The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1245 - Andrew Yang

00:00:00.000 Five, four, we'll talk about it.

00:00:03.000 Three, two.

00:00:06.000 Yes, and we're live.

00:00:07.000 Hello.

00:00:08.000 Hey, Joe.

00:00:09.000 Welcome.

00:00:09.000 Thank you.

00:00:10.000 It's great to be here.

00:00:11.000 Thanks for having me.

00:00:12.000 My pleasure.

00:00:12.000 Sam Harris sends his regards.

00:00:14.000 Yeah, Sam's a beautiful man.

00:00:16.000 He is.

00:00:16.000 I love that guy.

00:00:17.000 And he's one of the reasons why you're here.

00:00:20.000 So, universal basic income.

00:00:22.000 This is what this is all about.

00:00:23.000 Yes.

00:00:24.000 That's what my campaign for president is all about.

00:00:27.000 That's an interesting focus of a campaign.

00:00:32.000 Very unusual.

00:00:34.000 Four years ago, you never even thought that would have a chance at all.

00:00:38.000 But this is a subject that has been gaining momentum.

00:00:42.000 And I made a big shift, because I had my friend Eddie Wong on once, and he was the first person to bring it up. 0.99

00:00:49.000 And my initial knee-jerk reaction was, get the fuck out of here. 0.98

00:00:53.000 Like, universal basic income. 0.95

00:00:54.000 I'm just going to give people money.

00:00:55.000 They're just going to be lazy.

00:00:56.000 Nothing's ever going to get done.

00:00:57.000 That's a terrible idea.

00:00:58.000 And then I started paying attention to the rise of AI and automation and how many jobs are going to get taken away.

00:01:05.000 And then once you see the actual numbers, it's pretty staggering.

00:01:10.000 Yeah, and that's how I got there, Joe.

00:01:12.000 Like, I spent the last seven years running an organization that I had started called Venture for America.

00:01:16.000 And we helped create about 3,000 jobs in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Birmingham, New Orleans, other cities around the country.

00:01:24.000 And I saw that we're pouring water into a bathtub that has a giant hole ripped in the bottom.

00:01:28.000 And that for every 5, 10, 50 jobs that my entrepreneurs are going to create, we're going to lose 5, 10, 50,000 jobs.

00:01:37.000 It's not something that people intuitively suspect could be a real issue either.

00:01:41.000 It's one of the ones where you kind of have to shake people.

00:01:45.000 Like, hey, look at this.

00:01:46.000 This is coming.

00:01:46.000 There's a cliff.

00:01:48.000 We're going towards this cliff.

00:01:49.000 It's darker still.

00:01:51.000 So when I was digging into the numbers, I found that it's not this cliff that we're heading towards.

00:01:57.000 It's actually more of a curve that we're on.

00:01:59.000 What I've been telling people is that we're in the third inning now.

00:02:02.000 Where one of the main reasons why Donald Trump won in 2016 is that we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs that were based in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, all the swing states he needed to win in the center of the country.

00:02:18.000 And a lot of that was just manufacturing work.

00:02:20.000 And if you go to a factory, you'll see it's just giant robot arms as far as the eye can see.

00:02:23.000 So it's not just that you have artificial intelligence on the horizon.

00:02:27.000 It's that we've been eating away at the most common jobs in the U.S. economy For almost 20 years now, and it's just now hitting a point where it's pushing more and more unskilled men in particular out of the workforce.

00:02:40.000 Now, are there other alternatives that you've considered other than just universal basic income, like educating people about this being a real issue and perhaps pushing them or directing them towards other occupations?

00:02:55.000 Yeah, so that's the...

00:02:58.000 Recipe that most people are attracted to.

00:03:00.000 So I just want to unpack the numbers a little bit more so people have a sense of it.

00:03:04.000 I was just with a bunch of truck drivers in Iowa last week.

00:03:07.000 And there's a guy, Dennis Bogasky, that gave me a ride from Altoona to Grinnell in Iowa where I've been campaigning.

00:03:13.000 And the truth of it, Joe, is that there are 3.5 million truck drivers in this country right now.

00:03:19.000 It's the most common job in 29 states.

00:03:20.000 And the average trucker is a 49-year-old guy with a high school education, maybe ex-military like Dennis was, and they're making like $50,000 a year.

00:03:30.000 So then if you say, hey, I'm going to retrain...

00:03:32.000 Half a million truck drivers.

00:03:34.000 For what exactly is like issue number one?

00:03:38.000 And that these guys didn't love school 30 years ago.

00:03:41.000 It's not like driving a truck has made them really excited about the idea.

00:03:45.000 And then the new job you're training them for, I looked into the data as to how good we were at retraining, let's say, displaced manufacturing workers in the Midwest when we started decimating their jobs.

00:03:57.000 And we're terrible at it.

00:03:58.000 According to independent studies, government-funded retraining programs had a success rate of between 0% and 15% in real life.

00:04:06.000 This is what actually happened to the workers of Michigan and Indiana and Ohio.

00:04:11.000 And so if you say we're going to retrain these people, then you also have to come up with a way for us to become amazing at something that right now we're really, really bad at.

00:04:19.000 And if you were an employer, which you are...

00:04:22.000 Would you rather employ a 50-year-old former truck driver with health problems who got some certificate program or would you rather hire a 25-year-old kid who went to community college, is probably cheaper, has lower expectations, and his skills are natively going to be a little fresher?

00:04:38.000 I mean, if you were an employer, you'd probably choose number two.

00:04:42.000 I agree.

00:04:44.000 I mean, I'm trying to look at this through rose-colored glasses, I guess.

00:04:48.000 I'm trying to think if there's a way that these people can adapt.

00:04:51.000 You know, I mean, some will, for sure.

00:04:54.000 You can retrain and rescale some people.

00:04:56.000 But if you look at even the conversations we're having around this, where people legitimately talk about retraining coal miners to be software engineers. 0.79

00:05:03.000 Stuff that on the face of it makes no sense.

00:05:05.000 But the reason why we're stretching for that is because we're looking for some kind of retraining-oriented solution when the numbers show that that's just not going to be the recipe for actual success.

00:05:16.000 And this is where this whole learn-to-code controversy is coming out online where people are actually getting banned for writing learn-to-code.

00:05:24.000 It's really a hot subject on Twitter.

00:05:28.000 And it's very confusing, too, and I haven't really gotten an explanation for why that's such an offensive thing to say, but people are getting banned for even joking around, saying learn to code.

00:05:40.000 It's very weird, but the idea behind it is that it's kind of preposterous to ask someone who doesn't have an education to do something that's as difficult as code computer language.

00:05:51.000 Yeah, and unfortunately, we're going to get to a point where AI can do some basic coding at a certain level.

00:05:57.000 So if you think about the impulse to, say, learn to code, what it's really saying is you need to do something that the market values.

00:06:05.000 It's like, hey, being a truck driver, the market's not going to value that much when the trucks start driving themselves in the next five to ten years.

00:06:12.000 So what does the market value?

00:06:14.000 And then people are like, well...

00:06:16.000 Coding and STEM and engineering skills.

00:06:19.000 And so there's a drive to try and push people in those directions.

00:06:21.000 But if you look at the numbers, about 8% of American jobs right now are in STEM fields, like in technology, engineering, math, etc.

00:06:31.000 So you're talking about 92% of the population that is not in those fields.

00:06:35.000 And it's unrealistic to expect that 92% to somehow shift into the 8%.

00:06:40.000 Right, and there are even places for them there.

00:06:43.000 Yeah, that's true too.

00:06:44.000 Even if they perfectly, seamlessly transition, there's too many people for those jobs.

00:06:48.000 Yeah, so I've been driven to universal basic income in part because I've been looking at the numbers.

00:06:53.000 The five most common jobs in the United States right now are administrative and clerical work, retail and sales, food service and food prep, truck driving and transportation and manufacturing.

00:07:05.000 Those five jobs comprise about half of all American jobs.

00:07:08.000 Only 32% of Americans graduate from college.

00:07:11.000 So the average American is a high school grad doing one of these five jobs.

00:07:14.000 And if you look at it, technology is already doing a number on each of these jobs.

00:07:19.000 Like the first administrative and clerical includes call center workers, and AI is in the process of taking over that job.

00:07:25.000 Retail and sales, 30% of malls are closing in the next four years.

00:07:29.000 So the danger here is to think of it as Artificial intelligence is coming.

00:07:34.000 It's actually already eating up the most common jobs in our economy, and it's driving Americans into distress in various ways in the numbers.

00:07:44.000 Now, when you're talking about universal basic income, there's two questions that come up.

00:07:48.000 How much money and where is it coming from?

00:07:51.000 Yeah.

00:07:52.000 So first I want to say that if you look at the heritage of universal basic income, it's a deeply American idea where Thomas Paine was for it at the founding of the country.

00:08:00.000 And then Martin Luther King was for it.

00:08:02.000 Milton Friedman, the godfather of conservative economists, was for it.

00:08:06.000 And one state has had it in effect for 37 years, where everyone in that state gets between $1,000 and $2,000 a year, no questions asked.

00:08:14.000 That's Alaska?

00:08:14.000 Yeah, it's Alaska, and they fund it with oil money.

00:08:17.000 And what I'm going around telling people is that technology is the oil of the 21st century.

00:08:21.000 So I know you spoke to another guest about, hey, how do you get, let's say, approximately $3 trillion a year to fund universal basic income?

00:08:30.000 And the great thing is that it's...

00:08:32.000 Well, the first thing is it's not actually $3 trillion.

00:08:34.000 And the reason why it's not $3 trillion is that if you look at what we're currently doing, we have...

00:08:39.000 We're spending about $1.5 trillion right now on 126 welfare programs and Social Security.

00:08:46.000 And so if you show up to someone's door and say, hey...

00:08:49.000 Here's a dividend of $1,000 a month.

00:08:52.000 But if you're already getting more than $1,000 in stuff, we're not just going to stack it on top.

00:08:58.000 We're just going to say you're guaranteed $1,000.

00:09:00.000 And if you're already getting more, then this doesn't touch you.

00:09:03.000 You can keep your current stuff.

00:09:04.000 If you're getting $700 in food stamps and whatnot, then you can just get $300 on top.

00:09:09.000 So the $3 trillion actually shrinks a lot very fast because of the fact that about half of Americans are already getting We're good to go.

00:09:23.000 We're good to go.

00:09:25.000 Now, for context, the entire U.S. economy is now $20 trillion, up $5 trillion in the last 12 years, and the federal budget is $4 trillion.

00:09:33.000 So you're looking at $1.8 trillion.

00:09:35.000 It's a lot of money, but it's actually manageable.

00:09:40.000 And one of the things that I haven't heard discussed here with you is that when you put money into people's hands, the money doesn't disappear.

00:09:48.000 If I gave you $1,000 a month, it probably would not make a big difference in the economy because it would just go into your account somewhere and nothing would happen.

00:09:56.000 But we all know that right now most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

00:10:00.000 57% of Americans can't afford an unexpected $500 bill.

00:10:05.000 So you put $1,000 a month into their hands, it's going to go right back into the economy.

00:10:09.000 They're going to spend it on food, childcare, Car repairs they've been putting off, the occasional night out.

00:10:15.000 And then all of those businesses end up hiring more people and then we end up getting some of the money back as tax revenues.

00:10:22.000 So of the $1.8 trillion, we're going to get back, let's call it $400 billion in new tax receipts because everyone's going to be spending more money.

00:10:33.000 We're going to save one to two hundred billion on things like incarceration and homelessness services and emergency room health care.

00:10:41.000 I was in New Hampshire last month and a prison guard said to me, this is a prison guard, he said we should pay people to stay out of jail because we waste so much money when they're in jail.

00:10:52.000 Like he sees all the waste in the system.

00:10:55.000 So if you imagine a society where everyone's getting a thousand bucks a month, It's a great incentive to try and stay out of jail because you stop getting it if you wind up in jail.

00:11:05.000 And it reduces recidivism because when you come out of jail, at least you have $1,000 a month waiting for you and then you're less inclined to commit a crime and head back in.

00:11:14.000 How much crime do you think you'd actually prevent though by giving people $1,000 a month?

00:11:17.000 I think most of the people that are doing crime, whether it's thievery or assault, they're not thinking this out.

00:11:27.000 This is just either a way of life for them, either they've got real mental issues or a pattern of behavior that they can't break.

00:11:36.000 I really don't think that $1,000 a month is going to fix any of that.

00:11:40.000 It's not going to fix all of it, for sure.

00:11:42.000 I mean, we'll still have jails.

00:11:43.000 It's not like, you know, silver bullet.

00:11:45.000 Yeah.

00:11:47.000 I think?

00:12:04.000 I mean, everything's like this statistical curve, and you're taking the people who are, let's call it, like the last 10 to 20 percent.

00:12:11.000 But if you reduce our incarcerated population by 10 to 20 percent, I mean, that's billions and billions of dollars.

00:12:18.000 So you...

00:12:22.000 We're good to go.

00:12:46.000 Relationships improve.

00:12:47.000 Domestic violence goes down.

00:12:49.000 Hospital visits go down.

00:12:50.000 And your worker productivity goes up.

00:12:53.000 I mean, you're an entrepreneur and CEO, so you know when you run a company, you say, I'm going to invest in my people.

00:13:00.000 I'm going to treat them well and try and train them and give them resources because you know that will increase your productivity as an organization.

00:13:07.000 In the public sector, we have the opposite.

00:13:10.000 We're like, if I can just avoid spending money on you, then I'm going to somehow save money.

00:13:17.000 When we end up spending that money in very, very dark, costly, counterproductive ways in the back end, because they wind up in our institutions, and our institutions just spend a truckload of money.

00:13:29.000 So if you look at the cost savings and the value gains and the economic growth, that actually gets you back about a trillion dollars of the 1.8.

00:13:38.000 This is like the trickle-up economy because none of the money disappears.

00:13:41.000 It goes right back into the economy.

00:13:43.000 And the way you get the last $800 billion or so is related to what we think is happening with AI and all these advanced technologies.

00:13:50.000 Because if you look at who's going to win with AI and...

00:13:54.000 Self-driving cars and trucks.

00:13:56.000 The savings from robot trucks are estimated to be $168 billion a year, just from that one thing.

00:14:03.000 So the problem is that the American public is going to see very little of that money because the winners are going to be the trillion-dollar tech companies that are great at just not paying a lot of taxes.

00:14:13.000 They'll move it through Ireland.

00:14:15.000 Amazon will say it didn't make any money this quarter, no reason to pay taxes.

00:14:19.000 And so what we need to do is we need to put in a new tax that actually gets the American public a slice of every robot truck mile, Amazon transaction, Facebook ad.

