, what kind of asshole do you have to beat?
01:31:49.000This has got to be taking up a tremendous amount of your time.
01:31:52.000Are you doing anything else in addition to doing this, or are you setting aside everything else in your life other than your family obligations?
01:32:14.000Now, 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?
01:32:40.000It is weird sometimes, but I've really liked most of them.
01:32:43.000And so sometimes people ask me like, hey, who do you want your running mate to be?
01:32:46.000And 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.
01:32:53.000So 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 country's heading in the wrong direction.
01:33:04.000In terms of who I think is going to be there in the end, man, it's really interesting.
01:33:08.000I mean, 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, you know, kneecap Bernie.
01:33:43.000That was also the DNC, which is now on the record.
01:33:46.000So now, happily, certainly the DNC has turned a totally different leaf, where the DNC is like, we're not going to do anything that interferes with anyone's prospects.
01:34:25.000You want to know something that's really stupid, but it changed my opinion of him?
01:34:27.000He was being grilled by someone at 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.
01:35:16.000I know that's a stupid thing, but it's like, huh.
01:35:20.000We all suss out details about different people in different ways.
01:35:25.000One reason I'm so grateful for this opportunity is you actually can get a sense of different people in different environments and it does end up impacting your perception.
01:35:36.000People have made decisions on much lesser data points than that.
01:38:25.000So, just on the campaign trail, making the case to different people.
01:38:31.000I was on The Daily Show last week, and that's going to film pretty soon.
01:38:34.000The next big benchmark for the campaign is the Democratic primary debates in June, where they're going to bring all the candidates up.
01:38:41.000And this is something the DNC happily seems like they're being really, really open about, which it's not like, hey, you need to have particular things.
01:40:40.000And I gotta say we were talking as a team about being here and like you have like the biggest audience of just about any media platform in the country right now like bigger than cable news, bigger than anything.
01:41:01.000Someone step up and take that, please.
01:41:03.000I think it's you for the time being, brother.
01:41:06.000But what I was saying was that if people that listen to this conversation donate $10, $20 to my campaign, there are like 10 million people that are going to listen to this.
01:41:15.000That's like $100 to $200 million, and that's enough.
01:41:25.000Do you have a Patreon page or anything like that?
01:41:42.000The thing with people is you've got to make it easy.
01:42:29.000So the FEC was like, well, no problem.
01:42:31.000It's just an act of philanthropy or a gift.
01:42:35.000And 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.
01:42:50.000So we're really inverting this mindset of like scarcity and take, take, take and being like, look, there's like plenty to go around.
01:42:56.000We're like the richest and most advanced society in the history of the world.
01:42:59.000And we can make lives better just by coming together as a people.
01:43:04.000There's nothing stopping the majority of citizens in a democracy from voting ourselves a dividend.
01:43:31.000And 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 anger about the changes that are coming our way.
01:43:41.000And so, a bunch of techies are actually supporting my campaign.
01:43:44.000Because a lot of techies are not jerks.
01:44:12.000And so the goal is to try and make it so that people are actually able to be happy about the inevitable.
01:44:20.000You know, 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.
01:44:28.000You know, 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.
01:44:37.000Well, I love the idea, and it would be amazing if you won.
01:44:41.000I mean, it really would be fascinating.
01:44:43.000And 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.
01:44:49.000And he was saying that it's inevitable, that you're going to need something like that, that it's coming.
01:44:55.000Yeah, and to 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.
01:45:53.000Particularly if you accept the fact that all of the signs you would expect if we were displacing labor are already there.
01:46:00.000Man leaving the workforce, 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.
01:46:09.000And 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.
01:46:21.000We 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.
01:46:29.000Like, this is very much about human empowerment, and the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.
01:46:36.000Last question, because I guess no discussion of presidential policy and the possibility of someone like you running this country is – 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 particularly over the last couple of years with Russia?
01:47:25.000And if we have any credible evidence that you are tampering with our information, 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.
01:47:37.000And the people of the United States will support me on this.
01:47:53.000Now, I'm thinking 80-90% of Americans would get behind that and be like, how are we just looking at it being like, what are we going to do?
01:48:13.000And if you go back to Sam Harris' podcast that we were discussing, which is called The War of Information.
01:48:18.000I think that's what it's called, Information War or War of Information.
01:48:21.000A recent podcast from the last couple of weeks.
01:48:24.000They detail how there's essentially...
01:48:27.000Just 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.
01:48:44.000And they are laughing their asses off.
01:49:53.000And the American people would be like, about time, because, you know, if we can't trust ourselves or each other or what we're seeing, and this is before deepfakes and the rest of it starts hitting.
01:50:03.000Like, if you're actually going to believe in democracy, then you have to start protecting our information as fast as possible.
01:50:10.000And 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.
01:50:43.000You still need some information to vote.
01:50:45.000So we need to try and find new ways for you to get quality information.
01:50:50.000They're just throwing 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.
01:50:57.000Like you said, these are problems and we have to start solving them.
01:51:01.000If you still believe that democracy is the best form of government and that's what we're going to carry forward, which you obviously have to believe, like you have to go with that as your model.
01:51:11.000And 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.
01:51:18.000Things are trending in a terrible, terrible direction.