Andrew Yang, author of the book The War on Normal People, joins us this week to talk about why he s running for president and why he thinks it s the right thing to do. Andrew talks about how he got into politics, why he decided to run for president, and what he s learned about himself along the way. He also talks about what s going on in the inner cities of Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis, and why it s important to have a middle-class college education. And he talks about why you should get a $1,000-a-month free and clear so you can start making moves towards the sort of work that you want for yourself, that you value, and that you would find fulfilling and exciting. This is an [Expert] level episode, which means some parts of the conversation may not make sense unless you ve listened to the entire thing. If you haven t checked it out, you ll want to skip right over to the end of the show to find out which parts of Andrew Yang s story you should be listening to and which parts should be left out. You ll get the most out of this episode. Thanks to our sponsor, PolicyGenius. Go check it out right now! Rate/subscribe in Apple Podcasts! Rate, review, and subscribe to our new podcast, The Sunday Special! Subscribe to our newest podcast, Sunday Special. Subscribe, review and subscribe on iTunes! Thank you for listening to The Six Figure Podcast! The Six Figures Podcast! Subscribe to Six Figures: Six Figures? Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices and become a supporter of Six Figures in our new ad campaign. Become a supporter! Become a Friend of the Six Figures Campaign? Subscribe and review our new sponsor, Become a Patron! Download a Reviewed Member of the Neat & Retweeted Podcast Subscribe in iTunes Learn more at Six Figures and Subscribe on Podchaser Leave Us a Review on iTunes and Subscribe to the Podcharts Connected to our Podcasts? Learn about the Podcasts That Will Help Support Our New Music, Subscribe to Our Sponsorships & Support Us On The Same Podcasts Subscribe To Our Podcasts And Subscribe On Spare Some Places To Learn More About Us On Social Media Places We Review Our New Podcasts We Will Be Released Soon and More!
00:00:00.000My flagship proposal is we give every American $1,000 a month free and clear.
00:00:04.000If you have a little bit more freedom from scarcity, then you can start making moves towards the sort of work that you want for yourself, that you value, that you would find fulfilling and exciting.
00:00:15.000Hello and welcome to the Sunday special We're joined this week by Andrew Yang, author of the book The War on Normal People.
00:00:27.000I can't wait to get to my conversation with Andrew.
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00:01:46.000Well, first of all, I just have to thank you again for coming on the show, because we've invited a lot of folks on the left, particularly members of the Democratic Party who are running for president.
00:01:55.000You're the only person who's accepted thus far, and so we appreciate the conversation.
00:01:58.000It really does mean a lot to me that you would come on, and I'm sure that you will get some slings and arrows for it.
00:02:40.000I went to, you know, I studied economics and political science in college, didn't know what to do, so I went to law school and then practiced law for five unhappy months and then left to start an ill-fated dot-com in the first bubble.
00:02:53.000But then I'd been bitten by the bug and said this is much better than being an unhappy lawyer.
00:02:56.000And so I worked at a healthcare software company and then I became the head of an education company that grew to become number one in the U.S.
00:03:03.000and was acquired by a public company in 2009.
00:03:06.000So, at this point, my career was going really well, but it was the wake of the financial crisis, and I thought that we had all of these whiz kids heading to Wall Street and McKinsey and not enough starting generative businesses in places like Detroit or Cleveland or Baltimore or St.
00:03:25.000I started an organization called Venture for America that helped create several thousand jobs in those cities and another dozen cities or so around the U.S.
00:03:33.000And the reason I'm running for president is that when you spend time in the Midwest and the South, you see the aftermath of the fact that we automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, all the swing states that Trump needed to win and did win.
00:03:49.000And so I'm running for president to wake up America to the fact that it is not immigrants that are causing economic problems.
00:03:54.000It is the fact that we're going through the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of the country.
00:03:59.000It's called the fourth industrial revolution and we need to progress to the next stage of capitalism in order for our country to prosper in an age where artificial intelligence and self-driving cars and trucks will become real.
00:04:12.000You talk a lot in the book, The War on Normal People, about these people who are in the middle of the country and whose towns are sort of being left behind, their jobs are sort of being left behind.
00:04:20.000Do you think that the Democratic Party has properly spoken to a lot of those people?
00:04:23.000There's a feeling that President Trump won specifically because the Democratic Party largely forgot about those folks.
00:04:29.000Well, to me, there's a very powerful central economic narrative where if you look at the voting district data, there's literally a straight line up between the adoption of industrial automation in an area and the movement towards Donald Trump.
00:04:44.000And so to me, Democrats need to try and address that set of problems.
00:04:48.000And if they fail in that, then they're not trying to solve the problems that got Donald Trump elected.
00:04:53.000Like Donald Trump is not himself Well, he's to me a manifestation of this greater economic megatrend, and it's up to the Democratic Party, in my opinion, to help America navigate this wave as opposed to focusing too much on Donald Trump, who to me is a symptom.
00:05:11.000There's been a lot of talk about the effect of automation, and some folks I've talked to, sitting in your chair, have suggested solutions to automation, including restriction of automation itself.
00:05:20.000Tucker Carlson suggested on my show, for example, that he wanted to actually legislate away self-driving trucks.
00:05:25.000You don't make any of those sorts of sweeping pronouncements about limiting technology, really, in your book.
00:05:32.000I think there might be isolated instances where you need to at least try and buy some time.
00:05:39.000I talk about truckers a fair amount in my book.
00:05:44.000Being a truck driver is the most common job in 29 states.
00:05:45.000nine states, three and a half million truck drivers, 94% men, average age 49.
00:05:50.000And so if you can foresee that you might displace tens or hundreds of thousands of these truck drivers over a particular period of time, you might want to slow that down because you might need to buy yourself time to help assimilate that adjustment.
00:06:04.000But generally speaking, trying to just stop automation is a loser over time because you might even be able to stick your finger in one part of the dam, but then something else is going to break anyways.
00:06:18.000It's like if we tried to say, hey, you can't automate truck driving, then there'd be some other part of the economy where you'd look at it and say, well, I guess we're going to automate away the warehouse workers.
00:06:30.000We're going to automate away the dock workers.
00:06:32.000So with all of that said, the solutions that you propose are pretty big government solutions.
00:06:38.000You're a guy who obviously worked in the private sector and you ran a charity that was specifically designed for helping people in the sector.
00:06:44.000Why do you think that stuff is insufficient?
00:06:46.000Why isn't it that it should just be about private charity, for example?
00:06:49.000It's been my proposal is that there needs to be a lot more upswing in private charity, that we need to encourage people to leave some of these dying towns.
00:06:55.000You seem to suggest that these people should essentially be able to stay in these dying towns and the government should take care of them there.
00:07:01.000Well, I think there are several paths forward, but we have to choose one, and we have to figure it out together.
00:07:07.000It's like, what is the path forward for many, many Americans?
00:07:11.000And the reason why I'm confident that we need to go bigger is that I was one of the most celebrated social entrepreneurs of the last number of years when I started this multi-million dollar organization, Venture for America.
00:07:22.000You know, movie made about us, honored by the White House.
00:07:26.000And I realized that our efforts, as much as I was proud of them, were like pouring water into a bathtub as a giant hole ripped in the bottom.
00:07:34.000Where, if you look at the numbers, we're looking at three to four times the level of labor force displacement as the first industrial revolution, or the industrial revolution at the turn of the century.
00:07:45.000And so if you say, hey, charities are going to handle that, like charities don't have the scale to address needs this big.
00:07:52.000And I know this because I've worked in that space and I've, you know, hung out with the heads of foundations and just the scale is wrong for the scope of the changes.