00:14:30.000 And every other industrialized country already has this tax.

00:14:33.000 It's called a value-added tax.

00:14:35.000 And because our economy is so vast at $20 trillion, a value-added tax at even half the European level generates about $800 billion in new revenue.

00:14:42.000 And that gets you all the way there.

00:14:44.000 So this is much more achievable and affordable than most people think when they start unpacking how the numbers work out.

00:14:51.000 So essentially, it would be the biggest corporations, the companies that gain or that...

00:14:57.000 Have the largest revenue.

00:14:59.000 They're going to be paying most of this.

00:15:01.000 Yeah, but they're going to get some of that money back, obviously.

00:15:03.000 Because one of the things I say to the CEOs, it's like if everyone in Missouri is getting a thousand bucks, you know Amazon's going to see some of that because they're just going to buy more stuff.

00:15:12.000 That's true for all of the big companies.

00:15:14.000 What I say to CEOs, and I've spoken to groups of dozens of CEOs, what's really bad for your business is when people don't have money to spend.

00:15:21.000 What's good for your business is when they do.

00:15:23.000 So they're going to give up some money at the top end, but they're just going to end up getting it back when their consumers end up spending a bit more.

00:15:30.000 And has this been actually fleshed out, like the real numbers or the projections of how much they're going to get back?

00:15:36.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:15:37.000 So the Roosevelt Institute studied this plan of everyone getting $1,000 a month and projected it would create 2 million new jobs and grow the economy by 8-10%.

00:15:46.000 And then you can model out what that means to each business because in that climate, they're going to see a similar uptick in revenues.

00:15:54.000 Did they factor in all the jobs that are going to be lost?

00:15:57.000 So one of the things that's a misconception about universal basic income is that it somehow will, like, facilitate job loss.

00:16:05.000 Well, job loss, though, is the reason for universal basic income in the first place, right?

00:16:09.000 Yeah, which we're in the midst of right now.

00:16:11.000 Like, right now, as we're sitting here together, the labor force participation rate in the United States is 63%.

00:16:20.000 I think we're good to go.

00:16:43.000 So if you put a thousand bucks a month into people's hands, it actually grows the economy and creates jobs because of more economic activity.

00:16:52.000 Now, when you say a problem that's coming down the pike, what are the projections in terms of the timeline?

00:17:00.000 A lot of the projections are actually pretty consistent with each other, which means they're probably right.

00:17:09.000 Bain says you're looking at between 20% and 30% of jobs subject to automation by 2030, which is pretty soon.

00:17:17.000 It's like 11 years from now.

00:17:18.000 McKinsey says about 25%.

00:17:22.000 The Obama White House, literally their last day in office, they issued a report saying, hey guys, we're going to automate away all the jobs and then turn the lights off.

00:17:31.000 They said 83% of jobs that make less than $20 an hour will be subject to automation by 2030. MIT is saying the same thing.

00:17:40.000 And so we have 11 years to try and accelerate meaningful solutions.

00:17:46.000 And this 11 years, it's not like it all happens on 2030. It's going to happen between now and then progressively, according to all of the major institutions that have looked at this.

00:17:55.000 Now, when you take a guy who's working as a truck driver and he's making $50,000 a year and you tell him that automation is going to take away his job, but good news, we're going to give you $12,000 a year, that's a substantial loss in income.

00:18:09.000 Yeah, it's a problem.

00:18:11.000 Yeah, it also leaves them with this feeling of uselessness or hopelessness, that they're not contributing.

00:18:17.000 I think one of the things that people enjoy is earning their own way.

00:18:23.000 It sounds counterintuitive.

00:18:26.000 People don't like free money.

00:18:28.000 They like a feeling of satisfaction, of a job well done, that they've created something, that they've done something.

00:18:34.000 Yeah.

00:18:34.000 Yeah, you're 100% right.

00:18:35.000 It's one reason why we call this the freedom dividend.

00:18:38.000 We say, look, it's not money for nothing.

00:18:40.000 You're an owner and shareholder of the richest country in the history of the world.

00:18:44.000 Just like when I buy Verizon or Microsoft, they send me a dividend.

00:18:48.000 I don't complain about that.

00:18:50.000 You're now a shareholder in this great nation and you get a dividend.

00:18:55.000 But when I was with Dennis, the trucker who owns his own trucking company in Iowa, the The role that jobs play in truckers' lives is vital.

00:19:08.000 And again, I'm a very data-driven guy where men deal with joblessness very, very poorly.

00:19:15.000 By the numbers, we spend between 40 and 75 percent of our time on the computer playing video games or doing other things.

00:19:23.000 Our substance abuse goes up.

00:19:26.000 Our volunteering in the community goes down even though we have more time.

00:19:30.000 And we generally spiral into antisocial and self-destructive behaviors.

00:19:35.000 Now, this is not something that's experienced by women in the same levels.

00:19:40.000 Like women in joblessness, women actually are more adaptable. 1.00

00:19:43.000 They're more likely to go back to school and volunteer.

00:19:46.000 They don't spend all their time on the computers the way that we do.

00:19:50.000 So there's a real problem.

00:19:52.000 And the purpose of universal basic income is not meant to be a job replacement for those truckers.

00:19:59.000 Because right now, those truckers, and when I talk to the truck drivers, so I've been campaigning for president now for a number of months, so I spent a lot of time in Iowa, which is a really huge trucking hub.

00:20:09.000 And you go to them and say, hey guys, you worried about robot trucks taking your jobs?

00:20:12.000 They're like, there's no way a robot could take my job.

00:20:14.000 That's totally matter of fact.

00:20:16.000 They're like, this is not something that they worry about.

00:20:20.000 Their attitude has transitioned from that somewhat to, we should make robot trucks illegal.

00:20:27.000 Or we should make it so that a robot truck cannot displace me.

00:20:31.000 So that's been a big shift.

00:20:33.000 Because a year ago, they were like, it's impossible.

00:20:37.000 The idea that an American would say, we should make a robot job illegal.

00:20:44.000 We should have some laws that keep you from being free to use robots for your business instead of a person.

00:20:52.000 You should be forced to hire mandatory unionization or something. 0.86

00:20:56.000 That sounds pretty ridiculous.

00:20:58.000 Well, that's where a lot of them are, Joe.

00:21:00.000 So only 13% of truckers are unionized.

00:21:03.000 So 87% are like Dennis, where they're small, independent firms.

00:21:07.000 And a lot of them actually bought or leased their own trucks.

00:21:12.000 Yeah.

00:21:17.000 Yeah.

00:21:24.000 Yeah.

00:21:32.000 So you literally cannot compete because the robot truck is just going to keep going hour 15, 16, 17, etc.

00:21:39.000 So these guys make – some of them make really good money.

00:21:43.000 Like some of them make $70,000, $75,000, $80,000.

00:21:45.000 It's one of the higher paying jobs for men without a college degree.

00:21:52.000 And so if you look at what they're facing, it's not so crazy that they're like, hey, you need to make the robots illegal.

00:21:59.000 Because for them, what is the next best economic alternative if the robot trucks take over that job?

00:22:05.000 Like, where are they going to go from?

00:22:06.000 Yeah, it's not crazy for them.

00:22:07.000 But it's a crazy idea to tell a company that they can't do something that's more efficient, safer, and probably economically more viable.

00:22:16.000 Oh yeah, again, the savings from automating truck driving are estimated to be $168 billion per year.

00:22:23.000 And not just labor savings, but also equipment utilization, because the trucks never stop.

00:22:28.000 Fuel efficiency, because the trucks can daisy chain together so there's less wind resistance.

00:22:32.000 Fewer accidents, because right now truck accidents kill about 4,000 people a year.

00:22:37.000 So you'd probably save lives.

00:22:39.000 There's a very, very powerful argument for the fact that we should be trying to automate this stuff.

00:22:44.000 Yeah.

00:22:44.000 But on the other side, you have literally three and a half million truckers who rely upon this for their livelihoods, to support their family.

00:22:51.000 And there's going to be a lot of passion, a lot of resistance to this.

00:22:55.000 Anyone who thinks that truck drivers are just going to shrug and be like, all right, I guess I had a good run.

00:23:00.000 I'm just going to go home and figure it out.

00:23:01.000 That's not going to be their response.

00:23:03.000 It's going to be much more likely that they say, you need to make these robot trucks illegal, or they're just going to park their trucks across the highway, get their guns out, because a lot of these guys are ex-military, and just be like, hey, I'm not moving my truck until I get my job back, and there'll be a lot of truckers in the same situation.

00:23:20.000 You really think that would happen?

00:23:22.000 They would block the highway for their job back that's less efficient, kills more people. 0.98

00:23:28.000 So I was with these truckers in the truck stop in Altoona, Iowa.

00:23:32.000 And Joe, they have really, really difficult jobs.

00:23:35.000 I mean, I don't know if you knew truckers where you were.

00:23:38.000 But they have this 14-hour window where they're allowed to drive their truck, and they drive most of that.

00:23:43.000 So they have these other 10 hours, and they sleep in their truck.

00:23:46.000 Their trucks have a bed. 0.63

00:23:47.000 They go into the truck stop.

00:23:49.000 They take a shower.

00:23:50.000 There's a laundry.

00:23:52.000 And they're like plugged into this machine of this truck and the industry.

00:23:57.000 You know, they spend days, sometimes weeks on the road.

00:24:02.000 A lot of them listen to podcasts.

00:24:03.000 Probably a lot of them listening right now.

00:24:05.000 A lot of them listen to podcasts.

00:24:07.000 And they're doing it primarily because it's a more lucrative opportunity than the other jobs that are available to them.

00:24:14.000 A lot of them have families that like, you know, like supporting their families.

00:24:18.000 Yeah.

00:24:18.000 And so, if you say, hey guys, like, you know, time's up for this way of life.

00:24:26.000 Most of them, I think, will not.

00:24:28.000 Actually, I look at how much, frankly, they endure.

00:24:32.000 There's so much endurance baked into that job that I think most of them will be like some of the guys you and I know where they're much more likely to implode or do something where it's self-destructive than they would be to take their truck and park it across the highway.

00:24:50.000 Yeah.

00:24:50.000 But you're talking about a population of hundreds of thousands, including many small business owners.

00:24:56.000 And small business owners have a different mentality very often.

00:25:00.000 Like I've been an entrepreneur.

00:25:01.000 I'm a serial entrepreneur for like the last 20 years.

00:25:03.000 Like you're an entrepreneur.

00:25:04.000 And if you saw this happen, you might say, hey, I'm adaptable.

00:25:08.000 I'll figure it out.

00:25:09.000 Or you might say, hey...

00:25:12.000 I think I can do something about this.

00:25:14.000 If I park my truck this way, that's going to cause such havoc that it's like hundreds of millions of dollars worth of economic harm very, very fast.

00:25:25.000 And if you look at the Industrial Revolution, which people cite as the precursor to what we're going through, there were mass riots in the Industrial Revolution that killed dozens of people, caused billions of dollars worth of damage.

00:25:38.000 Labor Day is a holiday today because of those riots.

00:25:42.000 And then we implemented Universal High School in 1911, in part as a response to these riots.

00:25:48.000 So according to the estimates, this is called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and we're going to displace jobs at three to four times the rate of that Industrial Revolution.

00:25:58.000 And that Industrial Revolution included mass riots.

00:26:02.000 So thinking that this one will not strikes me as really, really optimistic and perhaps unrealistic.

00:26:10.000 What do you see coming when you think that these jobs are going to be automated and then universal basic income is going to supplement?

00:26:21.000 It's going to give them some money, $1,000 a month.

00:26:24.000 But where do they go from there?

00:26:26.000 How do people exist on $12,000 a year?

00:26:29.000 What do they do?

00:26:30.000 How do they adapt to this new world?

00:26:32.000 Right.

00:26:33.000 So the first thing you have to do is you have to look at what lies ahead if we do nothing.

00:26:37.000 Right.

00:26:37.000 So the way it's going to play out is that self-driving trucks are slowly going to start hitting the highways.

00:26:43.000 Amazon's testing them out right now.

00:26:45.000 And the first stage is going to be that there's a human driver just sitting there as a fail-safe, and the truck's going to drive itself.

00:26:52.000 Now, my friends in Silicon Valley are working on teleoperators, which is – so the trucks have right now like a 98 percent – Accuracy level, which is not very high because you can't have 2% semi-trucks like running into things off the roads.

00:27:09.000 So the way they're trying to get the last percent or so is they're equipping trucks with teleoperating software, which means that a trucker, a teleoperator in Nevada or Arizona will beam into the truck and just be able to see out the front like a video game.

00:27:25.000 It's like drone operating, but instead it's a truck.

00:27:27.000 You beam in, and then you just steer the truck until the computer is like, I got it from here, and then you beam out.

00:27:33.000 That's what they're working on to try and catch that last bit of uncertainty.

00:27:38.000 So the innovations they're having, and again, Joe, we're talking about $168 billion a year.

00:27:42.000 Like, everything becomes possible when you're looking at that much money.

00:27:47.000 So in the absence of anyone doing anything, the robot trucks will start reducing shifts of various truckers.

00:27:55.000 I would say six to ten years from now.

00:27:58.000 And so then there'll be a bunch of reactions.

00:28:00.000 Now, trucking firms already have massive shortages.

00:28:04.000 They can't find enough people.

00:28:06.000 That's one reason why they're trying to automate this job as fast as they are, because they're literally like, you know, they're short like a couple hundred thousand truckers right now.

00:28:16.000 And people don't want to go into this field for a variety of reasons, the main thing being it's like extraordinarily brutal on you physically.

00:28:23.000 Very, very bad for your family life, too, because you're away all the time.

00:28:28.000 Something like 88% of truckers have an early marker for chronic disease, like substance abuse, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, something along those lines.

00:28:38.000 And now people think that the job's going to disappear in the next five to ten years, so you can't get people in.

00:28:43.000 So if you play out what happens when the robot trucks start reducing shifts, then there'll be people trying to flee the field of trucking.

00:28:51.000 And then if it becomes really dramatic where the robots start driving, let's say, between Western Pennsylvania and Nevada, and then human beings get in those states and then take it the rest of the way, because the robots won't be reliable enough to drive in urban areas.

00:29:07.000 They'll be reliable enough to drive on an interstate where they just have to make a few decisions.

00:29:13.000 Then there'll be a massive depletion of truck driving opportunities.

00:29:17.000 And then, in my mind, a lot of suicides, a lot of self-destruction.

00:29:23.000 And I don't say that lightly.

00:29:24.000 I say that based upon the fact that that's what happened to the manufacturing workers.

