#202 — A Conversation with Andrew Yang
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Summary
In this episode of the Making Sense Podcast, Sam Harris sits down with former presidential candidate Andrew Yang to discuss his 2016 campaign, his journey to the White House, and his thoughts on the current state of the country. They also talk about how technology has changed the way we live and work, and what it means for the future of the world, and how we can prepare for the coming automation of the 21st century, and the impact it will have on the world as a whole, if we don t prepare for it. Sam and Andrew discuss how technology can be a force for good, and why it s important to prepare for its inevitable impact on the future. And, of course, there's a lot more to be said about the Trump administration and its impact on our world, including what it really means and how it's going to affect us in the long-term, and whether or not we should be worried about it. This is a great episode, and I hope you'll listen to it and share it with your friends, family, colleagues, and your friends in your social media feeds, because it's a must-listen! to make sense of what's going on in the world and what's to come. -Sam Harris The Making Sense podcast is a production of Gimlet Media. Please consider subscribing to our newest podcast, Making Sense, wherever you get your news and information, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, wherever else you re listening to podcasts, and social media, and wherever you re able to access the latest news and updates from the latest episodes of the making sense. Thanks for listening to the podcast, and remember to leave us your thoughts and opinions on the things you care about the things that make sense. We really do appreciate it! - Sam Harris - Thank you! -- A very special thanks to Sam Harris, and we really appreciate the things he's doing the most about the world. . -Jon Soraya, the author of Making Sense: A Good Thing, Good Morning, Good Things, Good Life, Good Times, Good People, Good Stuff, Good News, and Good Things: That's a Podcast. -- Jonestowns, Jon s Workday, Good Day, Good Work, Good Hustle, Good Talk, Good Relationships, Good Thoughts, Good Habits, Good Vibes, Good Grief, Good Dreams, Good Problems, and More! -- Jon s Good Things.
Transcript
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There was this period when everyone who was supporting our campaign was because they heard
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Yeah, well, it's really, it was amazing to witness.
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Obviously, the major assist was to get you on Rogan's podcast after you did mine, which
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just completely blew you up because he has this, an audience so large that the mainstream media
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has yet to even understand what's happening in podcasting.
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And, you know, I can only imagine it's the beginning of the Andrew Yang show on various
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And I have to tell you that I remember our conversation.
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And then I remember watching your conversation with Joe on AI after you and I spoke.
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And then I realized, oh, my gosh, Sam was waiting for someone like me, where you'd been talking
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about trying to prepare society for AI for years.
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And you were like, how the heck is this going to happen?
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And I only figured out after the fact that you'd essentially paved the road for me before
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I think in any political cycle, you would be a breath of fresh air.
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But in the current environment, I mean, now even more so, but, you know, back when you
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first appeared, what was so amazing and depressing was, you know, the juxtaposition between what
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should be possible in a U.S. president and what is actual in the case of Trump.
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Before, you know, anyone ever heard of you, we all knew that there are people in the world
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who understand science and who have read widely and who are deeply curious about the way the world
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works and who are normal human beings who have fallen in love with some person at some point
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in their lives, you know, who feel real compassion for the suffering of other people.
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And people who are clearly moved by ethical arguments and the progress of ideas.
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You're someone for whom it's obvious that the last thousand years of human progress has
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And what we have in place of a person like that in the Oval Office, we have a barbarian with
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a smartphone who appears to love nothing but fame and money and golf.
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And an interesting thought has never escaped his lips.
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The level of hope that was, you know, hurled on your shoulders was kind of abnormal because
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of, you know, the context in which you're appearing.
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But really, it's the fact that you're not in any sense a normal politician is wonderful.
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And I hope we draw more and more lessons from how far you got in the last campaign.
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And I hope you stay in the center of our conversation about how to dig out of COVID land, because
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obviously your primary plank in your campaign, the UPI, I mean, that is an idea whose time has
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come and it was almost like, you know, you were a prophet in light of what was soon to
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So, yeah, I'm looking forward to talking through all of this with you.