00:08:01.000So let's talk about the crisis itself.
00:08:03.000So the book in particular, the first half is rather dystopian about kind of its description of the economy, particularly in certain parts.
00:08:09.000And you do make sort of a bifurcation between big cities where you say the economy is growing and some of the outlying rural areas where you say that it's not growing.
00:08:16.000What about the argument that the economy seems to be doing pretty well, that every time there is a technological change historically, there's been worker displacement, that there will be people left behind because that's just the nature of creative destruction, but that new jobs will be created in ways that we can't foresee right now.
00:08:29.000What makes you think that this time is sort of the cataclysm?
00:08:32.000Well, we will 100% create many, many new jobs that we can't predict.
00:08:36.000And the issue is that they're going to be for different people in different places with different skills than the people that are going to lose their jobs are going to be able to take advantage of.
00:08:48.000And so, if you look at a couple of big historical references, number one, the Industrial Revolution, which people generally refer to and say, hey, we've been through this before.
00:08:56.000The Industrial Revolution at the turn of the century included mass riots that killed dozens of Americans and caused billions of dollars worth of damage.
00:09:03.000We now have Labor Day as a national holiday because of those riots.
00:09:07.000We implemented universal high school in 1911 in part as a response to these problems.
00:09:13.000Bain and McKinsey project that this time is going to be three to four times faster and larger than that industrial revolution in terms of displacement of workers.
00:09:22.000So even if you just rely upon history, you would expect a lot of violence and tumult and conflict.
00:09:30.000Number two, I studied economics in college, and according to economic theory, if you were to automate away 4 million manufacturing jobs, which we did, those workers would move, get retrained, rescaled, find new, higher productivity jobs, and all would be well.
00:09:43.000But when I dug into the numbers, it turns out that almost half of those workers left the workforce and never worked again.
00:09:48.000And of that group, about half filed for disability.
00:09:51.000And then you saw a surge in substance abuse and drug overdoses and suicides, none of which were in my economics textbook.
00:09:59.000It didn't say, hey, workers are going to go home, fall off a disability, and start dying at record levels.
00:10:04.000So if you look at that fact pattern, you say, OK, that's what happened when 4 million manufacturing workers lost their jobs.
00:10:10.000That's actually a much better sign of what's going to happen when the 3.5 million truckers and the 2.5 million call center workers and the over 10 million retail workers suffer from the same sort of displacement.
00:10:20.000Now, the conservative counterargument to some of what you're talking about would be, right, all these people went on disability, but they were able to, meaning that a lot of people were able to find a social safety net.
00:10:29.000They've been reliant on that social safety net.
00:10:30.000That hasn't actually rebuilt the forms of social capital necessary to have functioning societies.
00:10:35.000You've seen people who are supported by the government, largely, who are still getting addicted to drugs, people who are committing suicide at record rates, who are staying unemployed for years at a time, and who are staying in towns where presumably I mean, there are 7 million unfilled jobs, apparently, in the United States right now, and there are a lot of people who are out of work, and people, as you mentioned in the book, are basically staying where they are.
00:10:57.000Is the incentive structure maybe misaligned because of government intervention into the system?
00:11:01.000You know, it's a very interesting question.
00:11:03.000And one of the things that I found worrisome in the data was that Americans are migrating between states at multi-decade lows, which is a terrible sign for dynamism.
00:11:19.000It's something very optimistic about moving to another state for a new job.
00:11:24.000And so I would love to help more Americans do just that.
00:11:27.000And one of my policy proposals is that we pay moving expenses for Americans who want to move.
00:11:32.000Because to your point, there are a lot of Americans who are stuck in place because they're underwater in a mortgage.
00:11:38.000There are costs associated with a move that they can't manage properly.
00:11:41.000But a lot of them are also in place because they have families.
00:11:44.000And so it's tough if you're going through a hard time and then you have like the only people that you're close to in your life are living in that same town and then you're like, hey guys, I'm gonna leave to move to the big city.
00:11:56.000You know, you're asking people in some ways to sacrifice what little they can rely upon in their lives.
00:12:03.000I mean, and I think that that's sort of where I am in the sense that I wonder if this is more about an American mentality shift that has to happen as opposed to government interventionism.
00:12:11.000So maybe we need to reinstall the sort of pioneer ethos that supposedly animated the United States in the first place.
00:12:17.000This idea, OK, you do have to pick up and you do have to move and you do have to make difficult decisions to better your economic life.
00:12:23.000And do you ever worry that the description of the upcoming economic catastrophe is actually disincentivizing people from going out and trying to forge forth?
00:12:32.000Because I do think that how people think has a major impact on how they decide to embrace the job market.
00:12:37.000Well, like you say, you know, I mean, facts are very stubborn things.
00:12:42.000And so, you know, like, I'm convinced that we're, let's say, for example, 30% of American malls are going to close in the next four years and working in retail is the most common job in America.
00:12:52.000I mean, those are objective facts, like Amazon sucking up another $20 billion in commerce every year.
00:12:57.000And so saying, hey, this is happening, I don't think that necessarily is going to freeze people in place.
00:13:03.000Like the hope is that we can galvanize energy around folks trying to improve their situations and adopting real solutions.
00:13:09.000But I couldn't agree with you more that there is a mindset that we would love to have more Americans inhabit.
00:13:19.000And what I'm going to suggest is that there's something Very optimistic and confident about that pioneer ethos that you described, which is like, hey, I'm going to just like go and we're going to make it happen.
00:13:30.000I'm going to farm, you know, in some undiscovered frontier and like we're going to create a better life for ourselves.
00:13:36.000And that is not happening for a lot of Americans.
00:13:38.000The question is, how do we get them from where they are now to that point?
00:13:43.000I want to ask you about your perspective on jobs, because it seems like you have an interesting view of jobs.
00:13:47.000On the one hand, you say that people obviously need them, they need them for a sense of meaning.
00:13:51.000On the other hand, you seem to suggest that those jobs aren't forthcoming any time soon.
00:13:55.000So do you think that it's the jobs that provide meaning, or the check that provides meaning?
00:13:58.000At one point in your book, for example, you specifically criticize this exact bifurcation.
00:14:03.000You basically say that there are two completely oppositional ideas, page 182, two completely oppositional ideas that many people seem to hold simultaneously.
00:14:12.000First, work is vital and the core of human experience.
00:14:14.000Second, no one will want to work if they don't have to.
00:14:19.000Do you think that work is vital and people are going to work?
00:14:22.000Or do you think that work is not vital and that this hole can sort of be filled by the government paying for it?
00:14:27.000So I assume that you believe work is vital.
00:14:29.000I mean, you talk a lot about it in the book.
00:14:31.000And you're opposing that to the idea that people won't work if they don't have to.
00:14:36.000But you're acknowledging a lot of people aren't going to work, right?
00:14:38.000I mean, your basic government proposals involve a lot of paying people, whether they're working or not, obviously.
00:14:43.000With the goal that we create more work, because I'm very much in the work is vital camp.
00:14:48.000And that's not just my thinking about it.
00:14:52.000That's just in the data, where if you look at what happens to idle men in particular, we spend a lot of time on the computer playing video games and doing other things.
00:15:00.000We volunteer less than employed men, even though we have more time.
00:15:04.000Our drinking and substance abuse tends to go up.
00:15:08.000And over time, there are some antisocial patterns that develop and idle men to a higher degree than women.
00:15:17.000And so if you look at that and you say, OK, this actually is pretty consistent with my intuition that work is incredibly important and vital.