00:29:28.000 Where if you unpack what happened to the manufacturing workers of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, suicide rates spiked to a point where now our life expectancy as a country has declined for the last three years because of suicides and drug overdoses.

00:29:42.000 I think we're good to go.

00:29:57.000 So you'll see truckers going home and drinking themselves to death or doing drugs and overdosing or killing themselves.

00:30:05.000 And then eventually there will be an outbreak of violence because some truckers will say, instead of killing myself, how about I go bust up a robot truck?

00:30:14.000 And there are already truckers that are doing things like blocking Tesla recharging stations at electronic vehicle battery stations because they don't like electronic trucks.

00:30:24.000 Sort of.

00:30:25.000 Those are pickup trucks, though. 1.00

00:30:26.000 Those are assholes. 0.99

00:30:28.000 I mean, this is not like people doing it because they think that these Tesla recharge stations are taking jobs away. 1.00

00:30:34.000 They're just being dickheads. 0.96

00:30:36.000 Exactly, Joe. 0.98

00:30:37.000 So if you're going to be a dickhead, even though it really has nothing to do with you, imagine when you actually think your livelihood's being threatened. 0.97

00:30:45.000 Right. 0.97

00:30:45.000 Good point. 0.97

00:30:45.000 Then you can see it getting revved up to a much higher level. 0.97

00:30:49.000 Yeah.

00:30:50.000 So...

00:30:51.000 So I'm running for president in large part because I think we need to get in front of this set of problems.

00:30:56.000 We have to say, look, if we're going to save $168 billion a year, maybe some of that should go to the truckers and give them a soft landing.

00:31:05.000 Maybe we should have this universal basic income where everyone feels like they're getting a thousand bucks a month, which is not a work replacement.

00:31:11.000 It's not going to make their lives easy.

00:31:13.000 They still need to work.

00:31:14.000 But at least it takes the edge off.

00:31:16.000 It takes like the existential threat off.

00:31:19.000 And also their kids getting it.

00:31:21.000 So they feel like, okay, my kid actually has some kind of path to the future.

00:31:24.000 And it's not like if I lose this trucking job, not only am I going to struggle and suffer, but my kid will too.

00:31:31.000 So my plan as president is to install a trucker transition czar and say, look, it is your job to try and manage this transition for the three and a half million truckers.

00:31:42.000 And Joe, we haven't even talked about the five million Americans who work at truck stops, motels, diners, retail establishments, all the places where the truckers stop every day just to get out, eat a meal and, you know, like live a life.

00:31:59.000 I mean, if you imagine those communities when the trucks don't stop, there's going to be a drying up of economic vitality on a level that's unprecedented in many of these communities.

00:32:10.000 This is something that I'm just becoming aware of over the last year or two.

00:32:16.000 When you're out on the campaign trail and you're talking to media and you're discussing this with people, how many people have no idea that this is coming?

00:32:26.000 Well, what I say to people, Joe, is I say, hey, have you noticed stores closing on your Main Street?

00:32:31.000 And then they say, yes.

00:32:32.000 And then I ask them, why is that?

00:32:34.000 And then they reflect for a minute.

00:32:35.000 And then they say, Amazon.

00:32:36.000 And I'm like, yeah, that's right.

00:32:38.000 Amazon's getting $20 billion of commerce every year.

00:32:42.000 And it's now tipping your malls and Main Street stores into oblivion.

00:32:45.000 And like, is that going to get better or worse?

00:32:48.000 So some people say it's like the robots are years away.

00:32:51.000 And then you're like, no, it's not robots actually walking around your neighborhood.

00:32:55.000 I mean, of course, that's unlikely.

00:32:57.000 But Amazon soaking up the business that used to go to your mall, if you go to their fulfillment center, it's robots as far as the eye can see.

00:33:06.000 If you go to their...

00:33:07.000 I think?

00:33:12.000 I think?

00:33:31.000 Getting rid of the most common jobs in the U.S. economy, filled by high school graduates, and then replacing them with a handful of jobs for higher skilled people in different places.

00:33:41.000 And then we're pretending that the first population is somehow going to access the new opportunities, when the odds of them getting up and moving to Seattle or whatnot and becoming a web designer or logistics manager or...

00:33:55.000 A big data scientist or something like essentially near zero.

00:33:59.000 And so this is what gave rise to a lot of the anger that got Donald Trump elected because they looked around their communities and were like, hey, I used to work in this manufacturing plant.

00:34:09.000 This manufacturing plant no longer exists.

00:34:11.000 For whatever reason, like I'm being told that it's somehow like my fault that I wasn't adaptable enough.

00:34:17.000 I didn't somehow become a coder or something ridiculous.

00:34:23.000 And I have to say, Joe, and this is like something that I've picked up from Dennis in part.

00:34:28.000 So I'm with this trucker in Iowa.

00:34:29.000 And he says to me, he says, like, I don't think that Democrats care about people like me.

00:34:35.000 And he says that to me while I'm in his truck.

00:34:37.000 And I'm just like, I can understand why he feels that way.

00:34:40.000 But that's Incredibly destructive.

00:34:43.000 Because there's a point at which Democratic Party used to be very, very heavily aligned with working class Americans.

00:34:51.000 And there's now some kind of pathology that if the person who's suffering is a white man of a certain background, then the suffering somehow is like, somehow like diminished.

00:35:02.000 Like it doesn't count as much if they're a trucker.

00:35:06.000 And that's something that I find really...

00:35:11.000 It's like we have to start acknowledging the source of the problems.

00:35:15.000 One thing I'm saying to people is like, look, it's not immigrants that are taking these jobs away.

00:35:18.000 Like, just facts.

00:35:19.000 It is not immigrants. 1.00

00:35:21.000 It is the fact that technology is pushing our economy in a direction that makes it harder and harder for many Americans to get by based upon this current, I trade my time for money model.

00:35:33.000 Now, truckers seem to be the big one, right?

00:35:35.000 Yeah.

00:35:36.000 Cashiers are another one.

00:35:37.000 Yeah.

00:35:38.000 What are the other jobs that are going to be killed by automation?

00:35:43.000 So the next obvious one is call center workers.

00:35:47.000 Of course.

00:35:48.000 Where there are 2.5 million call center workers still in the United States.

00:35:51.000 Generally high school graduates that make about $14 an hour.

00:35:54.000 Now, when you and I call a company, we're like pounding keys trying to get a human because the AI is so annoying.

00:36:00.000 It's like, hey, just give me a person.

00:36:04.000 But over the next number of months, AI is going to become indistinguishable from a person.

00:36:09.000 Yeah, like the new Google answering service that comes with the Pixel phones.

00:36:13.000 It's amazing.

00:36:14.000 Yes.

00:36:15.000 And so that two and a half million call center population is going to shrink a ton.

00:36:19.000 Because after you get AI software that's better than one of them, you know, it can beat most all of them, you know, that's not like 5000 jobs, that's potentially 500,000 jobs.

00:36:30.000 Right.

00:36:31.000 I was at a CIO type of like a major bank said that his estimate was that's about 30% of the bank's workers fall into that category.

00:36:58.000 So you're looking at call center workers, you're looking at back office workers, you're looking at insurance brokers.

00:37:04.000 Insurance is a very highly automatable industry because it's a lot of information getting passed back and forth.

00:37:09.000 Cashiers, as you said, truck drivers, delivery drivers, Uber drivers.

00:37:14.000 I heard that it goes even as far as medical procedures.

00:37:17.000 There was a recent automated medical procedure where they did surgery on a grape.

00:37:23.000 Yes.

00:37:23.000 Did you see that?

00:37:24.000 Yeah, I saw that.

00:37:25.000 And China's already had just a complete automated dental implantation.

00:37:30.000 Because China actually has a real shortage of surgeons.

00:37:33.000 And so their incentives to try and automate this are very, very high.

00:37:38.000 Now, the interesting thing here, Joe, is that let's say I made a robot surgeon tomorrow.

00:37:42.000 That was awesome.

00:37:42.000 Could do better work than a lot of people.

00:37:45.000 Right now, the economic incentives still are not necessarily for everyone to use my robot surgeon because the regulations aren't there yet in the U.S. And so healthcare is a really interesting one.

00:37:55.000 Another one that's very clearly going to get taken up by AI is radiology and looking at tumors on a film.

00:38:01.000 Because it turns out that AI can see shades of grey that a human eye cannot.

00:38:06.000 And it can reference millions of films where the most experienced doctor can probably reference thousands.

00:38:12.000 And so radiology, I'll tell you, medical students are running from radiology as fast as they can because they know that's going to get taken up by AI. Man, this is such a bleak forecast.

00:38:24.000 It's very strange when we stop and think about all the different things that human beings find value in as far as their occupation.

00:38:31.000 Like, hey, I'm a this, I'm a that, this is what I do.

00:38:34.000 And the idea that these things are all going to go away.

00:38:37.000 It's kind of disturbing.

00:38:38.000 Yeah.

00:38:38.000 Oh, and when I was digging into the research, Joe, it's been happening and it's tearing us apart.

00:38:43.000 I mean, I referenced the fact that...

00:38:44.000 So here are some things that are at all-time or multi-decade highs right now in the United States of America.

00:38:50.000 Suicide, drug overdoses, anxiety and depression, mental problems, financial insecurity, people being unable to pay their bills.

00:39:02.000 All of these things are at record highs.

00:39:04.000 And one thing I know you've talked about in the past that I think you'd really find...

00:39:09.000 Fascinating.

00:39:10.000 So there have been studies as to what happens to your mind when you can't pay your bills.

00:39:15.000 And when you can't pay your bills, you're like stressing out.

00:39:18.000 It's like, if I pay this, I can't pay that.

00:39:19.000 And there's like always the time-money trade-off.

00:39:21.000 It's like, oh, if I spend extra time commuting, maybe I can save a couple bucks.

00:39:26.000 And so what it does is it actually constrains your bandwidth to a point that your functional IQ goes down by 13 points or one standard deviation.

00:39:34.000 So just if you say to someone, hey, here's a bill you can't pay and then you give them an IQ test, their score actually goes down.

00:39:41.000 It's a lot.

00:40:11.000 Yeah, like, blame them.

00:40:15.000 What we're talking about, again, it's not the speculative future.

00:40:18.000 It's that we've been doing this for years, and it's actually pushing our population into a mindset of scarcity, of nastiness.

00:40:25.000 And that's why universal basic income is so crucial, because it gets the boot off of people's throats, and it replaces the mindset of scarcity with a mindset of abundance and rationality and optimism and capacity.

00:40:41.000 I'm an entrepreneur.

00:40:42.000 You're an entrepreneur.

00:40:43.000 I'll tell you, very, very few entrepreneurs start businesses at a scarcity where they're like, oh, I can't pay my bills.

00:40:49.000 I guess I'm going to start a new company.

00:40:52.000 But $1,000 a month isn't even enough money for most people to pay for their rent.

00:40:57.000 Well, the great thing is, again, this $1,000 is yours no matter what.

00:41:01.000 So right now, let's say you're doing a normal job.

00:41:05.000 So if you make $1,000 a year, you still get $1,000 a month.

00:41:08.000 Yes, yes, you do.

00:41:09.000 I mean, it's opt-in.

00:41:10.000 So you could opt in and take it, which most Americans would because it's still a thousand bucks a month.

00:41:14.000 Yeah, people get greedy.

00:41:16.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:41:18.000 Yeah, a thousand dollars to get my nails done.

00:41:21.000 Yes.

00:41:22.000 Or give it away if they felt like it.

00:41:24.000 Yeah.

00:41:25.000 Yeah, but those are the things that are at all-time highs.

00:41:30.000 It's like all these negative social indicators.

00:41:32.000 Here are things that are at all-time lows.

00:41:34.000 Getting married, starting a business, having a kid, moving for a new job.

00:41:41.000 All of those things are at historic lows in the United States of America.

00:41:45.000 Having children, really?

00:41:46.000 Yeah, we're at record low birth rates right now.

00:41:48.000 And it's largely because people feel too strapped to have kids.

00:41:52.000 I mean, that's literally where we are.

00:41:53.000 When you say record low, by like what percentage?

00:41:55.000 You can look up right now, Jamie, I don't know if you want to look this up, but stories have come out over this last year saying that Americans are now at the lowest rate of childbirth that has been the case in decades or ever.

00:42:08.000 Yeah, that's a conversation that I have with people whenever they say that they're worried about population, that the population is growing so fast and overpopulated.

00:42:16.000 Here it goes.

00:42:17.000 1.80 births per woman 2016. What does that mean?

00:42:23.000 Question.

00:42:24.000 So it's dropping from 1970 at a high to...

00:42:30.000 1964. Yeah.

00:42:31.000 Well, it seems fairly similar from 1980 to today.

00:42:35.000 That's still...

00:42:36.000 In fact, it's actually above.

00:42:38.000 If it goes from 1.8 to...

00:42:40.000 If it goes from...

00:42:42.000 Even something like 1.9 to 1.8 is a pretty significant drop.

00:42:46.000 There it is.

00:42:47.000 U.S. birth dipped to 30 or low.

00:42:49.000 Fertility rates sink further below replacement level.

00:42:54.000 But the thought is that this is because of education, and that this is because people are waiting longer to have children, and that this is a byproduct of industrialization and modern world, and that the more educated and affluent people get, the less likely they are to have children.

00:43:08.000 As far as everything I've read about it, it's not a symptom of people doing poorly.

00:43:15.000 It's a symptom of people doing well.

00:43:17.000 You know, there are definitely cases where richer countries just have fewer kids.

00:43:23.000 And that's cool.

00:43:24.000 Because they concentrate on their careers, right?

00:43:26.000 Isn't that the idea?

00:43:27.000 But the darker part of this, Joe, is that right now, if you're a non-college-educated person in the United States, the odds of you ever getting married are less than 50% now for the first time.

00:43:38.000 Ever.

00:43:39.000 And then people are having fewer kids.

00:43:41.000 To play devil's advocate though, the marriage thing might be people looking at it and go, God, my parents got divorced, my brother got divorced, everybody else got divorced. 0.98

00:43:49.000 What the fuck am I doing? 0.95

00:43:51.000 There are a lot of good reasons for it. 0.99

00:43:54.000 As a happily married man myself.

00:43:56.000 Me as well.

00:43:57.000 I always tell people don't do it.

00:43:59.000 I tell people don't do it.

00:44:00.000 It's too risky.

00:44:02.000 So you can look at, to me, certainly to me, getting married and having kids is like an act of prosperity or optimism.

00:44:10.000 There are reasons why it's going down otherwise.

00:44:12.000 But if you look at things like starting a new business, I mean, that being at multi-decade lows, there's like no positive spin on that.

00:44:18.000 People moving between states is now at multi-decade lows.