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Yeah, I thought we're going to automate jobs and send everyone home.
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And it turns out that we're all home for a different reason right now.
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You know, I was joking with someone, but I was serious.
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It's like, I do think that I had the only stump speech that referenced the Spanish flu of
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1918, for me, I was saying that that was the last time American life expectancy declined
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for three years in a row, which we just had happen in the last three years.
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But this time, I have to say, Sam, it's like the things I was concerned about have all been
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Now, instead of closing 50% of America's malls, we've closed virtually all of them.
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But a lot of those jobs are going to be gone for good.
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Yeah, so maybe we can talk about what you think the COVID pandemic has exposed in our
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Obviously, it's accelerated the arrival of the future.
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What are you expecting to be true once we emerge from this at whatever point in terms
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of the effects on the economy and how effective or not our pumping trillions of dollars into
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the system will be and how the postmortem on that might reveal incredible levels of corruption.
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What are you expecting to be true in six months or a year?
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I think these are catastrophic times for tens of millions of Americans.
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And it's frustrating that for whatever reason, the gravity of the situation is not as clear
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to some people as it is to me or others who know how tenuous a hold many Americans already
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had on their month-to-month paycheck-to-paycheck ability to make ends meet.
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And watching our government try to send money to people even is incredibly frustrating because
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we're missing so many people in the mechanisms we're using.
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hearing these stories of people calling their state unemployment office day after day and
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just never getting through because we're asking systems to do things that they're not designed
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The state unemployment office is not designed to all of a sudden take millions of inquiries.
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And the thing that occurs to me, as I think would occur to a lot of people listening to
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this, why do people have to call a phone line and connect to a person in order to access these
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Andrew, let's drill down on that for a second because this is so bizarre and potentially it's
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So your idea, which doesn't originate with you, but which you have brought into such prominence
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of universal basic income, is that this is something that the government can do well,
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We should be able to just send checks to everybody.
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But in the current environment, we're recognizing that even that isn't good enough.
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We need a digital infrastructure that can directly give money to people.
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And correct me if I'm wrong, currently, you can't even apply for this money unless you
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have a previous tax return, which is going to leave out millions of people who most need
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So maybe you can discuss how far we're falling short of what should be possible here in terms
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of just getting money to people as quickly as we can.
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So I just want to relate my experience with my organization just a number of weeks ago.
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We were trying to get money into people's hands and we called JPMorgan Chase.
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We called Citigroup and said, hey, can we get money to people in the Bronx who have accounts
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We even asked them, can we buy bank cards from you that we will somehow physically get
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And we wound up working with a local organization that had people's financial info, neighborhood
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And we sent a million dollars to a thousand families in the Bronx through that organization.
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And my direct experience with this is the same experience we're having society-wide, where
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the government's saying, OK, let's send everyone money.
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And then they look around and say, well, how do we know where people are?
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How do we know what account to send the money to or address if it's a check?
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And the best information they have is through tax returns.
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That's the majority of the mechanism they're using.
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It misses, it turns out, millions of people who didn't file taxes because they made below
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a certain amount or they're working in, frankly, some kind of informal environment
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where maybe they're cleaning people's houses and they're just getting paid cash.
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And so they didn't file taxes either because they didn't make enough or because, frankly,
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they were just like, well, I'm just going to operate and pay my bills in cash.
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So because we're using people's tax returns, if you didn't have that connection to the government
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and a bank account on record for them to return your tax refund to, then you're not getting
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And that's, unfortunately, that's tens of millions of the most needy Americans.
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Because if you can imagine the folks that aren't filing taxes, many of them are quite
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The thing about UBI, which strikes me as so much better than many remedies that seem very
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much like it, is that there's no question of means testing it.
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Because people worry, well, does it really make sense to be sending Jeff Bezos a $1,000 check?
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But obviously, if our tax structure were rational, Jeff would be paying an enormous amount, I mean,
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more than anyone, back into the system in taxes.
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So it wouldn't matter if he was also on the dole getting UBI, right?