00:15:24.000It provides structure, purpose, fulfillment, meaning, social structures to to people every day.
00:15:29.000And so the question is, how do we create more things like that?
00:15:33.000Now, to me, the best path to create that is to put economic resources into people's hands in the form of a freedom dividend of $1,000 a month, which would then allow more people to do the sort of work that either they want to do or that their community has a need for.
00:15:49.000And the goal is to create jobs, and putting $1,000 a month into people's hands would create at least 2 million new jobs just because the buying power would just go right back into local businesses and communities.
00:15:59.000Now, all that being said, I do think our definition, our notion of work should evolve.
00:16:06.000And one example I use is my wife is at home.
00:16:14.000I mean, you know, she works harder than I do.
00:16:17.000I mean, I'm running for president and she's working harder.
00:16:21.000But the market values her work at zero.
00:16:23.000Society, in some ways, minimizes the value of that work.
00:16:27.000And so, to me, we should broaden the definitions of work to include being a parent or caregiver, but also arts, creativity, entrepreneurship, journalism, things that we know people coaching, volunteering, civic engagement, things that we know people want to do more of, but that right now society will systematically either undervalue or not have any monetary value.
00:16:55.000So I want to ask you about the location of meaning.
00:16:57.000So I've heard, as I say, I think there's a point where the populist left sort of meets the populist right.
00:17:02.000And the suggestion is that if we structure the economy in certain ways that this will provide more jobs and that the jobs are what are going to provide meaning.
00:17:08.000But you also suggest that You know, the Freedom Dividend, while it may create more jobs as sort of an ancillary benefit, there are a lot of people who are not going to be able to work, who are going to be on the Freedom Dividend, who are going to be receiving UBI.
00:17:20.000In fact, UBI studies don't show increased employment in virtually any study.
00:17:24.000At best, they show even employment or declines in employment in the areas in which they are tried.
00:17:29.000And then you sort of suggest that people will be able to find meaning in all the other things you're talking about, volunteering and community and art.
00:17:35.000But we're not seeing that with disability.
00:17:37.000So people are dependent on disability.
00:17:38.000They're not engaging more in art making or learning to play violin or volunteering more.
00:17:43.000They're engaging more with video games, as you talk about, or drug use, or in some cases, they become suicidal.
00:17:50.000We're seeing family breakdown with all of that.
00:17:52.000So what makes you think the freedom dividend is going to have a different effect on human behavior than, for example, current government welfare systems have?
00:18:00.000The first is that money does not somehow convey meaning.
00:18:05.000And you know, the best it can do is maybe provide circumstances that help people find a path towards some work that they find fulfilling.
00:18:15.000The second thing is that I have a friend whose sister is on disability and she's afraid to volunteer in her community because she's afraid she'd be noticed as able-bodied and thus lose her benefits.
00:18:25.000And so this freedom dividend would be unconditional and free and clear and so that person would be volunteering and would not have any fear that, you know, her benefits are going to be taken away.
00:18:33.000The third thing is that there's something very, very important about conceiving of yourself as either able or disabled.
00:18:41.000And so if you're literally getting a check for being disabled, your two ideas of yourself are one, I'm genuinely disabled, which, and most people do have some kind of genuine ailment, you know, physical or mental, or two, I'm defrauding our society and I'm actually totally fine.
00:18:59.000And I'm going to suggest that most people will fall into bucket number one.
00:19:03.000That it's like a rare person who's just like, I'm 100% fine and this disability check I'm getting is just me being completely fabricating some condition.
00:19:12.000And so if you invert that mentality and you say, hey, you are not disabled, you are fine, you are a citizen of the Richest, most advanced country in the history of the world and you're getting this cash and it's going to be yours no matter what because it's yours and you deserve it.
00:19:26.000Then that would be more constructive in terms of pushing more people into things that they'd feel good about, that society would feel good about.
00:19:34.000Then if we say, hey, there's something wrong with you and we're going to give you this cash in order to survive.
00:19:39.000So, with all of that said, is your proposal for essentially universal basic income, the freedom dividend, do you see that as substituting for the vast agglomeration of welfare state policies we currently have, which was sort of Milton Friedman's proposal, or do you see it as another dividend on top of whatever is being paid?
00:19:53.000We're already paying tens of thousands of dollars per household in poverty in the United States in welfare.
00:20:00.000So, my plan, the Freedom Dividend, would be opt-in.
00:20:03.000But if you opt-in, then you will forego benefits from the existing programs.
00:20:07.000And so, if you are currently receiving more than $1,000 in benefits, then you would look at this and say, hey, like, I'm not going to do anything and my life is going to be as it is.
00:20:16.000If you decide to opt-in for the Freedom Dividend, it might be very appealing because it's unconditional, there's no administration, no case manager, it's $1,000 cash, you can do whatever you want, then you forego your current enrollment.
00:20:27.000And so what you'd see is you'd see we would shrink the enrollment in the 126 or so different welfare programs that we have, and then over time those enrollments would go down, which is very much the goal, because the current programs, no one loves them, and they do have many unfortunate incentives attached to them, where if you do better, then you get less, and so many people are under-reporting how they're doing, or constructing a world where they are maximizing their benefits.
00:20:55.000So when we talk about the cost of this thing, and you talk about it in the book, The War on Normal People, you talk about it'll cost maybe $1.3 trillion a year.
00:21:02.000That would be in addition to current budgeting, presumably.
00:21:06.000Honestly, that's obviously a lot of spending off the top.
00:21:09.000But beyond that, it does raise the question as to, would this be limited in any way?
00:21:13.000Because every government program, as Ronald Reagan said, basically has a bill of the mortal life.
00:21:18.000And if it were to start at $1,000 a month, inflation adjusted, How quickly does this become somebody saying, you know what, it really ought to be $3,000 a month because that's a popular pitch.
00:21:31.000And how do we limit that from just eating the rest of government?
00:21:33.000Because entitlement programs obviously are running us ragged now.
00:21:36.000They obviously represent two-thirds of the federal budget.
00:21:39.000Adding another massive entitlement program on top that doesn't have a limiting principle, how do we limit that so it doesn't become the overarching goal of government and actually put too much of a press on the capitalist system?
00:21:50.000So the first thing is, I would disagree with the characterization of a dividend as an entitlement program.
00:21:55.000And there's one state that's had a dividend for 37 years, and that state is Alaska, which is deep red, was passed by a Republican governor, and he said, look, who'd you rather get the money, the government who's just going to screw it up, or you, the Alaskan people?
00:22:09.000And the Alaskan said, us, and he said, I thought you'd say that.
00:22:11.000And now everyone in Alaska gets between $1,000 and $2,000 a year, no questions asked.
00:22:48.000Number two is, right now you're right about the fact that our entitlement programs are creeping ever higher in terms of both proportion of the federal budget and the enrollments, where there are right now more Americans on disability than work in construction, as one example.
00:23:03.000And these trends are not going to abate, they're actually going to accelerate.
00:23:06.000So the question is whether we're going to try and restructure those programs to something that we can all embrace and get excited about, that will actually help keep American families and communities strong, instead of waiting for more and more people to get debilitated by, for example, an automation wave that's going to displace the significant proportion of the people that hold the most common jobs in the economy, which we're in the midst of right now.
00:23:29.000And so the question is, do you wait and say, okay, I guess we're going to have more and more people qualifying for these welfare programs that have very negative incentives attached to them, or are we going to own the reality and say, look, we get it, we're going to have this dividend, and then we're going to reverse the incentives of those programs over time?
00:23:48.000Now to your question about like whether there's a logical limit.