00:44:23.000 People moving for a new job, multi-decade lows.

00:44:27.000 And you think this is the product of automation or it's the product of a bunch of different factors?

00:44:38.000 It's a range of factors, but one of the big problems, and keep in mind, I spent seven years helping entrepreneurs grow businesses in 18 cities around the country between 2011 and 2017. That was actually my job.

00:44:51.000 My job was to be the job creator guy.

00:44:54.000 And so when you go out to these places, you see that the dynamism is getting sucked up by certain markets to a level that's unprecedented in our history.

00:45:04.000 Like that the disparities between Cleveland and San Francisco or St. Louis and LA are much, much higher than they've been at any other historical period, both by the numbers and like after you actually go to the places,

00:45:19.000 you're like, wow, like this is not flourishing the way that you'd hope.

00:45:23.000 Do you feel like an economic Paul Revere in a certain sense?

00:45:27.000 Like, the robots are coming!

00:45:29.000 The robots are coming!

00:45:30.000 I do.

00:45:31.000 It's weird, man.

00:45:32.000 The comparison I make is that if the United States economy is like an elephant, you know the parable of blind people touching the elephant? 0.91

00:45:41.000 So I'm an entrepreneur.

00:45:43.000 I sold a company to a public company that was a national education company.

00:45:48.000 It was based in New York.

00:45:49.000 What is the parable of blind people touching an elephant?

00:45:51.000 So what happens is they're like seven blind men and they get asked like, what does an elephant look like?

00:45:57.000 And then one of them is touching the trunk and is like, an elephant looks like a snake.

00:46:01.000 And another one is touching its leg and it's like, an elephant looks like a tree trunk.

00:46:04.000 So that's the way most people experience the economy is that they're like touching a part of the economy and they're like, this is what it looks like or feels like.

00:46:11.000 So, I've had this really strange set of experiences where I sold a national education company to a public company.

00:46:18.000 I lived bi-coastally between New York and San Francisco for the last five years.

00:46:23.000 I've operated in 18 cities around the country.

00:46:25.000 I was an appointee in the Obama administration in D.C. So, I've actually seen the elephant, if you know what I mean.

00:46:32.000 The whole elephant.

00:46:33.000 Yeah, I'm hanging out with...

00:46:36.000 The tech wizards of Silicon Valley.

00:46:38.000 And I'm like, hey, we're going to automate these jobs.

00:46:40.000 And they're like, oh yeah, we're going to automate these jobs.

00:46:43.000 So it's not a mystery.

00:46:45.000 And they're not bad people.

00:46:46.000 It's like, hey, it's my job to make stuff work better.

00:46:48.000 And if you gave me a choice between making things work better and creating abundant opportunities for the other people, I would choose that.

00:46:56.000 But I do not have that choice.

00:46:57.000 I have a job to do.

00:46:58.000 This is my job.

00:47:00.000 And what I tell people is like, whose responsibility then is it to go tell the people, look, It's technology.

00:47:06.000 It's transforming the economy in fundamental ways.

00:47:08.000 And we need to make it so that everyone benefits.

00:47:11.000 And it's not just that this hyper-concentrated set of winners and then this huge army of relative losers.

00:47:18.000 And it's the government's job.

00:47:20.000 But at this point, we've given up on our government as anything.

00:47:23.000 It can't really do anything.

00:47:25.000 And so now it's no one's job.

00:47:27.000 And so somehow, Joe, it has become my job.

00:47:30.000 And it blows my mind, too, sometimes.

00:47:32.000 Now...

00:47:34.000 Coming from a place of being a serial entrepreneur to this presidential candidate who's kind of warning people about the upcoming technological apocalypse, as it were, how did you make that transition?

00:47:46.000 And what was your motivation to get involved in this to the point where you're actually running for president on this platform?

00:47:52.000 Yeah, so sell a company in 2009, and that was the financial crisis.

00:47:59.000 Like, Wall Street had crashed the economy.

00:48:01.000 And I had personally taught these kids who'd worked at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and McKinsey, and I was like, man, we need smart kids to do something other than just head to Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

00:48:10.000 We need to have them go to Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, and all, and start businesses.

00:48:16.000 So I quit my job.

00:48:17.000 I donated low six figures to start this new organization.

00:48:21.000 And then we trained hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped create several thousand jobs.

00:48:25.000 So that was like my wholesome give back.

00:48:27.000 I was like, hey, I'm like the guy who just believes in entrepreneurship.

00:48:31.000 Because just like you, I freaking love entrepreneurs.

00:48:34.000 And I was like, so here's the joke I used to tell.

00:48:36.000 I went to law school.

00:48:36.000 I was an unhappy lawyer for five months.

00:48:38.000 Yeah.

00:48:40.000 And so what I tell people is like, if you're a clueless, ambitious 22-year-old who came out of college, and you say to your parents, hey, I'm going to go to law school, they're going to say, that's great.

00:48:52.000 It's really easy to find the law school because they're just there, just apply to it.

00:48:56.000 And the government will give you a $100,000 loan, no questions asked. 0.90

00:49:00.000 And then if you say to your parents, hey, I want to be an entrepreneur, your parents will think that's stupid, it's hard to find, and no one's going to give you a $100,000 loan.

00:49:08.000 So we have this huge oversupply of indebted law school graduates and a huge undersupply of entrepreneurs was my thinking. 0.85

00:49:15.000 And so I was like, okay, how do you fix that?

00:49:17.000 So I started this organization, Venture for America, to try and fix that.

00:49:21.000 I think?

00:49:42.000 They're blaming racism, Russia, Facebook, the FBI. And if you look at the voter district data on a district-by-district basis, there's a straight line up between the adoption of industrial robots in that voting district and the movement towards Trump.

00:49:59.000 It's a straight economic story where we blasted away 4 million manufacturing jobs.

00:50:05.000 In the swing states and Donald Trump is our president.

00:50:08.000 So imagine being me and then seeing that and being like, okay, I get it.

00:50:14.000 This is an economic technological story.

00:50:16.000 And then I went to people in Washington, D.C. I was like, hey guys, what are we going to do?

00:50:20.000 We're in the third inning of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country.

00:50:26.000 And the third inning has brought us Donald Trump.

00:50:28.000 The fourth, fifth, sixth innings are going to be horrific.

00:50:32.000 What are we going to do?

00:50:34.000 And then the answers I got were somewhere between disappointing and horrifying.

00:50:38.000 Where if you go to mainstream politicians and you're like, what are we going to do?

00:50:41.000 The answers I got were literally, number one, we cannot talk about that.

00:50:46.000 Number two, we should study that.

00:50:48.000 We cannot talk about that.

00:50:50.000 That's verbatim.

00:50:51.000 Really?

00:50:51.000 Yeah.

00:50:52.000 And why were they saying that?

00:50:53.000 Because it seems alarmist, like anti-progress, or like, you know, you're like, you know, throwing stones at like, like big tech companies.

00:51:04.000 And it's like, I'm not throwing stones at anyone.

00:51:05.000 I'm just pointing out the fact.

00:51:06.000 So number one is, so number one was can't talk about it.

00:51:10.000 Number two is need to study it.

00:51:12.000 And the number three was the point you made originally, which was we must educate and retrain Americans for the jobs of the future.

00:51:18.000 And then when I was like, hey, we're terrible at that by the numbers, then they'd literally be like, well, I guess we'll learn to get better at it then.

00:51:25.000 So I came back to my home in New York City and I was like, oh my gosh, we are so backward and far gone, certainly as a government. 0.99

00:51:35.000 And so then I was grappling with it, and I'm a parent like you are, and I looked at my kids and I was like, am I really going to bring them up in this shit show? 0.98

00:51:42.000 Like, is this really the plan? 0.97

00:51:45.000 And so then I was like, okay, how would you actually solve this problem if you had to do so?

00:51:51.000 And so then I said, okay, Universal Basic Income rebranded the Freedom Dividend after we did a bunch of tests because it tests much better as the Freedom Dividend than Universal Basic Income.

00:52:01.000 And then try and make the rules of the economy work better for more people as fast as we can before this automation wave really crescendos.

00:52:11.000 What do you mean by that?

00:52:12.000 Well, to me, you know what I'm saying is retail and truck driving are the two major, major obvious sectors that are going to get displaced.

00:52:21.000 Being a retail worker is the most common job in the United States right now.

00:52:25.000 The average retail worker is a 39-year-old woman with a high school education making between $11 and $12 an hour. 0.96

00:52:31.000 So what do those workers do when 30% of the malls and stores close in the next five years?

00:52:36.000 You know, and then truckers are next in line, you know, by the five to ten year mark.

00:52:40.000 So it's like we have to get our acts together before these populations end up getting displaced.

00:52:47.000 And we know Americans don't have a ton of savings to fall back on.

00:52:50.000 It's not like they'll be like, oh, like, you know, let me take a month off to like think about it.

00:52:54.000 That's not the real life situation.

00:52:56.000 But We're good to go.

00:53:03.000 We're good to go.

00:53:27.000 And I either win, which is very doable.

00:53:30.000 I can win.

00:53:31.000 Or I mainstream this set of considerations to a point where other politicians are willing to tackle something like universal basic income and make it a reality in that timeframe.

00:53:43.000 Anyone can win, right?

00:53:45.000 I mean, it is possible.

00:53:47.000 I mean, there are voters, people are voting, but do you really believe that you can win?

00:53:53.000 You wouldn't be running if you wouldn't, right?

00:53:55.000 I believe that.

00:53:56.000 But if you were not you...

00:54:00.000 No, I appreciate the question.

00:54:02.000 And I've been very upfront the whole time, is that if my ideas and policies become front and center and we get this done, then if I'm not President of the United States, I'm perfectly happy with that.

00:54:16.000 I'm on the record just being like, I'm just trying to solve problems.

00:54:18.000 I'm an entrepreneur trying to solve a problem.

00:54:20.000 That said...

00:54:22.000 I'm already polling at 1% nationally.

00:54:24.000 I'm tied with Kirsten Gillibrand and other national politicians right now as we're sitting here.

00:54:28.000 I have no idea.

00:54:29.000 Do you?

00:54:30.000 Kirsten Gillibrand?

00:54:31.000 She's a senator from New York, so that was supposed to be a national politician. 0.99

00:54:35.000 But normal morons like myself are not aware of that. 0.99

00:54:37.000 I wouldn't have known that you were running if it wasn't for Sam. 0.99

00:54:40.000 I appreciate that, man.

00:54:41.000 But now, happily, everyone who's a fan of yours, which is apparently everybody, now knows I'm running.

00:54:49.000 So, you're right that most people have never heard of Andrew Yang, and I'm already polling at 1% enough for me to make the debates.

00:54:56.000 Are you running as an independent?

00:54:57.000 I'm running as a Democrat because the mechanics make it such that that is necessary for you to be able to actually succeed and win.

00:55:04.000 But I can go through with you the mechanics and you might enjoy this because I know you and Sam and others sometimes talk politics and presidential politics.

00:55:13.000 So I'm an operator.

00:55:15.000 I'm an entrepreneur.

00:55:16.000 And so you get to and be like, okay, what does it take to be president?

00:55:19.000 So there are two rules to run for president.

00:55:21.000 One is you have to be 35 years or older.

00:55:23.000 Check.

00:55:24.000 And then the second is natural born citizen.

00:55:25.000 Check.

00:55:26.000 Only rules.

00:55:27.000 That's it.

00:55:28.000 So then you get into the process and you say, okay, the first two states to vote are Iowa and New Hampshire.

00:55:33.000 Okay.

00:55:34.000 Now, there are going to be about 20 people running for president as a Democrat this cycle.

00:55:38.000 You probably knew that, right?

00:55:40.000 So, you look at the Iowa caucus.

00:55:44.000 Iowa has a population of 3.1 million, but only 171,000 Iowans participated in the caucus in 2016 because it's a very high investment.

00:55:54.000 Now, they changed the rules, so this year it's going to be closer to, like, let's call it 250,000.

00:55:59.000 But if you have 20 candidates...

00:56:02.000 To finish top three in a field of 20, you probably need about 40,000 to 50,000 Iowans to get on board.

00:56:10.000 So you say, hey, do I think I can be President of the United States?

00:56:13.000 The threshold question is this.

00:56:15.000 Can I get 40,000 to 50,000 Iowans on board with the idea that them and their family members getting $1,000 a month is a good idea, that that would actually help improve their lives?

00:56:23.000 Well, I'm sure it would help improve their lives, and I'm sure they would agree with you.

00:56:26.000 The question is, what are the other things?

00:56:29.000 See, I don't think most people are aware That this is coming.

00:56:34.000 And I think you educating people and explaining all these statistics and seeing the forecast, particularly from your position as a serial entrepreneur who has a deep background in business and you have a deep understanding of this, you're helping in a tremendous way by educating people.

00:56:48.000 But I think most people have, it may be illogically, but they have different concerns.

00:56:56.000 So how do you address these other concerns?

00:56:59.000 Like, I bet if you polled people, what are the issues?

00:57:02.000 What are the issues in this upcoming 2020 presidential race that, you know, who's going to beat Donald Trump?

00:57:08.000 How do you do it?

00:57:09.000 This is like, on the Democratic side, the idea is like, anyone but Trump, right?

00:57:13.000 Yep.

00:57:13.000 This is, I mean, they would be so happy if, fill in the blank, Tulsi Gabbard, you, whoever.

00:57:19.000 On the Republican side, obviously it's Trump, unless someone comes along or he goes to jail.

00:57:24.000 Those are the two possibilities.

00:57:26.000 What are the other issues?

00:57:29.000 And that you feel that people are really concerned about that you can perhaps shed some unique light on.

00:57:38.000 Sure.

00:57:38.000 So the three big policies I'm running on are, one, the freedom dividend, because a lot of Americans are seeing their paychecks not keep up with their expenses.

00:57:46.000 Number two is we need to get healthcare off the backs of people. 0.89

00:57:50.000 We're good to go.

00:57:57.000 We're good to go.

00:58:07.000 So we've got to get healthcare off the backs of businesses and families and try and make the economy more dynamic.

00:58:13.000 And we spend twice as much on healthcare as other countries do to worse results.

00:58:17.000 Right now we're in the worst of all worlds.

00:58:19.000 And the third thing is, and I reference my wife when I talk about this.

00:58:24.000 My wife is at home with our two boys, six and three, one of whom is autistic.

00:58:28.000 And what I say is, what is her work valued at in GDP? And then people think about it and they're like, I don't know.

00:58:35.000 And I'm like, zero.

00:58:36.000 Because GDP doesn't consider that actual economic contribution.

00:58:41.000 And then I say, what we have to do is we have to actually evolve from GDP as a measuring stick because it actually doesn't work for us.