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So it seems like we should just take all the friction out of this and get money to everyone
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Yeah, we should be flooding the zone with money, honestly.
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And the incredibly frustrating thing is that if you really wanted to account for the Jeffs
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of the world, you could just take out of their tax returns later.
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You know, it's like they can just pay it back in 2020 or 2021 in their tax returns next year.
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And I've talked to people who did not qualify for stimulus checks because their income was
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And so they're looking up saying like, why am I not getting this $1,200?
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And if it turns out they didn't need it, we can always just claw it back in taxes later.
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Though, to me, that shouldn't even be that necessary.
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But if you were going to worry about the Jeffs of the world, you could always just get it
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You know, like the theory being that right now we're in crisis mode.
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So my concern now is that this is going to increase wealth inequality in ways that will
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And, you know, how we navigate that moment, I think, is everything hinges on that.
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I mean, I worry about the loss of social cohesion.
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I worry about a level of political partisanship that really seems to be indicative of a failing
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And I feel like we've been on the cusp of that really every day under Trump with respect
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to the level of partisan rhetoric and the degree to which the two sides can't get on
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the same page for the purposes of ordinary political compromise.
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And you obviously, at this point, know much more about that than I do.
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But I just worry that in the aftermath of whatever is going to happen here economically, the people
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who will weather this, you know, much better than anyone else are the people who are already
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And whether a middle class exists in a year is really an open question.
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And so I just wonder what your thoughts are about that.
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And what did you learn through the experience of campaigning all that time and going to more
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American cities than I will ever go to in the rest of my life?
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We could be tied in terms of number of town halls.
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So what's your view of our ongoing economic emergency between now and next year?
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You hit the nail on the head where we are going to eviscerate what's left of the American
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There was an executive in Silicon Valley, Vala Afshar, who said 2020 will vastly accelerate
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And you think about them, you're like, oh, yeah, all of that's happening.
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E-commerce, drone delivery, digital contactless payments, video conferencing, autonomous vehicles,
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wearable health monitors, 3D manufacturing, voice mobile applications, online learning,
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And now we've just revved them up into overdrive because we need to do some of these things
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And if you look at autonomous cars and trucks, wouldn't you rather get picked up in a vehicle
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that has been sanitized and a human has not sat in, unfortunately?
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Like all of the arguments is like, oh, you need a person for that.
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It's like now that the person is a net negative in terms of someone's confidence level, in terms
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of not just the way we feel about it, but the actual transmission rate of the coronavirus.
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And so you're seeing companies that were on the fence about throwing people overboard and automating
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processes now making a very, very clear investment in these technologies.
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And you can see it in what the stock market is saying, where when people are announcing record
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layoffs, their prices go up, the stock values go up.
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Because investors know that if you can shrink your workforce, then the returns on capital
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So this is going to be disastrous for tens of millions of American workers over time.
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And the government is the only entity that can meaningfully try to resuscitate the middle
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class and the opportunities available to most Americans in the days to come.
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And I know many people listening to this are not going to love the message that the government
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is going to be the center of the universe for these decisions.
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But unfortunately, that's what we're faced with.
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Yeah, well, that's always the first sticking point.
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When you talk to someone who, a fantastically wealthy person who recoils at the idea of paying
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more in taxes, who doesn't like the concept of redistribution, not because they're callously
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inconsiderate of the suffering of other people, and not because they don't care about wealth
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Really, the first thing you encounter is that everyone has a fundamental skepticism, and
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granted, some of this is well-earned, that the government can do anything right, that
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it just seems like a waste of money to give the government more money to try to solve problems.
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And there's this, you know, the strain of libertarianism that suggests that it should, by default, more
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or less always fall to the private sector to solve these problems.
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But a few things I think should be obvious here.
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One is that there are many problems for which the private sector can't produce a ready solution,
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either because the incentives just aren't there, or you just have a massive coordination problem,
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and you just can't respond flexibly all at once.