00:23:51.000The reason why $1,000 a month is so magical is that it's enough to make a huge difference in the lives of individuals and families.
00:23:58.000It's going to help children's health and graduation rates and mental health and you know kids will have a real chance to to learn.
00:24:05.000We'll reduce domestic violence, we'll reduce hospital visits, but it's not enough to be a labor replacement because $12,000 is below the US poverty line of $12,700.
00:24:15.000And so people are still going to have to work to prosper and have a life that anyone's going to be excited about.
00:24:24.000So, my goal would be to put in this $1,000 dividend and then keep it at that level, but it's going to be up to, you know, and this is a big leap, but we have to trust that future legislatures will be responsible with the fact that... Yeah, good luck to that.
00:24:37.000Well, but again, you can look at something like Alaska.
00:24:40.000They've had it for 37 years and they've pegged it to a particular resource.
00:24:46.000And so what I'm suggesting is what is the resource that we should peg this to?
00:24:49.000And the resource we should peg this to is technology, where we have artificial intelligence and self-driving cars and trucks coming.
00:24:56.000And Amazon, this trillion-dollar tech company that's sucking up $20 billion in commerce and causing 30% of malls and stores to close, they paid zero in federal taxes last year.
00:25:05.000And so what I'm going around saying is like, look, that's not their fault.
00:25:08.000It's their job to pay as little tax as possible.
00:25:10.000But that means we've done a bad job designing a system if Amazon's paying less in federal taxes than you are or, you know, he is.
00:25:17.000I mean, I wonder if that's true, though, because the fact is that we focused a lot on production, but we focus very little in this conversation on consumption.
00:25:23.000And the fact is that, you know, when we talk about sort of this halcyon past where everybody was employed, And people in the manufacturing industry were employed.
00:25:32.000Like, you describe at one point the 1970s, and I want to read it because I think it's sort of telling and interesting.
00:25:36.000You say, some economic problems existed.
00:25:38.000Growth was uneven and inflation periodically high, which might be a mild understatement.
00:25:42.000I mean, the 70s were not great economically.
00:25:44.000But income inequality was low, jobs provided benefits, and mainstream businesses were the drivers of the economy.
00:25:49.000There were only three television networks, and in my house we watched them on a TV with an antenna that we fiddled with to make the picture clearer.
00:25:55.000I'm not nostalgic for a time where I had three channels on a TV where I had to fiddle with the antenna.
00:26:01.000There are obviously benefits and drawbacks to the economy, but the fact is that people are living significantly better on the average in the United States than they were in the 1970s, if only from the ability to consume more.
00:26:11.000I mean, the fact is that everybody has a microwave, everybody has a cell phone, everybody has a car.
00:26:15.000I mean, we're talking poverty line folks have these things.
00:26:18.000So when we talk about what Amazon is not paying, the fact is that Amazon not only is one of the bigger employers in the country, but Amazon is making legitimately millions of lives better on the consumption side.
00:26:29.000So are we focusing too much on the production side as opposed to the consumption side, especially considering that the number of people who are affected by consumption is 100% and the number of people who are affected by lacks of production jobs are significantly lower than that?
00:26:44.000Well, you know, it's one of the things that I say in the book, which is that if you have like this focus on consumption, like cheap stuff and access to apps on your smartphone are great, but they don't substitute for having a functioning Main Street or a job to go to.
00:27:04.000And so it's true that there are winners and losers in this economy.
00:27:08.000Unfortunately, right now the losers outnumber the winners significantly by at least some measurements.
00:27:16.000And we talk about the 70s to now, income growth has stagnated for many Americans from the 70s to now in real terms.
00:27:23.000And the last three years we've seen this declining life expectancy that's hand in hand with a surge in suicides and drug overdoses, which is a sign that at least some Americans are experiencing the lack of productive opportunity much more sharply than having access to cheap consumer goods can somehow make up for.
00:27:42.000Well, I think that's obviously true for a subset of the population.
00:27:45.000It is also true that for 100% of the population, the consumer... We got cheap stuff, yeah.
00:27:49.000Yeah, I mean, it's not just cheap stuff.
00:27:50.000I mean, it's pretty fantastic and great stuff.
00:27:53.000And if the idea of UBI is that raising living standards on a generalized level, results in better outcomes in a variety of areas, then one of the ways to do that is to continue to provide that cheap stuff.
00:28:06.000And so there is a balance here, I would assume.
00:28:10.000So let's talk about your view of capitalism, because I think that there's something interesting there.
00:28:14.000So you talk about what you call human capitalism, the idea of changing our notion of capitalism where essentially it changes how we see the market.
00:28:23.000You say human capitalism would have a few core tenets.
00:28:25.000One, humanity is more important than money.
00:28:27.000Two, the unit of an economy is each person, not each dollar.
00:28:30.000And three, markets exist to serve our common goals and values.
00:28:33.000On sort of an abstract, in a vacuum, I agree with a lot of that stuff, obviously.
00:28:37.000I mean, I have kids, I have parents, right?
00:28:40.000And if you ask me to sell my child, obviously the answer is no.
00:28:43.000I like my kids, although it depends on the day.
00:28:46.000If you're asking, you know, the units of an economy, dollars versus people, There I start to have a little more trouble, just on the economic level, because what I'm actually paying for is a skill set, not a person.
00:28:56.000Obviously the value of each human being is infinite, but the value of each human being's labor is certainly not.
00:29:00.000And then when you say markets exist to serve our common goals and values.
00:29:04.000This is what, it's really interesting, because as I mentioned, I mentioned Tucker, because I think that you and Tucker Carlson are on the same page with regard to some of this stuff, so is Bernie Sanders for that matter.
00:29:12.000The idea that markets exist to serve people, I think is something with which I disagree, and I'll explain.
00:29:19.000When we talk about markets, my view of a market is essentially a recognition that my labor belongs to me.
00:29:25.000A free market is just my labor belongs to me in the same way that free speech is my viewpoint belongs to me.
00:29:30.000You can't say that the markets exist to serve our common goals any more than you say that free speech exists to serve our common goals.
00:29:36.000Free speech is just a recognition that I, as an individual human being, have worth.
00:29:40.000And so free markets are the same thing.
00:29:41.000It's a recognition that I, as an individual human being, my labor has worth.
00:29:45.000So the idea that the market is just something that is an institution that we have come up with together and then we play with, I'm not sure that's an accurate description of what markets actually represent.
00:29:53.000There's an underlying value to human labor that is not just a common system we all decided to come up with one day.
00:30:00.000It's just a recognition that I can alienate my labor and you can buy my labor.
00:30:04.000Well, that, So to me, the fundamental shift that we have to start getting our arms around is that certain people's labor is not going to be worth enough for them to make the kind of living that is required for them to live what they the fundamental shift that we have to start getting our arms around is that certain And so if you look at Look at truck drivers as an example, because I use them because they're the most clear.
00:30:33.000So you have three and a half million truckers making about $46,000 a year, and it's a punishing job.
00:30:40.000They're behind the wheel of this truck for up to 14 hours a day, and they're away from their families four days a week, and the rest of it.
00:30:47.000But their market value, with the market of their time behind the wheel, you know, it's about $46,000 a year.
00:30:52.000Now, if five to ten years from now, my friends in Silicon Valley come up with trucks that can largely drive themselves, and then we're going to go to that truck driver and say, hey, turns out your market value, like your time behind the wheel, it's not $46,000 anymore.
00:31:07.000It's like, you know, whatever the number is.