00:58:48.000 It's almost 100 years old.

00:58:50.000 We made it up during the Great Depression.

00:58:52.000 Self-driving trucks are going to drive GDP way up, but it's going to be very, very bad for many people and communities.

00:58:58.000 So we have to actually change the measuring sticks to something that would actually make our economy work for us.

00:59:03.000 Make it so that the market serves us instead of all us being inputs to the market.

00:59:08.000 Because if we're all inputs to the market, we lose to robots and AI. Hands down.

00:59:12.000 And it's not, like, it doesn't matter if you were, like, a really conscientious, hard-working truck driver or, like, a really lazy, sloppy one.

00:59:19.000 It doesn't matter.

00:59:20.000 Like, you know, it doesn't matter if you were, like, a really diligent radiologist or, like, a...

00:59:23.000 It doesn't matter.

00:59:25.000 So...

00:59:26.000 We have to shift the market's emphasis to actually fuel our well-being and change from GDP, which is again this archaic measurement we made up, to things that would actually correspond to how we're doing.

00:59:37.000 Things like health, childhood success rates, environmental quality.

00:59:41.000 How would you quantify that in a way that would be translatable to the average voter?

00:59:47.000 Yeah, so we have measurements for most of these things.

00:59:49.000 And again, if you look at our numbers right now, you'd see it's like, what?

00:59:54.000 Like, how many people listening to this know that America's life expectancy has declined for the last three years?

00:59:58.000 You know, that to me would be like a pretty important measurement.

01:00:01.000 And you think that's because of...

01:00:03.000 Is it because of suicide?

01:00:04.000 Is it because of drug overdose?

01:00:06.000 Is it because of obesity, diet?

01:00:10.000 What is it?

01:00:10.000 The two causes that people point to the most are that drug overdoses and suicides have overtaken vehicular deaths as the most frequent deaths in the United States.

01:00:21.000 I didn't know that suicide was on that list.

01:00:23.000 I knew that drug overdoses had taken obesity.

01:00:25.000 But suicides have overtaken obesity as well?

01:00:28.000 Suicides have overtaken car accidents.

01:00:31.000 I'm not sure about obesity.

01:00:32.000 Oh, I'm sorry.

01:00:32.000 I meant car accidents.

01:00:33.000 I misspoke.

01:00:34.000 So car accidents used to be number one.

01:00:37.000 Yeah.

01:00:38.000 Suicides are higher than car accidents now.

01:00:41.000 Yeah.

01:00:42.000 So suicides...

01:00:45.000 Drug overdoses and then car accidents?

01:00:47.000 Or suicides and drug overdoses equal?

01:00:50.000 I think drug overdose is number one.

01:00:52.000 Number one.

01:00:52.000 And then suicides, number two.

01:00:54.000 Wow.

01:00:55.000 And so that's why life expectancy has declined for the last three years.

01:00:58.000 And you think that very much likely there's at least some of the number of the suicides are related to economic disparity.

01:01:06.000 Oh, yeah.

01:01:07.000 I mean, if you look at the suicide rate, it's particularly pronounced in 50 to 54-year-old white Americans, which are the population—I mean, you resemble that. 1.00

01:01:18.000 That's me.

01:01:18.000 Yeah, that's you, which resembles the population that right now is just reaching a point where they're like, hey, my job skills don't have any— You know, like, utility in the marketplace and then they go home and they just like, you know, start looking around and being like, what am I doing?

01:01:32.000 I mean, it's really dark.

01:01:34.000 It's punitive.

01:01:35.000 It's punishing.

01:01:36.000 And we've put our citizens in the situation where we all see ourselves as economic inputs.

01:01:42.000 What the market says we're worth is what we're worth.

01:01:45.000 And if we're worth less, then it's our fault.

01:01:48.000 And so the next move is to say, okay, I guess, you know, this place, there's no place for me here.

01:01:53.000 I don't mean to sound skeptical, but I just don't believe that $1,000 a month is going to fix that.

01:02:01.000 It seems like that would be a good thing, certainly not moving in the wrong direction, certainly moving in the right direction, but it seems that there needs to be some sort of a...

01:02:23.000 Yes.

01:02:27.000 It seems like we need a step further, another move.

01:02:31.000 A hundred percent, brother.

01:02:32.000 And that's one reason why the Freedom Dividend doesn't solve the problem.

01:02:37.000 The problem is fundamentally one of reconstituting means of structure, purpose, and fulfillment in people's lives, particularly in men's lives.

01:02:47.000 Right.

01:02:47.000 How do we do that?

01:02:48.000 Right.

01:02:49.000 So one important aspect of that is to actually start measuring how we are doing as a society and saying that's actually where we're trying to go.

01:02:59.000 So instead of using GDP, using some sort of other quantifiable method of measuring health and happiness and fulfillment?

01:03:08.000 Yes.

01:03:08.000 Levels of engagement with work.

01:03:13.000 I mean, we have measurements for that.

01:03:15.000 We are sophisticated enough to do that.

01:03:17.000 And then if we say, then as president, I'm going to be up there in 2021 being like, oh, here's the State of the Union.

01:03:22.000 Here's like the data.

01:03:23.000 And then we're going to say, you know what we're going to try and do?

01:03:25.000 We're actually going to try and move those measurements in the right direction.

01:03:28.000 So let's try and get drug overdoses down by 50% in two years.

01:03:33.000 Let's try and get our mental health up a little bit, like in these ways.

01:03:37.000 And then make it so that that person who's at home being like, okay, there's not a job for me.

01:03:44.000 I'm getting $1,000 a month.

01:03:45.000 That does not solve all my problems.

01:03:47.000 It takes the edge off.

01:03:49.000 But then we can hopefully start reconstituting what that person's purpose is in their community, in their neighborhood.

01:03:58.000 And so...

01:04:00.000 One of the things that I'm going to point out is that if you pump $1,000 a month into that neighborhood, it ends up creating a whole new rung of opportunities for the people in that community.

01:04:11.000 Some of that money goes to youth leagues and churches and non-profits and creates jobs right there in that community.

01:04:22.000 One of the examples I use is if you're in a town in Missouri with 50,000 people, and let's say you really like to bake.

01:04:27.000 But starting a bakery is a dumb idea because people just do not have money in that town to buy your baked goods.

01:04:33.000 But then I pump $60 million a year into that economy, and a lot of that just circulates right there in that town.

01:04:41.000 Then if I start a bakery, it's a good idea.

01:04:44.000 And I know if my bakery fails, I'm not going to die.

01:04:46.000 I can at least go home and get my dividend.

01:04:49.000 And then if I go to other people and say, hey, you want to help me out with this, then they also think it's a better idea than they would have.

01:04:54.000 So the money is not the solution.

01:04:57.000 The money helps set the stage for the solutions.

01:05:00.000 So does the measurements.

01:05:02.000 Because right now, if you don't even know that your life expectancy is declining, it's kind of hard to solve that problem.

01:05:08.000 So if you say, look, this is actually how we measure how we're doing.

01:05:12.000 And then you go in and say, okay, local government, NGO, entrepreneur.

01:05:17.000 Because right now, none of our entrepreneurs are working on trying to make that dude's life better.

01:05:23.000 Yeah.

01:05:23.000 You know, it's like, that's not- You can only do so much.

01:05:26.000 Most entrepreneurs are just trying to succeed.

01:05:28.000 I mean, it's very difficult to start a business, right?

01:05:30.000 And actually have it work out well.

01:05:33.000 The idea that they're going to look out for truck drivers.

01:05:35.000 Yeah, it's not realistic.

01:05:37.000 But at least we can start moving ourselves in that general direction if we start- Because as a CEO, you know this.

01:05:44.000 You make what you measure.

01:05:45.000 Mm-hmm.

01:05:46.000 You're not measuring it.

01:05:46.000 You have no chance.

01:05:47.000 If you start measuring it, you at least start to open up the chance.

01:05:52.000 But what you're saying is the most profound, which is like we need to reconstitute meaning for many, many Americans.

01:05:58.000 And that's what, to me, the most destructive aspect of the, you know, again, like the mental health indicators and like the suicides and the rest of it, is like there's a real loss of meaning for many, many people here in this country.

01:06:12.000 Right.

01:06:12.000 Well, obviously we're talking about a large scale, but if you go back to the time before trucks and truck drivers, that was not a viable occupation.

01:06:22.000 It wasn't something people did, but yet they still found a way to occupy their time.

01:06:27.000 Do you think that there needs to be some sort of an education and some sort of a method of explaining to young people in particular that you have to think of something to do because most of the things that you think you can do won't exist.

01:06:43.000 So we have to think of what are the other possibilities and be creative and do something with your life that only a human being can do, which is A really weird way to think about it, because most of the things you used to be able to think that a human being could do for a living are now going to be done by robots.

01:07:01.000 But I don't think...

01:07:03.000 I think there's a giant gap between the understanding that you have and the understanding that the average person has.

01:07:09.000 And this could be a real problem in trying to expand this platform.

01:07:15.000 Well, we have to inform people.

01:07:17.000 I gotta tell you though, Joe, when I say this to people, they're like, that makes perfect sense.

01:07:20.000 Yeah, it does make perfect sense.

01:07:21.000 That's what's scary about it.

01:07:23.000 But I'm not disagreeing with you in any way, shape, or form.

01:07:26.000 I'm just thinking, man, for young kids.

01:07:29.000 For young kids.

01:07:30.000 And, you know, you're a parent, I'm a parent.

01:07:32.000 So, our education system...

01:08:00.000 It has a lot to be desired.

01:08:01.000 And the reason why it's gotten so expensive is because they've just gotten really bloated administratively.

01:08:07.000 And what would you do about that?

01:08:08.000 Like, you know, Bernie Sanders wants to have some sort of a free university.

01:08:15.000 He wants to do it across the board.

01:08:17.000 Have education to be 100% free.

01:08:20.000 I mean, look, I love that on paper.

01:08:23.000 One of the things that I hate is talking to my friends about college debt.

01:08:27.000 You know, friends that are in their 30s and 40s.

01:08:30.000 Just follow them around.

01:08:31.000 Yeah, it just stays with them like a wet blanket that you can never get out of.

01:08:35.000 I used to call my school loans my mistress because I was writing a check to another family in another town.

01:08:40.000 I was like, I hope they're enjoying themselves.

01:08:42.000 It's like I'm sending $900 a month to my loans.

01:08:46.000 And what's crazy is that if something devastating happens to you in any other form, you can file for bankruptcy.

01:08:52.000 But you never escape your student loans, no matter what happens to you.

01:08:56.000 That was just some lobbying on the part of the financial companies, man.

01:08:59.000 They just lobbied the crap out of it. 0.99

01:09:00.000 That is dirty. 1.00

01:09:01.000 That's really dirty.

01:09:03.000 When you think about how many people that run corporations that have racked up...

01:09:09.000 I mean, just think about what happened with the savings and loan crisis.

01:09:11.000 Completely, man.

01:09:12.000 And those guys skated...

01:09:14.000 Woo! 0.99

01:09:15.000 The vast majority, they're carrying around zero, zero burden from that.

01:09:21.000 The vast majority.

01:09:22.000 No one went to jail, except a few people.

01:09:25.000 Not really anybody.

01:09:26.000 Yeah, real criminals like Bernie Madoff went to jail.

01:09:29.000 A few people went to jail.

01:09:31.000 But that's about it. 1.00

01:09:33.000 You know, you'd have to be a real fucking thief to go to jail. 0.99

01:09:36.000 And these people that just, they did this and got away with it and profited and redistributed all this money into their own personal accounts and fucked the whole economy sideways. 0.99

01:09:47.000 Yeah, but heaven forbid you take out a bunch of school loans and then things go south, like you can't get out of it.

01:09:51.000 I mean, I know a guy who's in his 50s, who's an ophthalmologist, who's deeply in debt still.

01:09:58.000 It's crazy.

01:09:58.000 Yeah, it is crazy.

01:09:59.000 And if you look at it just economically, it's a massive burden on people starting businesses, starting families, buying homes instead of living with their parents.

01:10:09.000 Is it possible to fix?

01:10:09.000 It's possible to fix, for sure.

01:10:11.000 So the first thing you do is you go to the people that are currently in debt and say, look, we're going to give you a path out.

01:10:18.000 And there are ways to do it.

01:10:20.000 You know, you can have a payment plan.

01:10:22.000 One of the things I'm proposing is like a 10 by 10 where if you commit 10% of your wages for 10 years, then you're debt free.

01:10:28.000 And that means if you're not making a lot of money, then you can save a whole lot.

01:10:31.000 And the schools at this point have long since forgotten about these loans because they got paid off already.

01:10:37.000 This is just these financial companies that are holding the loans.

01:10:41.000 That's important for people to understand because people think, well, if you don't pay them, the colleges are going to go away.

01:10:45.000 No, no.

01:10:46.000 So if you're the government, you can be like, hey, loan company, guess what?

01:10:50.000 Good news.

01:10:50.000 We're going to take this off.

01:10:51.000 And it's a stimulus.

01:10:52.000 Because like you said, we've done a lot of things that were supposed to be a stimulus.

01:10:56.000 Give $4 trillion to the banks and be like, that'll stimulate the economy.

01:11:00.000 Nothing's going to stimulate the economy better than getting student loans off the backs of freaking young people because they'll actually do what they're supposed to do, which is actually spend money in the economy, take chances, start businesses, and the rest of it.

01:11:12.000 I mean, one of the reasons why our business formation rates are at multi-decade lows is that we are up to $1.5 trillion in school debt.

01:11:20.000 It's like $38K ahead.

01:11:22.000 That was like $100 billion In like 1999. So we've like gone up 15x since then and it's crippling us.

01:11:30.000 That's insane.

01:11:31.000 Anyone who thinks that's not burdening the economy.

01:11:34.000 So President Yang will be like, hey guys, it's a stimulus, but this time it's a stimulus of people.

01:11:38.000 We're going to forgive some of the student loan debt.

01:11:41.000 Because half that stuff was generated immorally anyway.

01:11:43.000 A lot of it was just schools lying about us.

01:11:47.000 Just to get people in the door.

01:12:16.000 If you want your students to have access to federal loans, you have to bring your administrator-to-student ratio in line with what it was like in the 1990s.

01:12:27.000 And then the schools would scream bloody murder.

01:12:29.000 They'd be like, I can't do that.

01:12:31.000 That's impossible.

01:12:31.000 And you'd be like, well, I have a feeling you're going to figure it out.

01:12:34.000 They would start bringing it down, and you would realize it doesn't impact the student experience at all.

01:12:40.000 And I understand it, because I've run a large non-profit organization that I had started, and your very natural tendency is just to hire excellent people, and then before you know it, you have excellent people, vice-deans of everything.