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And I think, you know, responding to a global pandemic is certainly an obvious commercial
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for a problem that needs to be solved, even beyond government.
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I mean, we need a global response to this problem.
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The lack of, you know, our internal leadership is galling and terrifying, but, you know, our complete
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abdication of any role in the wider world in coordinating a response to COVID is also just
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But so the idea that we should be starving the government in the context where at any
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moment problems of this sort can appear, and we're dealing with, you know, a public health
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emergency and an economic emergency simultaneously, and, you know, we have these piecemeal efforts
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of, you know, various well-intentioned billionaires, you know, riding in on their white horses to
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solve some very local problem, you know, delivering PPE or something, you know, and then probably
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the most heroic case, you have Bill Gates really doing great work, inspiring, you know, vaccine
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But I mean, clearly, that is not a surrogate for the wise use of government resources.
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And even if you think the government is just incompetent and can't spend your money well,
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the answer to that problem is to create a better government.
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Yeah, it's to actually get it operating at a higher level.
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Not to say it's like, oh, well, because like you said, there really is no other answer to
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And I remember when I was telling people I was going to run, there's a Silicon Valley
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CEO who said to me, he was like, what are you doing?
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Like, you're going into the most useless environment possible.
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Because he liked me and like, you know, thought I was effective.
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And he was like, why are you running headlong into the universe of inefficacy?
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And then I said to him, I said, look, like, are things working well in government?
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But like, do we need to get it working at a higher level to avoid calamity?
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And I said this, obviously, before the coronavirus crisis came.
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You know, it's funny, Sam, my wife and I, this was a little while ago, but there was
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like an interview you sat down for and you were describing me and you said something
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about, it's like, this Andrew Yank fellow, he seems like a normal enough guy, except that
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he's crazy enough to ruin his life running for president.
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I mean, what was your, what's the net of your experience running?
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And do you think you will run again or find or seek some other role in government?
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Well, my motivations are the same as they've ever been.
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And the problems have gotten bigger, unfortunately.
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Like, I thought, well, it's unacceptable that we're letting this freight train just bear
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And in my mind, the freight train was the progressive dehumanization of our economy.
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And I saw in the numbers that we had already blasted away millions of manufacturing jobs.
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And there was no real feedback mechanism unless you count Trump and his victory, because most
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of those manufacturing jobs were in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, like
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And, you know, my motivation is as high as it's ever been.
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So I'm just still trying to solve problems every day.
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And my capacity to solve problems is higher now than it was when I started my presidential
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I mean, I certainly learned a lot about becoming president, by running for president, where I
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have a sense as to what I'd missed when I sat down with you a couple of years ago.
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Like, I didn't realize that the process was going to entail certain things.
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But as long as the problems are there and I'm able to contribute, I'm going to do it.
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And if that includes running for office again, then that's what I'm going to do.
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Is there anything you would do differently in hindsight?
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I mean, I could definitely talk about this for a while.
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I mean, one change I would make is that I did not realize that there were a couple hundred
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beltway journalists in D.C. that had significant influence over the press narrative.
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And most of them treated me like a marginal anomaly slash novelty slash ignore him and
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And I'm not sure if my sitting down with them would have changed that.
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Not all of them are as thoughtful as someone like you, where you just evaluate someone based
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Like, that's one thing I figured out, too, is that there are so many people that represent
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these institutions that didn't really think for themselves.
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They just like operated on whatever the institutional incentives or motivations were.
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So I don't know if my sitting down with these couple hundred people would have moved the
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There was so many learnings in Iowa and New Hampshire where we got my favorables up.
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And this is actually true nationwide, where my favorability ratings were as high or higher
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than virtually any other candidate in terms of, do people like me, trust me, think I'm
00:22:16.560
And we just couldn't get them over the threshold of this person should be president, like right
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Like, we got a lot of people to a point where they were like, really like Yang, like really
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hope he becomes a cabinet member or something along those lines.
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But we couldn't quite get people over a threshold of put him in the White House this year.