00:31:10.000And so there's like a change building up in our economy that the freedom to trade your labor for money to make a good living for yourself, that's actually going to end up breaking down in more and more situations where that truck driver is no less willing to trade his time.
00:31:37.000It could be a radiologist who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they interpret radiation films and say, I'm very willing to do this.
00:31:43.000I like getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.
00:31:45.000And then we say, hey, turns out that AI can see tumors you can't.
00:31:48.000It can refer to millions of films, not thousands.
00:31:50.000It can see shades of gray that are invisible to the human eye.
00:31:55.000Your time all of a sudden goes from worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to, let's call it, Like, half that, or zero, or whatever the number is.
00:32:03.000And so, I think that it worked for a long time when the average American could show up and say, if I'm willing to work hard and I've got a strong back, like, you know, I can make a decent living for myself and my family.
00:32:14.000Like it was in the 70s, where if I showed up even to a manufacturing plant, I might be able to provide a middle class life for myself and my family.
00:32:21.000But then if that stops working, then we need to start thinking differently about how the labor market functions.
00:32:28.000So if we've moved beyond sort of the concept of free markets as places where we can alienate labor because some people are not capable of alienating their labor, their labor's just not worth anything, then is the idea that the collective owns the labor of everybody and gets to redistribute the products of that labor, is that what we're talking about here?
00:32:45.000And that's actually the outcome we have to avoid, if at all possible.
00:32:49.000And this is one reason why my flagship proposal is we give every American $1,000 a month free and clear.
00:32:54.000And that doesn't somehow usurp your labor, your time.
00:32:57.000That actually, if anything, liberates your labor, your time.
00:33:01.000That if you have a little bit more freedom from scarcity, then you can start making moves towards the sort of work that you want for yourself, that you value, that you would find fulfilling and exciting.
00:33:12.000So one of the things that you talk about, and I think this is interesting because you are obviously a big believer in the ability of people to make choices with their own money, and this is why you believe in the freedom dividend is the idea.
00:33:24.000It's your decision what to do with it.
00:33:26.000At one point in the book, you talk about the idea that folks who are poorer in the United States are actually Good with money, that essentially that they are going to be responsible with the money that they have, you say, on page 185.
00:33:38.000The idea that poor people will be irresponsible with their money and squander it seems to be a product of deep-seated biases rather than emblematic of the truth.
00:33:45.000And you do this in sort of a broader attack on the meritocratic idea in which you say, well, you know, this isn't completely a meritocracy.
00:33:52.000Obviously, there are some people who are born into situations they can't control.
00:33:55.000You don't always control your own level of merit.
00:34:08.000And the reason that I say that is because if you look at the spending habits of people who are lower down on the income chain, those spending habits don't tend to be more frugal than people who are at the upper levels of the income chain, at least not until those people at the upper levels are pretty secure in being at the upper levels.
00:34:21.000You see conspicuous consumption among people who are earning insane amounts of money because they can afford it, but the way that those people largely became people who can afford to do that is a certain level of frugality.
00:34:31.000I take, for example, the buying of lottery tickets.
00:34:34.000So, the lowest income households in the United States, on average, spend $412 annually on lottery tickets.
00:34:39.000Almost 3 in 10 Americans in the lowest income bracket play the lottery once a week.
00:34:43.000Now, we know, just statistically, this is flushing your money down the toilet.
00:34:48.000And I understand people do this out of despair, but that doesn't change the economic truth, which is that people may not make good decisions with their money, which is one of the reasons we have programs like Social Security.
00:34:59.000To keep your own money and put it in a 401k account, we believe that you're going to take that money and blow it on whatever you're going to blow it on.
00:35:06.000Are you worried that we grant UBI and then people just don't spend it on health insurance or they don't spend it on saving for the future?
00:35:14.000Instead, they just spend it on whatever they're going to spend it on.
00:35:16.000It provides a temporary boost for the economy and we're back in the same position because people at lower levels, at least people who tend to stay at lower levels, people who are permanently poor in the United States, don't tend to make great decisions with their money.
00:35:32.000And one of the things that drives me is that there's been a lot of research over the fact that if you're poor, if you're stressed out about your month-to-month bills, it actually consumes a lot of your mental bandwidth.
00:35:45.000And it reduces your decision-making ability, it reduces your functional intelligence by 13 IQ points or one standard deviation.
00:35:51.000And so, if you get the boot off of someone's throat and say, look, you're going to be here, your kid's going to be here, all will be well, then their incentives to save will hopefully be higher.
00:36:02.000Now I'm not naive enough to think that everyone's gonna go and do exactly what I would see as optimally responsible with their money, but big picture, to return to your original point, I think it's their money.
00:36:14.000I think that if you're a citizen and shareholder of this country, we can easily afford a dividend of $1,000 a month, and if you make a bad decision or a decision I would consider poor in January, maybe you'll make a better decision in February, maybe you'll make a better decision in March, but it's going to be up to you It's going to be, you know, your life, your choices.
00:36:34.000And I certainly do not think that the government saying like, hey, we think you should just use the money on this or that, like would be a better way to go.
00:36:43.000So that's a pretty libertarian idea, actually.
00:36:45.000So that doesn't seem to fit necessarily wholly within sort of the democratic belief that, on the Democratic Party side, that when money is signed to you that we have to kind of stand guard over the money.
00:36:56.000There are a lot of libertarians who believe in UBI, and they have the same sort of libertarian view, which is your money, you do with it what you want, you live with the consequences.
00:37:04.000Obviously that comes with downsides from, I think, the left-wing point of view.
00:37:08.000Well, you know, I think many Americans have lost confidence that what we need is another program where someone comes in and says, hey, you know what we think is best for you?
00:37:31.000You point out that in Europe there is value-added tax, which is essentially a consumption tax.
00:37:36.000You want to add that on top of the income tax and the business tax as opposed to replacing it.
00:37:40.000If we're talking about replacing it, I'm on board with you, man.
00:37:42.000I'm totally for a VAT replacing whatever income tax system we have right now.
00:37:48.000Where do you think the breaking point is as far as how much the system can support in terms of taxation?
00:37:52.000Right now we're living Pretty heavily on debt, obviously, and adding a bunch of new costs in the form of UBI or quashing economic growth to a certain extent, because as you increase the tax rate at a certain point, you're going to hit a breaking point.
00:38:07.000Where do you think the tax, the ideal tax rate lies?
00:38:12.000Well, I agree with you that ideally we are not taxing labor in the same way we do now.
00:38:18.000Because you don't want to tax things you need more of.
00:38:21.000And in my opinion, we need as much work and work-like arrangement as possible.
00:38:27.000And so ideally, you would find ways to tax things that are not labor arrangements.
00:38:31.000And so when you say like, hey, if you swap out to take up taxes for consumption tax, you're on board, that to me should be the long-term vision.
00:38:40.000The question is how you get from here to there.
00:38:42.000And so the way I would start is by implementing this value added tax at half the European level is quite modest, but it would help capture some of the gains that Amazon and these other mega tech companies are experiencing and return those gains to the American people.
00:38:55.000And some of it will float back up to, you know, Jeff and Amazon again, because you just buy an extra toaster.
00:39:02.000But, you know, like a lot of it will go to your local restaurants and the mechanic and the tutoring service and the hardware store.
00:39:08.000And, you know, it'll help replenish the Main Street economy and create jobs.
00:39:15.000There is, to me, like a movement in that direction that we need to get to because right now we're just taxing, in my opinion, we're taxing highly inefficiently.
00:39:25.000And you look around and the way that we're trying to address this is like, hey, you know, it's like there's like this high marginal tax rate.