01:12:53.000 But then over time, that ends up building a very large cost structure that gets passed along to the public.

01:12:59.000 So you bring the costs down.

01:13:01.000 Now, you said before, Bernie's like free college for everyone.

01:13:03.000 The problem with that solution is it pretends that college solves the employment problems of young people.

01:13:09.000 And anyone who's coming out of college knows that that's not real.

01:13:12.000 The underemployment rate for recent college graduates today is 44%.

01:13:15.000 So you have like a 50-50 shot if you come out of college, you're doing a job that doesn't really require a degree.

01:13:20.000 And 94% of new jobs created right now are gig, temporary, or contractor jobs that don't have real paths forward or healthcare benefits of the rest of it.

01:13:29.000 Yeah, I was reading something about people...

01:13:32.000 Actually, it might have been in that book that I was just telling you about Yuval Noah Harari.

01:13:39.000 Harari, yeah, 21st Century.

01:13:41.000 Yeah, it was...

01:13:42.000 I always say that guy's name wrong.

01:13:44.000 It's a tricky name.

01:13:45.000 Yuval Noah Harari.

01:13:47.000 Yeah.

01:13:48.000 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

01:13:49.000 I think he was talking about...

01:13:52.000 How many people plan on not being in the same job in 10 years because that job won't exist anymore versus what it used to be?

01:14:00.000 It used to be that people would think that they were going to get a job and they would stay in that job.

01:14:05.000 And now they're planning that they're going to have to move, that they're not going to be able to keep the same job.

01:14:11.000 And as automation kicks in, this is obviously going to bottleneck.

01:14:16.000 It's going to get even worse.

01:14:18.000 Yeah, yeah, completely.

01:14:19.000 So, the ideal is that you end up training young people to be really, really adaptable and have low-cost structures and just be able to, you know, become entrepreneurs.

01:14:28.000 And I spent seven years trying to train young people to do just that.

01:14:31.000 But one of the things I've discovered is that we're overemphasizing college, and what we're underemphasizing is technical, vocational, and apprenticeship work.

01:14:39.000 Because a lot of that work, believe it or not, it's actually really hard to automate.

01:14:43.000 Like, you know, we're not going to automate an air conditioning repair person or a plumber anytime soon.

01:14:48.000 And for sure, craftsmen, people who build things.

01:14:51.000 And it's good for your mental health and a bunch of other things.

01:14:54.000 So right now, only 6% of American high school students are in technical or vocational training.

01:14:59.000 In Germany, that's 59%.

01:15:01.000 Give you a sense of what the gap can be.

01:15:03.000 So what we're doing is we're over-prescribing college.

01:15:06.000 We're saying college, college, college for everyone.

01:15:08.000 It's not really working that well.

01:15:09.000 And then we're still treating people who are working in trades and everything as somehow, you know, like not in great careers when a lot of those careers are actually really awesome and they pay great and people enjoy them.

01:15:22.000 They're persistent.

01:15:23.000 So right now we're going to automate away.

01:15:25.000 It's a lot easier to automate away a lot of repetitive cognitive work.

01:15:31.000 Yeah.

01:15:49.000 You know what is going to get automated?

01:15:50.000 A lot of entry-level cognitive tasks, a lot of journalism tasks, a lot of bookkeeping, a lot of stuff that college graduates think they're going to get a job in, but then those jobs are going to disappear.

01:16:01.000 I was a corporate attorney for those five unhappy months, and my friends are working on AI that can automate away a lot of basic legal work.

01:16:09.000 So these college grads are like, oh, snap, don't know what to do.

01:16:13.000 I'll go to law school and load up with another $120K in debt, and then the legal jobs are not going to be there for them.

01:16:19.000 It's often the problem of the parents giving them pressure to go into college as well because they don't want the kid to become a loser.

01:16:25.000 Where I grew up in Boston, if you went into the trades, if you abandoned the idea of higher learning and going to college and just went right into learning to be a carpenter or something like that, people look at you like, oh, you sold yourself short. 0.98

01:16:40.000 But there's so many people that I know that went to school that Just got university degrees and then they got out and they were fucked. 0.97

01:16:49.000 It's so common. 0.93

01:16:50.000 It's so common that they thought there was going to be this path And this path just didn't exist once they got out, or it was far, far more difficult than they were led to believe.

01:17:00.000 Yeah, if you look at it, about 32% of Americans graduate from college right now, and that level has been more or less constant for a long time.

01:17:07.000 It's not like, hey, I've got another 20% I could get into college.

01:17:11.000 Like right now, the college completion rate in six years is about 59%.

01:17:15.000 So like four out of ten people who start college are not graduating in six years, and a lot of them are just not going to finish ever.

01:17:22.000 So, the people that have other paths available to them, we have to build those paths up.

01:17:29.000 And this is one reason why I'm so into the freedom dividend instead of something like free college.

01:17:33.000 Because why would you subsidize something that only the top third of the population is going to use?

01:17:38.000 And it's a highly inefficient, costly system anyway.

01:17:40.000 Plowing money into that, you're much better off putting $1,000 a month into every 18-year-old's hands.

01:17:46.000 Then if they go to college, great.

01:17:48.000 College is partially paid for.

01:17:49.000 They go to trade school, great.

01:17:50.000 Trade school is partially paid for.

01:17:52.000 They start their own business.

01:17:53.000 They do something creative.

01:17:54.000 They want to do something to help.

01:17:56.000 That's great, too.

01:17:57.000 You can actually start building more varied paths and make it so that people don't feel like, I need to get into this institution or else my life's going to be over.

01:18:04.000 Yeah.

01:18:04.000 Now what are the primary concerns that people have outside of what you're talking about so far with automation taking away jobs and student loan debt and these things?

01:18:15.000 What are the other things you think you're going to have to talk about in order to get people to take you really seriously?

01:18:20.000 I mean, the hot button issues, you know what they all are.

01:18:22.000 It's like immigration and climate change is a really big one.

01:18:27.000 And, you know, I mean, I can talk about those at length.

01:18:30.000 So my father and mother met as immigrants from Taiwan at UC Berkeley.

01:18:34.000 My father has a PhD in physics.

01:18:36.000 He generated 69 U.S. patents for GE and IBM over his career.

01:18:41.000 So I'm like, immigrants are awesome.

01:18:43.000 Immigrants come in and, you know, just like make stuff happen for... 1.00

01:18:47.000 Big American companies.

01:18:48.000 So I'm very pro-immigrant, and I think people would expect that just to look at me.

01:18:53.000 And so what I say is, first, it makes no sense to educate international students in US universities and then send them home to compete against us. 0.76

01:19:00.000 That makes no sense.

01:19:02.000 Like, if they're going to come to the US and study, we should just staple a green card to their diploma and be like, hey... 0.99

01:19:06.000 You got a diploma.

01:19:07.000 Great news.

01:19:08.000 You can stay here and work.

01:19:09.000 Because I personally know tons of awesome internationals who would definitely help make the U.S. more dynamic and competitive that go home and start companies there.

01:19:18.000 And you're like, oh, no.

01:19:19.000 Like, how did that happen?

01:19:20.000 Right.

01:19:21.000 That's great for people who come from a privileged background, who have the opportunity to come here and become educated.

01:19:27.000 But what about people who are poor, who are trying to make it here from South America and Guatemala and Mexico?

01:19:34.000 There are three paths available to you for the approximately 12 million people who are here undocumented, many of whom from Mexico and Latin America.

01:19:42.000 Frankly, they're not the profile I just described, for the most part.

01:19:47.000 So, there are three approaches.

01:19:49.000 Number one is you can pretend to deport them because it's completely unfeasible to deport 12 million people.

01:19:54.000 I mean, like, whole regional economies would collapse.

01:19:57.000 Like, you can't do it practically.

01:19:58.000 Like, it doesn't make any sense.

01:20:00.000 Number two is...

01:20:03.000 You do nothing, which is our current path.

01:20:05.000 And then you have massive problems, too, because they're constantly interacting with your schools and your hospitals, and they're getting into car accidents.

01:20:13.000 Just not knowing who the heck is who is an untenable situation for any advanced society.

01:20:20.000 So number three is you create a pathway to citizenship and then you integrate them into society, but it's like a long-term path that takes a number of years and you need to keep your nose clean and pay taxes and work hard.

01:20:32.000 That seems to me to be the most feasible.

01:20:35.000 Yeah.

01:20:35.000 And so that's where we should go.

01:20:37.000 And some Republicans were on board with that until they paid a political price and then they ran the other direction.

01:20:42.000 So that is really the right path for people who are here undocumented. 1.00

01:20:48.000 But I say to people a lot that the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian guy who likes math. 0.56

01:20:54.000 Yeah.

01:20:56.000 So, Donald Trump's like, build a wall, and I'm like, look, like, I mean, we gotta enforce a strong border, like, especially in a world where everyone, every citizen's getting a thousand bucks a month, like, you gotta enforce a strong border.

01:21:07.000 But at the same time, you know, like, people who are here, they're making our communities a lot more entrepreneurial and dynamic, many of them.

01:21:15.000 I mean, at the high end, half of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are either immigrants or children of immigrants.

01:21:20.000 And that's true in a different way in terms of the dynamism of these immigrant communities.

01:21:25.000 So what I say to people is, if I'm president, people will see that you come to this country and you work hard, your son or daughter can become president of the United States.

01:21:34.000 Now, what do you do, though, in this scenario that you just described, if someone comes here and they don't work hard and they don't keep their nose clean and they are still here and they're not a citizen yet?

01:21:46.000 Yeah.

01:21:47.000 So then they operate in the informal economy in the way that they have – and the truth is that even if we have this pathway, there are going to be a significant proportion of people who just do not trust us enough to actually say, hey, I'm here and I'm going to enter the pipeline.

01:22:01.000 There's going to be a lot of – there are going to be a lot of people that don't subscribe but – That's where it is right now.

01:22:10.000 We're not making the situation actively worse.

01:22:12.000 We can at least improve the situation for a really significant proportion of them.

01:22:17.000 Yeah, for a significant proportion of them.

01:22:19.000 And, you know, the other situation would be tax revenue.

01:22:22.000 How many people that are here illegally are not paying taxes? 0.55

01:22:25.000 I would imagine it's an enormous number.

01:22:28.000 Yeah, there'd be a real economic boost if we can integrate them into the formal economy, because there's a lot of just cash going back and forth.

01:22:35.000 Right, and that's what I'm saying, is that a lot of people might decide, hey, you know what, I don't even want to be a citizen, because if I'm a citizen, I have to pay taxes.

01:22:42.000 Or I could work as a laborer, or work as a, you know, on construction sites or whatever, whoever's willing to hire them and work for free.

01:22:50.000 Yes.

01:22:50.000 Or work, rather, with free taxes.

01:22:52.000 Right.

01:22:52.000 Yeah, and so, I mean, that would still be going on.

01:22:56.000 Like, there are limits to, you know, like, what sort of appeal you can have in terms of having people raise their hand.

01:23:01.000 Right, but have a path to real prosperity.

01:23:04.000 Have a real path to citizenship would be very nice.

01:23:07.000 It's pretty enormous for them because a lot of them have kids.

01:23:09.000 A lot of them have kids who know no other life but here.

01:23:12.000 So another issue I think you'll like that comes up on the campaign trail is what to do about marijuana.

01:23:18.000 And I'm for full legalization, remove it from the federal controlled substance list.

01:23:23.000 And I would go a step further and pardon everyone who's in jail for a low-level nonviolent drug offense because it makes no sense to me to have people...

01:23:30.000 Behind bars for things that are legal in parts of the country.

01:23:33.000 So my plan as president is on April 20th of 2021, I'm going to mass pardon everyone who's in jail for a nonviolent drug-related offense.

01:23:45.000 I'm going to high-five them on the way out and I'm going to be a very popular man that day.

01:23:47.000 You're going to be a lot of traveling to high-five all those folks.

01:23:50.000 I know.

01:23:51.000 I'm going to have to go to a lot of places and high-five, but I really want to high-five them, Joe.

01:23:55.000 Really?

01:23:55.000 Yeah.

01:23:56.000 I mean, that would be the funnest freaking occasion.

01:23:58.000 Yeah.

01:23:59.000 So, you know, that's something that comes up that, to me, it's obvious that marijuana is an important remedy for many people who are struggling with various health problems and everything else.

01:24:16.000 I have friends who are in that situation.

01:24:17.000 Yeah.

01:24:18.000 And that it's certainly much less dangerous than, for example, some of the opiates that have been getting prescribed for the same things.

01:24:25.000 Yeah, what do you do about that?

01:24:27.000 That's a question that I have because I was just reading something about some new approved drug that's more powerful than fentanyl, which seems to me to be completely insane.

01:24:39.000 Like, we already have fentanyl.

01:24:41.000 You make a mistake.

01:24:44.000 One of the things that happens with people that overdose is, especially old people that are in pain, when they're using fentanyl or using any kind of opiate on a regular basis, they sometimes forget if they took it. 0.97

01:24:55.000 And, you know, look, it's a fucking opium. 0.95

01:24:57.000 I mean, they're very powerful. 1.00

01:24:59.000 And if you're high on that stuff, and you forget whether or not you took it, and you go and take it again, you're dead.

01:25:05.000 And that's a giant issue.

01:25:07.000 They're too damn powerful, and the idea that you need something that's more powerful than that seems to be insane.

01:25:13.000 I agree with you.

01:25:14.000 It's irresponsible.

01:25:16.000 The entire opiate crisis was generated in part by the fact that the feds let Purdue Pharma just go crazy prescribing hundreds of thousands of OxyContin prescriptions.

01:25:26.000 And that company, man, that company got fined $635 million, which sounds like a lot, until you realize they made like $16 billion.

01:25:34.000 So those people are now some of the richest people in the country on the backs of American communities.

01:25:40.000 Yeah.

01:25:40.000 And it just keeps morphing because it went from oxy to heroin to fentanyl and then you have people who are struggling with this addiction.

01:25:47.000 So to me, it was federal negligence that unleashed this plague.

01:25:52.000 I mean, you got to hold the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma accountable because literally now they're profiting from one of the treatment drugs.

01:25:58.000 It's really obscene what they're doing.

01:26:00.000 They're just like, hey, my non-addictive wonder drug turns out it caused a super plague of lethal addiction for people.

01:26:07.000 Hundreds of thousands of Americans.

01:26:09.000 But now I'm going to sell you a new drug and try and make money on the back end too. 0.97

01:26:13.000 So you've got to get as much money as we possibly can from that family in particular.

01:26:19.000 But then you have to make resources available and try and get people to depend on these drugs less like on the front end from the doctor end.