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And if I run again, that's one of the things I'm spending my time doing is, frankly, normalizing
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myself more, where it just felt like a little bit too much change for some people.
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Yeah, I can imagine it was also the calculation of electability.
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It's like, you know, I want this guy to be president, but I would imagine that the rest
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of the country might not, or he's not going to be able to sell himself in this election
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And so for anyone who's privileging getting rid of Trump above all else, that has to be
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I mean, that's how we wound up with Biden, right?
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But the electability and not Trump calculus has gotten us here.
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I don't know if you want to plunge into a discussion of the remaining months of the 2020 election
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now, or if you have other topics you want to hit.
00:23:30.720
Well, you know, it's I mean, I'm on the same page you are, Sam, where I think that Trump's
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And now I'm going to help Joe defeat him because Joe is going to be the Democratic nominee.
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And to me, any day Trump's in office is bad for civilization, bad for humanity.
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Do you and, you know, I'm not sure if your tongue is going to be tied on any of these
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topics, but I'm just going to just push and until I hit a wall.
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Obviously, he's confined himself to picking a woman for VP, which he did not mention to
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So do you have a strong opinion about who you think he should choose to make his chances
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Obviously, we've spent some time with Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris.
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I've met Stacey Abrams, but I don't know her well.
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I don't know Whitmer, the governor of Michigan.
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I don't know a couple of the other people that we all know are in the consideration set.
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They're good, warm human beings behind the scenes.
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I shouldn't leave her out because I know that she's also.
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Elizabeth has always been very generous to me as well, where I don't know if you remember
00:25:01.140
the debate exchange when she was like, when, you know, we were arguing over automation
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and I asked her to read my book and then she actually read my book and then we talked
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about it like the next debate where she, you know, commended me on it.
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So I like the candidates that I know, Elizabeth, Kamala, Amy in particular.
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I don't have any insight as to where Joe's going to go with that choice.
00:25:24.320
Do you have a sense of what would be the best choice purely from a pragmatic point of
00:25:31.240
You know, I'd have to look at the numbers because I know Joe's team must have numbers
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on this where they're, they're running it and I don't have that data.
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It's like, like, you know, obviously if anyone had run the like, Hey, should Andrew Yang
00:25:49.460
But for the fact that answer always would have been no.
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And so like, obviously that wasn't a very data driven decision.
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But, but it, but it, like when we were running, did we try and get data for any opportunity
00:26:02.740
that we, we had in front of us, whether it was like how we were spending our money or who
00:26:07.600
we were targeting or what to name the freedom dividend or whatever the choices were.
00:26:11.880
It's like when we could get information, we'd get information.
00:26:14.780
There was a point thanks to you and other supporters where we actually could run private
00:26:26.380
Like we, we kept figuring out, you know, one of the things I was proudest of, Sam, is
00:26:30.460
we got the approval for universal basic income up from something like 25% to 66% in the state
00:26:38.780
And we, we knew that because we were asking people about it.
00:26:45.380
It's like certain decisions you make based upon instinct and gut and what you think is right.
00:26:50.640
And then certain things you try and put a finger in the wind and get some numbers for.
00:26:55.600
So now how worried are you about the Biden campaign at this point?
00:27:00.680
I mean, so that the two major things that I see pulling the wind out of his sails are,
00:27:06.240
um, obviously the, the sense that he's too old to be doing this.
00:27:11.280
And here we have a, I mean, there are two forms of asymmetric warfare here.
00:27:17.920
I'm saying every one of his gaffes seems to suggest senescence on some level.
00:27:24.780
Every one of Trump's gaffes seems to just suggest more Trump.
00:27:29.240
And, you know, I have no doubt that Biden is showing the signs of, of age.
00:27:34.100
I mean, you just have to look at video of him speaking 20 years ago to see that.
00:27:38.360
I also know I don't really care given the current circumstance.
00:27:41.660
And, you know, Trump is, whether you want to think of him in, in neurological terms or
00:27:46.960
psychological ones, I mean, he's, he's a deranged person and he's also a terrible speaker.