00:39:31.000I try to explain to people all the time, look, Jeff Bezos is worth $160 billion and most of that is Amazon stock.
00:39:36.000And it went from zero to being worth $160 million, and he's way too smart to have a taxable event.
00:39:42.000Like, I can ratchet up the marginal tax rate very, very high, and it's not going to help anything.
00:39:47.000This is exactly, by the way, what was in the 1950s.
00:39:50.000When people say that there was a 91 top tax bracket in the 1950s, no one paid that percentage because there were a bunch of loopholes in the law that allowed people to escape paying that percentage.
00:39:58.000The effective marginal tax bracket at that point was effectively the same as it is today.
00:40:02.000People were paying basically the same amount of taxes.
00:40:31.000Then I want to get to some of your other proposals because one of the things that's so fascinating about your candidacy is that you have proposals from here up to Wattisoo.
00:40:39.000So, on UBI, final question, which is, how much can money actually do?
00:40:43.000I wrote an entire book, which right now is doing very well, The Right Side of History, in which I talk about, I think, the lack of meaning and purpose in people's lives.
00:40:52.000And I wonder whether signing a check is going to actually alleviate that in any real way.
00:40:57.000It seems like there's been a loss of social capital and social fabric that can't necessarily be filled with a government program, and that no matter what government program we propose, if that social capital is not restored through certain basic beliefs in fundamental principles of the country, certain freedoms and certain beliefs in community and the kind of charitable organization certain freedoms and certain beliefs in community and the kind of charitable organization that you are the head of, that it's going to be very difficult for people to find meaning even if they're making a little more money, because the fact is we're the wealthiest country in the history People are exorbitantly wealthy.
00:41:24.000The poorest among us, I mean, the rich would have been clamoring in 1880, or for that matter, 1920, to live like the poorest among us live now.
00:41:30.000It's So, is there, can we fill what is effectively a spiritual hole with a government program?
00:41:39.000This is, to me, the generational challenge that we're facing, is how do you create more community ties and structure and purpose and fulfillment and paths forward for Americans who feel this central void in their lives?
00:41:50.000And, of course, like, a thousand bucks a month does not fill that void.
00:41:55.000But, and here's to me the path forward, is if you take a town in Missouri with 50,000 adults, and they're struggling with that sense of purpose, and then you say, hey, good news, now there's another $50 million in your community every month.
00:42:14.000Some of it goes into local businesses.
00:42:15.000There's a person there who wanted to start a bakery, and the bakery was a dumb idea, but now the bakery is a good idea.
00:42:19.000And then he starts it, and then he hires a couple of people, and then people like his baked goods, and then some of that money goes into religious institutions.
00:42:27.000Some of that money goes into non-profits.
00:42:29.000Some of that money goes into arts organizations and cultural organizations.
00:42:33.000And then you end up giving people an opportunity to at least start To address that new sense of structure and purpose and fulfillment and meaning by making it so that everyone feels like they have some value, they're not going to die, their kids have a future.
00:42:48.000And then putting at least the beginning of some resources into their hands to try and rebuild.
00:42:53.000And maybe for some of them it's like, hey, now I'm going to leave this town.
00:42:57.000That could be the way I'm going to rebuild.
00:42:59.000But that, to me, is the generational challenge.
00:43:02.000How do you restore that sense of self-worth and social capital and the rest of it?
00:43:08.000So, it's not like money does that, but what money does do is that money helps create the conditions where we can at least start to try and address that central challenge.
00:43:18.000Okay, so now I want to race through some of the policy proposals.
00:43:20.000I want to get one out of the way immediately because people think the reason you came on here was to discuss circumcision, which was not the reason you came on the show and not the reason I asked you on the show.
00:43:28.000So, your position on circumcision, you are anti-circumcision, but you are not in favor of banning it, is that correct?
00:43:33.000I mean, I have two young boys, and when the first was born, my wife dug into various reasons for circumcising your kids, and then she was unconvinced, and then she convinced me to be unconvinced, shall we say.
00:43:49.000But I've attended my friends' bris for their son, and it's up to parents what they want to do.
00:43:56.000And certainly for any religious or cultural reason, people should be free to adopt whatever they want for themselves.
00:44:19.000And I have to say how taken aback I was at what a thing it became.
00:44:24.000I mean, you mentioned circumcision, so now it's a thing, right?
00:44:26.000I mean, this is the stupidity of the internet.
00:44:27.000You know, let me ask you about that, because the stupidity of the internet is truly astonishing.
00:44:31.000If you look at your candidacy online and you look at how the media cover it, they cover it not as just a mainstream candidacy of ideas, but as something weird and curious, because you have a lot of particularly young white men who follow you online, and because you speak about the middle of the country that largely has not been talked about.
00:44:47.000There's a lot of focus right now in the Democratic Party on the problems of racism or sexism or bigotry.
00:44:52.000And you've talked about some of those things, but you've talked more about the fact that there's essentially an underclass of people, many of whom are white, living in the middle of the country in an area where technology is eliminating their jobs.
00:45:02.000And the media have thus labeled you some sort of near alt-righter.
00:45:07.000Where do you think this is coming from?
00:45:10.000You know, I mean, like, I think that we need to start just trying to have, like, honest conversations about the problems on the ground in this country.
00:45:20.000And certainly, that's my goal as a candidate.
00:45:25.000I'm not quite sure where, like, I've been frankly a little bit surprised by what I'm happy to say that now we're rising to a point because I'm pulling at 3% and we're raising, you know, hundreds of thousand dollars per week and everything else that the mainstream media will now have to reckon with this set of ideas.
00:45:47.000But I agree with you that the media response to us has been curious.
00:46:02.000OK, so I want to ask you about your perspective on health care.
00:46:04.000So you talk in your book, The War on Normal People, you talk about what you would do with the health care system.
00:46:10.000And you recommend a single-payer health care system.
00:46:12.000Obviously, I'm a massive opponent of a single-payer health care system.
00:46:15.000That is acknowledging the problems with our employment-based health care system.
00:46:18.000That's something I think both of us agree on.
00:46:20.000I'd prefer a system where people are effectively paying for their own health care so that they can actually see the cost of what it is that they are consuming.
00:46:26.000And then we can form coalitions, as we do, and associations to help defray the cost for people who have pre-existing conditions and all the rest.
00:46:33.000You recommend a single-payer health care system.
00:46:35.000Why do you think that's the best option?
00:46:36.000Well, I think you and I might have had similar experiences, where if you run a small company, you see that our current employment-based system is a real weight on the economy, where it makes it harder to hire people.
00:46:50.000It makes it harder to treat someone as a full-time employee, because you have these incentives to treat them as a contractor.
00:46:57.000It makes it harder to start a business.
00:46:59.000It's like this massive source of friction.
00:47:01.000And so the question is, how do you separate, uh, healthcare from your employment situation?
00:47:06.000Because right now you can imagine how many more entrepreneurs there'd be in the U.S. if they didn't have to stress out about healthcare for themselves and their families.
00:47:12.000I mean, there'd be many, many more people starting businesses.
00:47:15.000Now, I agree with you that there has to be some kind of skin in the game.
00:47:19.000Like it can't be that if you just show up, it's like always cost free because, you know, there's some people that, um, are hypochondriacs and like consume a lot of treatment.
00:47:28.000So there should be some sort of individual skin in the game.
00:47:30.000That said, I feel that healthcare is an environment where the market is going to be an imperfect solution because one, you get very cost-intensive if you have a serious illness or your loved one is seriously ill.