01:26:28.000 It's just like, look, why are you prescribing these opiates?

01:26:31.000 There was a doctor I quoted in my book where he's like, you have never seen a lethality rate from For something prescribed for like a non-life-threatening condition.

01:26:40.000 Yeah.

01:26:40.000 It's like literally like a non-trivial percentage of people you prescribe an opiate to will be dead in five years.

01:26:46.000 Yeah.

01:26:46.000 And the thing that came to you, you know, for in the hospital wasn't life-threatening.

01:26:50.000 Right, right.

01:26:51.000 It makes no sense.

01:26:52.000 It's crazy.

01:26:53.000 So...

01:26:54.000 So we have to make treatment resources available, but this is a very human problem.

01:26:57.000 It's not a money problem.

01:26:59.000 You can throw money at some problems and it works.

01:27:02.000 This thing we should throw money at to try and give people a fighting chance, but then you have to support the people coming out because it's a brutal, brutal process trying to become whole and healthy if you're an addict.

01:27:14.000 It is an unbelievably brutal process and I have family members that are affected by it and people with hurt backs that got on these pills and next thing you know they can't get off of them.

01:27:24.000 It's devastating and it's so common.

01:27:27.000 It's just all throughout the country.

01:27:29.000 It's everywhere.

01:27:29.000 They'll prescribe me for nothing.

01:27:30.000 I had my nose fixed.

01:27:32.000 I had a deviated septum and the doctor prescribed me two different kinds of opiates and I said, I'm not in any pain.

01:27:38.000 And he said, yeah, but you could be, so here.

01:27:41.000 And I'm like, but I don't think this is a good idea.

01:27:43.000 I'm like, I don't even want anything.

01:27:45.000 He goes, well, just take these just in case.

01:27:47.000 I'm going to tell you, I'm not playing tough guy.

01:27:49.000 It just didn't hurt.

01:27:50.000 Yeah.

01:27:50.000 It was a little annoying.

01:27:52.000 I was like, my nose feels weird. 0.99

01:27:54.000 But I didn't need fucking opiates. 0.99

01:27:56.000 Seriously, man. 1.00

01:27:57.000 They're just willing.

01:27:58.000 Like, here you go.

01:27:58.000 Come on, what are you in pain?

01:27:59.000 Here you go.

01:28:00.000 Come on, take a little of this.

01:28:01.000 Take a little of that.

01:28:02.000 Yeah, and I have a guarantee for you that their incentives drive them more towards dispensing those drugs than to not dispensing those drugs.

01:28:09.000 And it's in large part because the incentive structure of our healthcare system is so revenue oriented.

01:28:15.000 It's like, if I do more stuff, if I give you more stuff, I make more money.

01:28:19.000 If I decide you don't need it, I make less money.

01:28:22.000 And that is one of the things that's driving us all into this unhealth, is that if you went to a doctor who legitimately was like, you know, I don't think you need this stuff, like that would be the way many of them would see the problem if their paycheck was unrelated to the amount of activity that they were doing.

01:28:40.000 Yeah.

01:28:42.000 When you look at all the issues that plague this country, and you think about the possibility of you actually winning and becoming president, and then you look at what happens to presidents when they win, and the amount of just aging that happens to them, do you worry about that?

01:28:58.000 First of all, Asians age very well.

01:29:00.000 So you've got that going for you.

01:29:02.000 Yes.

01:29:02.000 That, you know, and I'm married and, you know, we've got two kids, so I don't think she's going anywhere.

01:29:06.000 It'd be, like, kind of tough for her to start over at this point.

01:29:10.000 You know, I mean, one of my nightmare scenarios is I win and then, like, I can't get stuff done the way that, because that's the fear.

01:29:19.000 Because you've talked about this, too.

01:29:21.000 Where good people go into government, they get stuck like flies in amber because the system is just designed to keep you from getting anything done.

01:29:27.000 But one thing I will say is that if you imagine a scenario where the Asian man who wants to give everyone a thousand bucks a month becomes President of the United States in 2021, everyone's going to know how I won. 0.83

01:29:37.000 It'll be like, all right, guys, it's dividend time.

01:29:39.000 And then Democrats will be like, yeah, I like money for families.

01:29:44.000 That's great.

01:29:44.000 And here's the great thing, Joe, is that then Republicans are going to look at him and be like, wait a minute.

01:29:48.000 This is a net transfer for rural areas, for red states on the interior.

01:29:52.000 Am I really going to stand in the way of my constituents getting this dividend?

01:29:57.000 And you can imagine me being like, hey, what state wants to pilot this first?

01:30:00.000 Freaking every state would be into it.

01:30:02.000 We can actually get this done.

01:30:04.000 This is a bipartisan thing.

01:30:05.000 It's not left or right, it's forward.

01:30:08.000 And keep in mind, the state that has been demonstrated to love this dividend is Alaska, which is a deep red conservative state.

01:30:15.000 It was a Republican governor that passed the plan in the first place.

01:30:18.000 He said, who would you rather get the oil money, the government who's just going to screw it up, or you, the people of Alaska?

01:30:24.000 And then the people of Alaska were like, us, please.

01:30:26.000 Wasn't that to incentivize people to support the idea of drilling in some controversial areas, though?

01:30:32.000 There's probably a whole basket of motivations, but now that thing's been in effect for 37 years and is wildly popular.

01:30:40.000 So what I'm suggesting when you say like, hey, you become president, you can't get anything done, it's like, I can get one big thing done because I think it's going to be really popular among not just progressives, but also independents, libertarians.

01:30:55.000 Like Milton Friedman, who's the patron saint of libertarian economists, loved this plan.

01:30:59.000 Because what libertarians and conservatives hate is government making people's decisions.

01:31:03.000 What they like is economic freedom and autonomy.

01:31:06.000 I just spoke at a libertarian conference, like LibertyCon, and was like, guys, like the freedom dividend would help people enjoy actual economic freedom.

01:31:15.000 Because you get a thousand bucks a month, that makes you more free to do all sorts of things.

01:31:20.000 You can make better choices.

01:31:24.000 And as long as the government is completely like, what you do is your business, so this can actually become something we can get done.

01:31:34.000 The Freedom Dividend is a great name too. 0.83

01:31:36.000 It's like the Patriot Act.

01:31:37.000 It gets people excited.

01:31:39.000 Freedom.

01:31:39.000 We're all about freedom.

01:31:40.000 Who could be against freedom?

01:31:42.000 You can't vote against that.

01:31:43.000 Yeah, who could be against the Freedom Dividend? 1.00

01:31:45.000 Come on, what kind of asshole do you have to beat? 1.00

01:31:49.000 This has got to be taking up a tremendous amount of your time. 1.00

01:31:52.000 Are you doing anything else in addition to doing this, or are you setting aside everything else in your life other than your family obligations?

01:32:00.000 I have two jobs, man.

01:32:01.000 One, help accelerate society to try and deal with this historic transition we're in.

01:32:07.000 And two, stay married.

01:32:08.000 Those are the only things I'm about.

01:32:11.000 That's a powerful path.

01:32:14.000 Now, when you're looking at the opposition and you're looking at all the other people that are running for president and whether or not they're going to be there by the time the elections roll around, What are you saying?

01:32:24.000 It's really interesting, Joe.

01:32:26.000 Holy cow. 0.89

01:32:27.000 One of the funnest things about running for president is you run into all the other candidates on the trail in Iowa, in New Hampshire.

01:32:34.000 So I'm just hanging out backstage with the gang.

01:32:37.000 It's so interesting and fun.

01:32:40.000 It is weird sometimes, but I've really liked most of them.

01:32:43.000 And so sometimes people ask me like, hey, who do you want your running mate to be?

01:32:46.000 And I'm just like, it really depends upon who I just click with best because we're just going to be on the trail all the time together.

01:32:53.000 So having met a bunch of them, I got to say, most of the candidates are really genuine patriots who just want to try and do something positive and they see the country's heading in the wrong direction.

01:33:02.000 I could work with most all of them.

01:33:04.000 In terms of who I think is going to be there in the end, man, it's really interesting.

01:33:08.000 I mean, one reason I, like, I will say that apparently the mainstream press had it out for Bernie last time where they were just going to, like, I have a friend who worked in the media and they were, like, just, you know, kneecap Bernie.

01:33:19.000 Why?

01:33:20.000 Why were they going to kneecap Bernie?

01:33:23.000 I don't know.

01:33:23.000 It's like, like, there's definitely something going on where, like, certain corporate media companies have certain candidates.

01:33:30.000 They kind of want to tip the scales for a little bit and people don't want to, like, tip it against.

01:33:35.000 Well, they thought that Bernie was going to get in the way of Hillary winning. 1.00

01:33:37.000 Is that the idea?

01:33:38.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:33:39.000 I mean, they were in the Hillary camp for sure.

01:33:42.000 And so that wasn't just the media.

01:33:43.000 That was also the DNC, which is now on the record.

01:33:46.000 So now, happily, certainly the DNC has turned a totally different leaf, where the DNC is like, we're not going to do anything that interferes with anyone's prospects.

01:33:56.000 Well, what they did was a disaster.

01:33:58.000 Yeah, a disaster in terms of public image, too.

01:34:01.000 Yeah, it was both substantively and perception-wise a disaster for them.

01:34:05.000 So this time, I've got to say, and that team has turned over almost entirely.

01:34:09.000 It's almost totally different people.

01:34:11.000 And then the media, we have the sense that they're still feeling out who they're going to try and put the thumb on the scale for.

01:34:21.000 Bernie is still running, though, right?

01:34:23.000 It looks like he's running, yeah. 0.99

01:34:25.000 You want to know something that's really stupid, but it changed my opinion of him? 0.98

01:34:27.000 He was being grilled by someone at the airport with a camera, and he was pretending to talk on the phone, but you could tell he wasn't really on the phone. 0.99

01:34:34.000 The phone was white.

01:34:36.000 And I saw that, and I was like, ew, you can't do that.

01:34:39.000 You can't do that.

01:34:40.000 You could say, I'm not giving impromptu interviews, thank you very much, and keep walking.

01:34:45.000 Like, if you want to interview me...

01:34:46.000 Do it through the correct channels.

01:34:49.000 But he didn't do that.

01:34:50.000 He pretended to be on the phone.

01:34:52.000 It's a weird thing.

01:34:53.000 Because if you're willing to do that, that's just deceptive.

01:34:58.000 Especially if you can actually see the deception.

01:35:01.000 Yeah, you can see it in the video.

01:35:02.000 You can see the video. 1.00

01:35:03.000 The fucking phone is not on. 0.99

01:35:04.000 It's like you can see his text messages. 1.00

01:35:08.000 Yeah.

01:35:10.000 And the guy's saying to him, you're not on the phone.

01:35:12.000 I can tell you're not on the phone.

01:35:14.000 And he keeps walking. 0.97

01:35:16.000 I know that's a stupid thing, but it's like, huh. 0.99

01:35:20.000 We all suss out details about different people in different ways. 0.97

01:35:25.000 One reason I'm so grateful for this opportunity is you actually can get a sense of different people in different environments and it does end up impacting your perception.

01:35:36.000 People have made decisions on much lesser data points than that.

01:35:40.000 Oh, sure.

01:35:41.000 Let's put it that way. 0.99

01:35:42.000 Remember, what the fuck's his name from Vermont? 0.99

01:35:44.000 Howard Dean? 0.99

01:35:45.000 The Dean Scream, man.

01:35:46.000 New Hampshire?

01:35:47.000 Is that what he's from?

01:35:48.000 He was from Vermont.

01:35:49.000 It was Vermont, yeah.

01:35:50.000 That scream. 0.87

01:35:51.000 Killed him. 1.00

01:35:51.000 Sank him. 1.00

01:35:52.000 Do you remember the Chappelle Show parody?

01:35:53.000 The Chappelle Show parody of that was hysterical.

01:35:55.000 It was funny.

01:35:56.000 But the fact that that...

01:35:57.000 It was just because it was a loud...

01:35:59.000 As a person who works in front of audiences a lot, when you're yelling into a microphone, like...

01:36:07.000 You hear, especially if you don't have monitors in front of you, what you hear is everything.

01:36:13.000 You hear the crowd screaming.

01:36:15.000 You hear everything.

01:36:16.000 And if you're yelling into that microphone, you're not realizing what it sounds like as a recording.

01:36:22.000 But with him, it's like, yeah!

01:36:24.000 And that was it!

01:36:25.000 One scream!

01:36:27.000 Imagine!

01:36:28.000 Imagine that one scream literally changed the course of that man's life.

01:36:34.000 One impulsive moment.

01:36:35.000 It might have changed the course of the nation's history.

01:36:38.000 It's crazy!

01:36:39.000 I don't know if that would happen today.

01:36:41.000 I think, especially post-Trump, one thing that has happened is we're willing to forgive so much more.

01:36:47.000 You know?

01:36:49.000 In some ways, yeah.

01:36:51.000 In some ways, no, man.

01:36:51.000 I mean, I feel like, you know, like some people are more forgiving than others for different things.

01:36:58.000 For sure.

01:36:58.000 Yeah, there's certainly – yeah, it varies.

01:37:01.000 But it would be interesting to imagine what the Dean scream would result in today.

01:37:06.000 Hopefully, I'm not the person that tests it out.

01:37:08.000 Yeah, don't scream.

01:37:09.000 Yeah.

01:37:10.000 Please don't scream.

01:37:12.000 So what's next now?

01:37:14.000 You're trying to elevate your profile.

01:37:16.000 You're trying to make people aware of your platform and how you're running.

01:37:20.000 What is next?

01:37:21.000 It's good fun, man.

01:37:22.000 I'm enjoying running for president more than I thought I would.

01:37:24.000 That's a great thing to hear.

01:37:26.000 Yeah.

01:37:27.000 So one thing is that when you talk to Americans in rural Iowa or Manchester, New Hampshire, it's like they're really good people.

01:37:35.000 You know, it's like the stuff that you might imagine is like, oh, people.

01:37:39.000 No, it's like really good, honest, genuine people just trying to make their lives better.

01:37:44.000 People I really love hanging out with are union guys.

01:37:46.000 Like, hanging out with the truckers was fun.

01:37:48.000 I hung out with these union metal workers the other day.

01:37:51.000 In New Hampshire, I was like, hey, any, like, you know, robots going on, like, here in your fields?

01:37:55.000 And then one of them was like, yeah, actually, like, we used to take five to eight guys to bend this rebar to reinforce a bridge.

01:38:01.000 Now they bring in a robot that does it overnight.

01:38:04.000 And then they're like, hey, good for you guys.

01:38:06.000 You don't have to do this.