00:27:53.620
I mean, he's, you know, it's also word salad that you get out of him much of the time.
00:27:57.320
But, strangely, it doesn't suggest anything like, you know, normal infirmity, you know,
00:28:07.680
I mean, Trump has this preternatural energy, you know, of a 300-pound child.
00:28:13.880
And, on some level, there's an unfortunate comparison between him and Biden with respect
00:28:20.760
to age and the inability to get to the end of a paragraph with something like 100% confidence.
00:28:27.080
They both show it, but it just shows up very differently and it has different political
00:28:33.920
Is he just too old to be in a debate with Trump or to campaign successfully?
00:28:39.100
And then there's the, the Me Too scandal or, or incipient scandal, the Tara Reid allegations.
00:28:46.880
And, again, he's up against somebody who can match him, you know, 10, 20x for every Me Too
00:28:53.680
scandal, but it doesn't matter in Trump's world.
00:28:58.620
It wouldn't even matter if we had video of Trump mauling some young woman at a beauty pageant,
00:29:04.140
I mean, it's just, he's functioning in a different political universe.
00:29:08.140
So I'm just wondering how you think those two issues that are dragging on Biden are likely
00:29:22.580
I had a 30-minute sit-down conversation with Joe Biden last week because I was on his podcast.
00:29:29.780
And he is fine, lucid, strong, like, in that setting.
00:29:36.620
And having been on the debate stage with him a number of times and then seen him debate,
00:29:43.500
Like, if you can just stand up there and just, like, debate on national TV or do a town hall
00:29:48.460
for, like, a, you know, hour, two hours, he still is very, very strong in many respects.
00:29:56.680
And I think that the concern around his aging is overblown from my exposure to him as a human
00:30:04.460
Like, I've been around him and, like, he's fine.
00:30:07.240
You know, it's like, and you actually could not do some of the things he's done if you
00:30:11.200
really were struggling, you know, in the serious, serious way.
00:30:14.060
I mean, of course, you know, he's getting older, you know, in the sense, I mean, that's
00:30:18.760
But that stuff, in my experience with him directly, is not as much of a concern.
00:30:23.440
And it's been overblown for a number of reasons.
00:30:26.520
Part of it's, I think, in the internet, it's like, if you wanted to parse something, you
00:30:30.340
could make anyone, I think, seem very gaffe-prone.
00:30:35.000
And, you know, obviously, Joe, you know, I mean, he's, you know, it's like he's had some
00:30:38.880
turns of phrase that, you know, you'd look at, you know, and see that, you know, they
00:30:45.560
On the tarot read front, you know, the way I think about this, Sam, it's like, like, when
00:30:49.700
we've seen other people in this circumstance, like, a pattern has emerged, where if you look
00:30:55.380
at any of, like, the serial predators, you know, it's like, it's never one.
00:30:59.400
It's like, there's just, like, this whole freaking drumbeat.
00:31:02.640
And in my mind, like, if you were to say, hey, has Joe, you know, like, sort of intruded
00:31:09.840
on someone's personal space in a way that we're, like, you know, rustled or touched the
00:31:17.020
But to me, one of the reasons why the media is treating the tarot read allegations the
00:31:22.260
way they are is that there's, like, this one isolated event that seems very, very out of
00:31:28.780
And that if he was the sort of person that could do what he's accused of doing, in my
00:31:33.480
opinion, the odds of there being other episodes that are similar to that sometime in the intervening
00:31:44.380
Because in every other instance, it'd be like if Harvey Weinstein did it to, like, one aspiring
00:31:51.660
Like, that's not the way someone in that position of authority who's a true predator would operate.
00:31:59.220
Like, you would see it, it would happen again, you know, like, months later, months later.
00:32:04.780
Like, you know, there'd be this whole freaking cascade that we've seen with other folks.
00:32:13.100
And then it's like, you know, when you talked about this video of him, like, you know, fondling
00:32:18.000
someone at a pageant, I thought to myself, it's like, does that exist?