00:47:44.000Two, it's like the pricing is very confusing and opaque, you know, and then you're relying upon specialists for various pieces of information to say, oh, you need this, you don't need that.
00:47:54.000And so it's not like the same sort of market as many, many other consumer goods or experiences where you can trust that, like, you know, you're going to say, like, hey, I'm educated on what that product means for me.
00:48:07.000So I think that we need to try and get the cost down.
00:48:11.000And right now we're living in the worst of all worlds where we're spending twice as much on our health care as other societies to worse results.
00:48:17.000And it's a massive impediment to our economy and hiring and dynamism.
00:48:22.000So I just think that having a robust public option, you can improve the access, bring down the costs, just because we're saddled with this incredibly inefficient system right now.
00:48:31.000So there are a couple of points to be made in defense of the American health care system, putting aside the employment basis, which I think is deeply wrong and was initiated in response to actually wage controls in the 1940s.
00:48:40.000One of the things to be said is that when it comes to five-year cancer survival rates, the United States still ranks number one.
00:48:45.000When you remove homicide and car accident, the United States still has the longest life expectancy.
00:48:49.000Yes, we're expensive, but if you look at us on a per capita GDP basis, we're going to be able to do that.
00:48:54.000We're actually not all that far out of the realm of possibility because the fact is that we're a very wealthy country, people are choosing to spend, we do develop more than half of all new medical patents, so there's some upsides to the fact that we have a market in healthcare.
00:49:05.000And one thing I do want to say is I would not, like I'm not for a system where we're somehow eliminating private insurers, where there would be these gold-plated concierge private health plans that would still have massive financial incentives and resources for various forms of innovation and the rest of it.
00:49:22.000So there's one point in the book where you talk about doctors.
00:49:26.000And this I took a little personally in the sense that, as I've mentioned many times, my wife is a doctor.
00:49:30.000She's gone through one million years of training at this point.
00:49:54.000So she's been doing this for a very long time.
00:49:56.000And you talk in the book about this idea that we're going to have to shift how doctors think of doing their jobs.
00:50:01.000And you sort of suggest that doctors are going to have to become more altruistic.
00:50:05.000Instead of seeing this profession as a way of making money, they're going to have to see it as just, you'll make some money, but you won't make enormous money.
00:50:11.000The fact is that you're not going to get people to go through a 10 to 12 year system of education if you're telling them on the other end they're going to get paid like postal workers.
00:50:22.000I mean, the fact is that, thank God, I've been able to pay for my wife's education this whole way.
00:50:27.000But if we had not, then she was working below minimum wage in her residency because she's working hours and hours and hours.
00:50:33.000And even if that's $50,000 a year, she's working legitimately 80 to 90 hours a week.
00:50:38.000She has, most of her colleagues, have hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical school debt, and they're going to have to pay all of that off.
00:50:46.000It seems to me that if we have a supply and demand problem, we need to increase the supply of doctors, and the way to do that is to actually incentivize people to join the medical profession, not by telling them that they need to be paid less in the name of altruism, but they need to be paid more through transparency and pricing and being able to decide their own standards.
00:51:01.000Well, have you seen why our supply of doctors is constrained?
00:51:17.000It's incredibly expensive to educate a doctor.
00:51:19.000And the supply has been constrained for years, even as many, many communities have become what's called primary care deserts.
00:51:27.000Because when someone, and this is one reason why I'm congratulating your wife on being a family medicine doctor, is that when she's in training, she's racking up all this debt, And then she's like, wait a minute, if I specialize in certain things, I'll get paid a lot more than if I become a primary care doctor.
00:51:41.000And if I live someplace where they can afford to pay me more, then I'll live better than if I go to some rural community or small town or something where maybe they don't have a doctor like me, maybe they could really use a doctor like me, but my life's going to be harder, I'm going to get paid less, etc.
00:51:56.000So right now, to me, you are 100% right that we need to increase the supply.
00:52:03.000We just need to increase the supply because right now the doctors and the medical schools have not created new paths to train doctors.
00:52:10.000And that's been a problem for years and decades.
00:52:12.000Well, it's certainly true that we have to deregulate a lot of medical licensing.
00:52:15.000So you're a libertarian on that one, too.
00:52:16.000I mean, it sounds like, you know, having nurse practitioners being able to do more things would be a very good thing.
00:52:20.000Yes, particularly when we get really good AI.
00:52:23.000And this is something the doctors have fought, is that if you were to say to a doctor or the doctor's lobby group, it's like, hey, there's a primary care in desert.
00:52:31.000Like, we need to send someone over there and they need to be able to treat patients.
00:52:37.000And then you're like, but wait, there's no MD there.
00:52:40.000Literally, none of you wants to move there.
00:52:43.000And so we need to make it so that nurse practitioners can do more.
00:52:47.000And this is particularly true when we're going to have AI that can at least help diagnose a significant proportion of conditions and recommend treatment.
00:52:55.000And then you can always refer to a doctor if it's helpful.
00:52:59.000I mean, we agree on all this, but I think the question is when it comes to Medicare for all, the truth is that fewer people are going into the medical professions They're choosing to be lawyers, they're choosing to be businessmen, specifically because they don't want to deal with the hassle of the government.
00:53:12.000There are lots of doctors, increasingly, who won't even take Medicare.
00:53:15.000They'd rather take private insurance because the Medicare reimbursement rates are 60%.
00:53:19.000And you are mandated to get through a certain number of patients, in many cases, if you're working at one of these hospitals to do a shift.
00:53:24.000So right now there's a double whammy going on.
00:53:26.000And so what you're suggesting is like, hey, it's because of low reimbursement rates, which is certainly an issue.
00:53:31.000But the other issue that's attendant, which is at least as important, is just the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork and administration and like, are these doctors?
00:53:40.000I'm friends with, because I'm Asian, I have a lot of doctor friends.
00:53:45.000Where they say it's like, I'd love to just actually be seeing a patient, but instead for every, you know, like 10 minutes I spend with a patient, like I'm spending or one of my staffers is spending, you know, four minutes on like documentation or administration or billing.
00:53:59.000A lot of that has to do with medical liability.
00:54:01.000A lot of that has to do as well with regulation of these insurance companies and lack of transparency because the truth is if you walk into a doctor's office right now and you ask a doctor how much an x-ray costs, they have no idea.
00:54:11.000They have to submit it to the insurance company.
00:54:42.000And to me, the most obvious example of the free market at work is concierge care.
00:54:48.000I mean, you're starting to see this rise.
00:54:49.000You're seeing apps that are designed to have doctors just arrive at your door.
00:54:52.000The doctor comes to you in many cases.
00:54:54.000It seems to me that, you know, we'll differ on this, but it seems that free markets actually do apply and obtain in the vast majority of cases when it comes to health care, just like they do anything else.
00:55:04.000And declaring something not a good doesn't make it more plentiful or more robust.
00:55:19.000I totally agree with you that the NCAA should pay athletes.
00:55:19.000I totally agree with you that the NCAA should pay athletes.
00:55:21.000Frankly, I think that we should stop college athletics altogether, which I will say right in the middle of March Madness.
00:55:22.000Frankly, I think that we should stop college athletics altogether, which I will say right in the middle of March Madness.
00:55:26.000I don't even care, man, because the fact is that if you're going to college and you're going to a top college not to actually get a degree, but we're going to basically bring you here for a year so that you can have a tryout for the NBA, and then they're going to make millions of dollars off you, totally on board with that one.
00:55:44.000I assume not the part for unable and unwilling to work in killing the farting cows.