01:38:07.000 And then we're like, we just lost a freaking day in today's place.

01:38:10.000 They're like, why are we supposed to be happy about this?

01:38:13.000 So then when I go in and I talk to them about what's going on in the economy, they're like, oh man, yeah, that's a real problem.

01:38:19.000 And unions have been losing for years.

01:38:21.000 They all know it.

01:38:23.000 Membership's gone in half.

01:38:25.000 So, just on the campaign trail, making the case to different people.

01:38:31.000 I was on The Daily Show last week, and that's going to film pretty soon.

01:38:34.000 The next big benchmark for the campaign is the Democratic primary debates in June, where they're going to bring all the candidates up.

01:38:41.000 And this is something the DNC happily seems like they're being really, really open about, which it's not like, hey, you need to have particular things.

01:38:51.000 So I'm...

01:38:52.000 I'm very confident that we'll be on that debate stage and then we can just keep on making the case to the American people.

01:38:59.000 When you're going to do something like that, how do you prepare?

01:39:01.000 Do you have someone throw fake questions at you and you practice them and practice the answers?

01:39:06.000 Do you work with a coach?

01:39:07.000 How are you going to do that?

01:39:08.000 For that, given the enormity of the occasion, I'm sure we will have something like that.

01:39:12.000 But I want to double back on a conversation you had recently with a guy named Lawrence Lessig about campaign finance reform.

01:39:19.000 And there are all these interrelated problems in our society.

01:39:22.000 And in my opinion, the automation wave is driving a lot of them because it's making people less functional.

01:39:27.000 It's making people less able to focus on the big problems in the future.

01:39:31.000 And then part of it is that our political system is held captive by rich corporations and mega-wealthy individuals.

01:39:39.000 And the average voter feels like, my vote doesn't matter.

01:39:42.000 And so, you know, I was talking to Lawrence Lessig.

01:39:44.000 He's like, hey, how do we fix it?

01:39:45.000 And I heard your conversation with him.

01:39:47.000 And so, a solution would be we give every American adult $100, democracy dollars, that can only be contributed to a political campaign.

01:39:56.000 And then you end up counterbalancing and washing out.

01:40:04.000 Yeah, that's very interesting.

01:40:07.000 That's an interesting idea.

01:40:08.000 I like that a lot.

01:40:09.000 Because the problem, Joe, is that a lot of our regulatory approaches right now are like the negative approach.

01:40:14.000 It's like, don't do this.

01:40:16.000 Don't do that.

01:40:17.000 And the fact is, a lot of the time, it's really hard to actually...

01:40:20.000 I think?

01:40:39.000 Sides of the equation.

01:40:40.000 And I gotta say we were talking as a team about being here and like you have like the biggest audience of just about any media platform in the country right now like bigger than cable news, bigger than anything. 0.96

01:40:52.000 How the fuck did that happen?

01:40:53.000 You know, I mean, to me, you're the primary voice of reason right now in our society, man. 1.00

01:41:00.000 That's ridiculous. 0.50

01:41:01.000 Someone step up and take that, please. 1.00

01:41:03.000 I think it's you for the time being, brother.

01:41:06.000 But what I was saying was that if people that listen to this conversation donate $10, $20 to my campaign, there are like 10 million people that are going to listen to this.

01:41:15.000 That's like $100 to $200 million, and that's enough.

01:41:25.000 Do you have a Patreon page or anything like that?

01:41:42.000 The thing with people is you've got to make it easy.

01:41:45.000 Make it easy.

01:41:46.000 Like, have an Amazon one-click button.

01:41:48.000 Oh, we were taking Venmo for a while, so we were working on it.

01:41:51.000 It was a bit of a pain in the neck administratively.

01:41:54.000 I also want to say one other thing I did that I think will entertain the heck out of you.

01:41:59.000 I'm giving $1,000 a month to a family in New Hampshire and a family of Iowa, just out of my own pocket, just to illustrate, you know what?

01:42:05.000 $1,000 a month will actually do you and your household good.

01:42:09.000 And how did you pick these people?

01:42:11.000 We had a bunch of submissions online for New Hampshire.

01:42:14.000 In Iowa, we're still taking submissions.

01:42:16.000 So if you know people in Iowa that could use $1,000 a month, just go to yang2020.com, nominate them, and then we'll pick someone.

01:42:24.000 And there's no obligation.

01:42:25.000 So it's out of my own pocket.

01:42:27.000 And there's no obligation.

01:42:29.000 So the FEC was like, well, no problem.

01:42:31.000 It's just an act of philanthropy or a gift.

01:42:35.000 And then a family in Georgia was so touched by my campaign that they're now supplying a thousand bucks a month to a family in South Carolina in honor of Martin Luther King, who was for basic income.

01:42:50.000 So we're really inverting this mindset of like scarcity and take, take, take and being like, look, there's like plenty to go around.

01:42:56.000 We're like the richest and most advanced society in the history of the world.

01:42:59.000 And we can make lives better just by coming together as a people.

01:43:04.000 There's nothing stopping the majority of citizens in a democracy from voting ourselves a dividend.

01:43:09.000 I love the idea, man.

01:43:11.000 I really do.

01:43:12.000 I love the idea of trying to find solutions to this obvious issue that's impending and it just seems like we're not going to escape.

01:43:20.000 It seems like automation is coming.

01:43:22.000 There's no way to get around it.

01:43:24.000 No way.

01:43:26.000 There's no way around it, for sure.

01:43:27.000 I mean, it's here with us already.

01:43:30.000 It's inevitable.

01:43:31.000 And the danger we're in right now is that if we don't respond to it, then there's going to be a lot of anger about the changes that are coming our way.

01:43:41.000 And so, a bunch of techies are actually supporting my campaign. 0.96

01:43:44.000 Because a lot of techies are not jerks. 0.97

01:43:47.000 They're just like, I'm doing my job. 0.91

01:43:48.000 I'm just like, you know, my job actually just tends to result in other people losing their jobs.

01:43:52.000 Right.

01:43:53.000 And so, what I say to them, and they agree, it's like, this is enlightened self-interest for us all.

01:43:58.000 It's like, progress should be something we're excited about.

01:44:01.000 There is a world where we're celebrating the fact that the truckers are getting liberated from their trucks.

01:44:06.000 Because that's a really difficult, punishing job.

01:44:10.000 Especially on their backs.

01:44:11.000 Yes.

01:44:12.000 And so the goal is to try and make it so that people are actually able to be happy about the inevitable.

01:44:20.000 You know, it was a quote in my book, Bismarck was like, if we're going to go through a revolution, you'd rather undertake it than undergo it.

01:44:28.000 You know, it's like if the revolution's coming, then we need to get in front of it and start making it work for us instead of just waiting for it to tear us apart.

01:44:37.000 Yeah.

01:44:37.000 Well, I love the idea, and it would be amazing if you won.

01:44:41.000 I mean, it really would be fascinating.

01:44:43.000 And like I said, I've done a complete 180 on the idea of universal basic income, particularly once I started talking to Elon about it.

01:44:49.000 And he was saying that it's inevitable, that you're going to need something like that, that it's coming.

01:44:55.000 Yeah, and to close on this, man, it's like, okay, so if you accept what Elon said, that it's inevitable, which I 100% agree with, let's say you go too early.

01:45:04.000 What is the downside?

01:45:05.000 Well, let's see, you alleviate untold, pointless human misery, and you have more time to build the institutions and help us adapt.

01:45:14.000 That's the downside if you go too early.

01:45:16.000 What's the downside if you go too late?

01:45:18.000 Yeah.

01:45:18.000 The downside if you go too late is literal disintegration and catastrophe.

01:45:23.000 Because it's not like society will magically reorder itself.

01:45:27.000 If you're like, okay guys, we're a little bit late to this, but now we're going to start putting checks into people's hands.

01:45:33.000 So the incentives to go early are...

01:45:36.000 Pretty much all the incentives.

01:45:38.000 It's like going too late is literally society ending.

01:45:42.000 So if you accept what Elon says, which I agree with, that look, this is inevitable, then there's no point in trying to, like, time it.

01:45:51.000 You know what I mean?

01:45:53.000 Yeah.

01:45:53.000 Particularly if you accept the fact that all of the signs you would expect if we were displacing labor are already there.

01:46:00.000 Man leaving the workforce, like drug overdoses, video games, like it's all right there in front of us if you just like take the rock and like flip it over.

01:46:09.000 Yeah.

01:46:09.000 And the thing I'm going to say, you know, a friend of mine, Andy Stern, said is that our government is terrible at most things, but it is excellent at sending large numbers of checks to large numbers of people.

01:46:18.000 Yeah.

01:46:19.000 Profly and reliably.

01:46:21.000 We have to lean into one of the only core competencies our government has that we can trust, and then it will let us make our own decisions.

01:46:29.000 Like, this is very much about human empowerment, and the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.

01:46:36.000 Last question, because I guess no discussion of presidential policy and the possibility of someone like you running this country is – How do you feel about international relations and the obvious issues of dealing with other countries and what's going on with China and Russia and the interference of our democracy and all the different various issues that we've experienced particularly over the last couple of years with Russia?

01:47:05.000 Yeah, sure.

01:47:06.000 So about Russia, and you and I were talking about this before we went on air.

01:47:09.000 When I'm president, I will say, look, Russia, I get it.

01:47:14.000 We have tampered with other people's elections for years and decades.

01:47:18.000 Like we, America, have done that.

01:47:20.000 You've done it to us for the last number of years.

01:47:23.000 It is going to stop right now.

01:47:25.000 And if we have any credible evidence that you are tampering with our information, our democracy, we will take that as an act of hostility and aggression, and we will retaliate in some way that will make your life very, very painful and inconvenient.

01:47:37.000 And the people of the United States will support me on this.

01:47:40.000 And so here is your drop dead date.

01:47:42.000 Like, turn off the bots.

01:47:44.000 And if we find that your bots are still going after this date, I will just bring the evidence to the American people and then we will act.

01:47:51.000 And you will not like it one bit.

01:47:53.000 Now, I'm thinking 80-90% of Americans would get behind that and be like, how are we just looking at it being like, what are we going to do?

01:48:01.000 What are we going to do?

01:48:02.000 And in this one, I actually feel a little bit for the tech companies because it's very difficult for the tech companies to prevent this.

01:48:10.000 Almost impossible.

01:48:11.000 Almost impossible to identify.

01:48:13.000 And if you go back to Sam Harris' podcast that we were discussing, which is called The War of Information.

01:48:18.000 I think that's what it's called, Information War or War of Information.

01:48:21.000 A recent podcast from the last couple of weeks.

01:48:24.000 They detail how there's essentially...

01:48:27.000 Just giant groups of people that work for the Russian government that pretend to be people that are involved in Black Lives Matter, pretend to be people that are involved in Texas culture, Southern culture, and they're just sowing seeds of argument and dissent.

01:48:44.000 And they are laughing their asses off. 0.86

01:48:46.000 Laughing their asses off.

01:48:47.000 And making funny memes.

01:48:48.000 Like, some of their memes are really hilarious.

01:48:50.000 But to them, this is the greatest ROI they've ever seen.

01:48:54.000 ROI? Like, return on investment.

01:48:56.000 Oh, okay.

01:48:58.000 You're such an entrepreneur.

01:48:59.000 You too, Brian, man.

01:49:01.000 I don't have a man hanger. 0.96

01:49:03.000 I have a normal freaking house.

01:49:06.000 So, like, they invested not even that much money. 0.93

01:49:10.000 But they found, like, this underbelly they can just freaking slice into.

01:49:14.000 And so, they've spent, best estimates, like, low tens of millions of dollars.

01:49:19.000 And it's caused us how much damage?

01:49:21.000 How much harm?

01:49:22.000 A real impact.

01:49:23.000 Like, you know, I mean, you couldn't even put a dollar figure on it.

01:49:27.000 So you have to just say, look, I get the tech companies are going to try, but they're not going to be able to pull it off.

01:49:32.000 So just go on and just say to the world and say, hey, this is to Russia, but anyone else, same thing.

01:49:38.000 If you tamper with our democracy, we are going to come down on you like a ton of bricks.

01:49:42.000 And if we're not quite sure, we're still going to come down on you like a ton of bricks.

01:49:46.000 I don't need 100% certainty on this.

01:49:49.000 I need a legal standard.

01:49:51.000 I need 80%, 85%.

01:49:53.000 And the American people would be like, about time, because, you know, if we can't trust ourselves or each other or what we're seeing, and this is before deepfakes and the rest of it starts hitting.

01:50:03.000 Like, if you're actually going to believe in democracy, then you have to start protecting our information as fast as possible.

01:50:10.000 And you also, in my mind, have to start, and this is a local issue, but I'm in New Hampshire and Iowa talking about this stuff.

01:50:16.000 Their local newspapers are all dying.

01:50:18.000 Yeah.

01:50:18.000 It's like thousands of local papers just winking out of existence because they used to rely on classified ads.

01:50:23.000 There are no classified ads anymore.

01:50:25.000 It's all Craigslist.

01:50:26.000 And so they all die.

01:50:27.000 And if you believe in democracy, how the heck can anyone vote on anything if they have no idea what's going on?

01:50:33.000 So there are a lot of interrelated issues.

01:50:35.000 I mean, one thing I'm saying is like, look...

01:50:37.000 We had a happy time where local newspapers were supported by classified ads.

01:50:41.000 It's over now.

01:50:42.000 But we're still a democracy.

01:50:43.000 You still need some information to vote.

01:50:45.000 So we need to try and find new ways for you to get quality information.

01:50:50.000 They're just throwing our hands up and being like, I guess the Russians are going to just misinform us with bots and I guess all the local newspapers are going to die.

01:50:57.000 Like you said, these are problems and we have to start solving them.

01:51:01.000 If you still believe that democracy is the best form of government and that's what we're going to carry forward, which you obviously have to believe, like you have to go with that as your model.

01:51:11.000 And so it's all interrelated, but we have to start thinking much, much bigger about what we can get done because things are slipping away.

01:51:18.000 Things are trending in a terrible, terrible direction.

01:51:21.000 Well, Andrew, good luck to you.

01:51:23.000 You're a good man.

01:51:24.000 I wish you well.

01:51:25.000 Thank you for being here.

01:51:26.000 I think your message is excellent, and I hope you really make an impact.

01:51:30.000 Thank you, Joe.

01:51:30.000 Really appreciate it, man.

01:51:31.000 President Yang.

01:51:32.000 Man, if I win, you can do a special JRE from the White House, and that would be a blast.

01:51:39.000 Let's do it.

01:51:40.000 Thank you, sir.

01:51:40.000 Appreciate it, man.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 12, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1245 - Andrew Yang

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