00:32:21.360
I mean, you know, it's like, like, we wouldn't be surprised if it did.
00:32:24.760
So, to me, those two concerns are not really the main areas of this election where it's
00:32:33.680
The third thing is that this really is going to become, like it or not, I believe, like
00:32:40.800
And whether 50% or more of us say this is not the direction we want the country to be heading
00:32:49.440
And the funny thing is, Joe defeated me, among other people.
00:32:57.160
Like, there's like this familiarity and comfort people have with Joe, where this election,
00:33:05.240
I believe, is going to be like an up or down vote on Trump.
00:33:09.980
And I think that people are going to put thumbs down because we're trapped in our homes.
00:33:16.240
This pandemic has been mishandled at like the highest levels.
00:33:20.540
You still have chaos in the PPE procurement markets with the federal government outbidding
00:33:27.240
states and just swooping in and grabbing gear for a national stockpile.
00:33:31.660
And like rich states are outbidding poor states, even as the biggest public health problems are
00:33:36.980
in poor parts of the southeast in like Louisiana and Mississippi.
00:33:41.100
So I think that Joe, like you shouldn't evaluate it as like, oh, you know, like in the way where
00:33:50.320
Joe's campaign is limited right now because of the crisis, like he's, you know, there's
00:33:56.160
Like I expected at this point in time where I'd be out there campaigning for Joe because
00:34:02.920
And the fact that we're not is categorically not a good thing because it deprives Joe's
00:34:10.700
campaign of the opportunity to make a case in like conventional ways and have these great
00:34:15.180
backdrops and have press and surrogates and me and a dozen other people out there pounding
00:34:24.220
But I still believe that there's a great chance that Joe wins and Trump loses because so many
00:34:35.360
Well, how much should we blame the other Republicans?
00:34:40.620
And I guess it's an interesting question to put to you because it's pretty obvious that
00:34:44.860
the way you campaigned and your political intuitions here to be as nonpartisan as possible and just
00:34:53.640
to focus on problems and your recognition that there has to be a bipartisan solution to
00:35:02.020
But when you look at the way in which the Republican Party has become a personality cult around Trump,
00:35:10.920
people with real political reputations, you know, people who used to be serious people,
00:35:15.340
even if you, you know, whether or not you agreed with their policies, the way in which they
00:35:18.680
have enabled this incompetent crime family, the Trumps, and propped them up in the face of a
00:35:31.320
But the deluge has been so incessant that it's impossible to focus on any part of it long enough
00:35:38.680
It's just, this has not seemed like normal American politics.
00:35:43.080
Everyone expects some degree of venality and complicity and cowardice in politics.
00:35:49.780
But this is just, it just seems like we're in another universe.
00:35:52.820
I mean, we are in some kind of banana republic territory with how our politics has turned.
00:35:58.040
And it is the story of Republican complicity, people like Mitch McConnell.
00:36:03.240
And so I guess even beyond the election, I mean, I think if Trump loses in the fall,
00:36:08.520
I think many people will feel like there should be some reckoning, right?
00:36:12.520
I mean, I feel like we're going to need a truth and reconciliation commission to process
00:36:20.660
And that's in the best case of Biden winning and all of us being able to hit reset in 2021.
00:36:28.320
There's no truth and reconciliation tribunal coming.
00:36:30.960
Like, politically, how should, how should we walk that line in the next six months with
00:36:42.800
And just in the case of Biden winning, I guess I'm tempted to say, all right, we're giving
00:36:47.780
a mulligan to everybody because there's so many problems we have to solve.
00:36:52.280
So, you know, you remember those four years where you, you utterly destroyed the reputation
00:36:56.860
of the United States on the world stage and flirted with the complete unraveling of our
00:37:02.420
Well, we're just going to give you no harm, no foul on that.
00:37:09.680
I think that it just may not be open to us because we will finally confront what a horror
00:37:17.000
One thing I disagree with you on, Sam, is this thing has been going on for decades.
00:37:25.460
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00:37:40.420
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