00:55:48.000I'm for the fact that climate change is a growing threat, where the last four years have been the four warmest years in recorded human history, and that our projections about what's going to happen, unfortunately, are getting steadily worse.
00:56:05.000And so the question is, is there something that we can do about it?
00:56:08.000And this is a space where the government, to me, has to play a key role because the financial incentives right now are towards forms of energy that, you know, are just more developed and more economically advantageous at this point.
00:56:24.000So if someone says, hey, we need to move dramatically in a direction towards renewable energy, like I applaud that vision, because I think that is where we need to go.
00:56:32.000The way I disagree with some people, some other people on this is that we sometimes pretend that the United States is somehow 100% of global emissions.
00:56:43.000And so even if we were to go whole hog, we would probably diminish the rate incrementally.
00:56:48.000And so I'm for trying to address and mitigate the worst effects of a warming planet with the recognition that it's probably going to happen whether we move towards renewable sources of energy or not.
00:57:02.000So this is hilarious, because you and I are on exactly the same page on this.
00:57:04.000Also, you've endorsed nuclear power, for example, where many of your colleagues have said, I don't even know how it's possible to say that you want to reduce global warming, but you're also against nuclear power.
00:57:14.000Yeah, yeah, I mean nuclear has to be a big part of the solution if you're going to head in this direction.
00:57:19.000Okay, so let's talk also about, this is one of the things I really enjoy about your candidacy is that you do have so many ideas and some of them are really kind of heterodox.
00:57:27.000So you want to revive earmarks and you talk about reviving earmarks.
00:57:30.000It's actually something that it's a third rail of politics.
00:57:32.000You're not allowed to say that you're in favor of earmarks.
00:57:33.000But the truth is that the death of earmarks has actually led to budget impasses because people have no incentive to essentially wall roll.
00:57:40.000There's nothing to freaking bargain with anymore.
00:57:42.000It's like, you know, I show up in your office.
00:57:52.000One of the areas where I do wonder about the practicality of it is you say that you're in favor of a four-week paid leave policy for all full-time workers, and you say it's a mandatory four-week paid leave policy.
00:58:01.000So can you explain what you mean by that?
00:58:03.000Well, so I think it was, you know, it's like There were projections that our work weeks would get shorter and shorter over time as we became more productive, and people were projecting like a 15-hour work week.
00:58:15.000But unfortunately, that's gone the other direction.
00:58:17.000And studies have shown that it's not necessarily that our productivity is in lockstep with the amount of time we spend.
00:58:24.000And so I think that a certain amount of time off and I would exempt various small businesses and the rest of it that You know that that it might somehow be disruptive To your operations, but generally speaking.
00:58:38.000It's good for Organizations, it's good for processes like when I ran a company I would tell people to take time off and they would never do it and And they wouldn't do it because I wasn't doing it.
00:58:48.000And then when I realized, OK, I get it.
00:59:03.000And so to me, it's a good way for an organization to have to evolve and adapt so that it's not like you have to be on the firing line or the front line all the time.
00:59:15.000I mean, listen, I would very much love to take four weeks of vacation this year.
00:59:18.000I highly doubt that I will, despite the Jewish holidays.
00:59:21.000I guess my question is, whenever you have the government sort of just creating goods, isn't that a damper on the economy?
00:59:26.000And also, aren't you going to get the same thing that you have with the tax code, where basically businesses just hire part-time workers?
00:59:31.000Businesses just decide that they're going to hire independent contractors.
00:59:35.000They're not subject to such regulations.
00:59:38.000You know, again, I mean, we'd have exemptions for people.
00:59:41.000So I'm sure that in your case, if you do not want to take four weeks, I'm sure you would not.
00:59:46.000Yeah, so the goal is not to somehow make it harder for businesses to operate.
00:59:54.000And I understand that the margins might seem like that's the case.
00:59:58.000To me, it actually helps make organizations more sustainable and somewhat more organic.
01:00:04.000So one of the other things that you've talked about is getting the government involved in sort of how we consume information.
01:00:08.000So you've talked about the Department of the Attention Economy, which would basically be the government policing the amount of time on social media.
01:00:14.000Not necessarily time, but also just the way the social media apps are designed.
01:00:18.000Because one of my friends, Tristan Harris, who worked on it, was like, look, we have brilliant engineers turning these supercomputers into slot machines that are hypnotizing teenage girls and making everyone depressed.
01:00:29.000And that's where their financial incentives are.
01:00:30.000So it's not just time on the app, it's actually the way the apps are designed.
01:00:33.000I mean, do you fear that giving the government that kind of power leads to the power of censorship?
01:00:37.000Obviously there have been a lot of complaints from the right, from people who are heterodox politically, that the social media companies are cracking down on particular political points of view.
01:00:46.000Putting the government in charge of this sort of stuff can easily slide over into government censorship, where they say that they are policing the form of the app, but in reality what they're actually policing is the form of consumption of content.
01:00:58.000You know, I feel like those concerns are somewhat less pressing than they were in a time when we had limited means of accessing information or consuming information.
01:01:08.000If you were to adjust Snapchat's design algorithms where it's like, hey, stop pinging the teenage kid all the time, I'm optimistic that that would not necessarily curb people's access to quality political information.
01:01:25.000One of the things that you've talked about, if I'm not mistaken, is you've talked about sort of a kind of regulation of the news media where the government polices the sort of information being distributed as news.
01:01:34.000That's where I start to get really frightened because the fact is that the government in the business of news, whether you are a fan of Trump or not a fan of Trump, if you are on the right, you're afraid of Barack Obama doing this to you.
01:01:44.000If you're on the left, you're afraid of Donald Trump doing this to you.
01:01:46.000How exactly do you restrict the powers of government when it comes to intervention and that sort of stuff?
01:01:50.000Well, so I was looking at some of the models abroad, because right now we're in a bit of a mess in terms of our information consumption.
01:01:58.000There are very powerful market dynamics where if I'm a media company, I figure out, ooh, if I cater to getting the most extreme 30% excited, that's actually better for my business than being more moderate.
01:02:13.000It's like clickbait, but clickbait across information silos.
01:02:18.000And so I looked at what some other countries have done and that if someone has demonstrably false information, then you come and say, look, that was actually fabricated.
01:02:28.000And then you just have to issue an apology or there's some kind of process.
01:02:32.000But we're at a point now where we legitimately have a hard time agreeing on facts and we have at least some foreign actors that are taking advantage of like this soft underbelly to sort of gin up various like groups against each other and make it so that people can't And this is before deep fakes and the rest of it arrived where literally they could show you and I like doing something.
01:02:58.000And then it's like, well, it must be real because I saw the Internet.
01:03:04.000And it's a situation where you have to look at it with like a perspective and say, OK, it's a mess and it's going to get messier.
01:03:12.000Like what are possible ways out of this?
01:03:15.000And at least to me, the government may have a role to play in saying this is fake, this is fraudulent, this is from a foreign actor, this is not true.
01:03:27.000In the absence of any sort of action in that direction, then we're in for an even worse environment in terms of polarization, in my opinion.
01:03:36.000I mean, to me, obviously, the response is that the government Empowering them to determine what is true and false sometimes shades over into an opinion on a fact, and the government decides that this is what PolitiFact does to us on a regular basis, and it gets into a little bit of dangerous territory.
01:03:52.000In a second, I want to ask you about race.
01:03:54.000I have one final question for you, which is, where do we stand racially in the country?
01:03:59.000But if you want to hear Andrew Yang's answer, you actually have to be a DailyWire subscriber.
01:04:02.000To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation over there.
01:04:07.000Well, thank you so much for stopping by.