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April 7, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:04:55
Andrew Yang | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 45
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My flagship proposal is we give every American $1,000 a month free and clear.
If you have a little bit more freedom from scarcity, then you can start making moves towards the sort of work that you want for yourself, that you value, that you would find fulfilling and exciting.
Hello and welcome to the Sunday special We're joined this week by Andrew Yang, author of the book The War on Normal People.
I can't wait to get to my conversation with Andrew.
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All right, Andrew, thanks so much for coming by the show.
Really appreciate it.
Oh, it's great to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Well, first of all, I just have to thank you again for coming on the show, because we've invited a lot of folks on the left, particularly members of the Democratic Party who are running for president.
You're the only person who's accepted thus far, and so we appreciate the conversation.
It really does mean a lot to me that you would come on, and I'm sure that you will get some slings and arrows for it.
Well, I hope I can set a trend.
Like, I hope I'm the first but not the last.
So, let's start with this.
What prompted you to run for president?
Where are you coming from?
What's your backstory for folks who don't know you?
So I certainly was not one of these kids who grew up thinking they were going to run for president.
I was born in upstate New York.
My parents are immigrants from Taiwan.
They met in graduate school at UC Berkeley.
So my father was an engineer for GE and IBM.
He generated 69 U.S.
patents over his career.
And being an academic was sort of the family business.
My dad's a professor now.
My brother's a professor.
My grandfather was a professor.
So I, like you, went to law school.
I went to, you know, I studied economics and political science in college, didn't know what to do, so I went to law school and then practiced law for five unhappy months and then left to start an ill-fated dot-com in the first bubble.
But then I'd been bitten by the bug and said this is much better than being an unhappy lawyer.
And so I worked at a healthcare software company and then I became the head of an education company that grew to become number one in the U.S.
and was acquired by a public company in 2009.
So, at this point, my career was going really well, but it was the wake of the financial crisis, and I thought that we had all of these whiz kids heading to Wall Street and McKinsey and not enough starting generative businesses in places like Detroit or Cleveland or Baltimore or St.
Louis, so I quit my job.
I started an organization called Venture for America that helped create several thousand jobs in those cities and another dozen cities or so around the U.S.
And the reason I'm running for president is that when you spend time in the Midwest and the South, you see the aftermath of the fact that we automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, all the swing states that Trump needed to win and did win.
And so I'm running for president to wake up America to the fact that it is not immigrants that are causing economic problems.
It is the fact that we're going through the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of the country.
It's called the fourth industrial revolution and we need to progress to the next stage of capitalism in order for our country to prosper in an age where artificial intelligence and self-driving cars and trucks will become real.
You talk a lot in the book, The War on Normal People, about these people who are in the middle of the country and whose towns are sort of being left behind, their jobs are sort of being left behind.
Do you think that the Democratic Party has properly spoken to a lot of those people?
There's a feeling that President Trump won specifically because the Democratic Party largely forgot about those folks.
Well, to me, there's a very powerful central economic narrative where if you look at the voting district data, there's literally a straight line up between the adoption of industrial automation in an area and the movement towards Donald Trump.
And so to me, Democrats need to try and address that set of problems.
And if they fail in that, then they're not trying to solve the problems that got Donald Trump elected.
Like Donald Trump is not himself Well, he's to me a manifestation of this greater economic megatrend, and it's up to the Democratic Party, in my opinion, to help America navigate this wave as opposed to focusing too much on Donald Trump, who to me is a symptom.
There's been a lot of talk about the effect of automation, and some folks I've talked to, sitting in your chair, have suggested solutions to automation, including restriction of automation itself.
Tucker Carlson suggested on my show, for example, that he wanted to actually legislate away self-driving trucks.
You don't make any of those sorts of sweeping pronouncements about limiting technology, really, in your book.
No, I'm very pro-progress generally.
I think there might be isolated instances where you need to at least try and buy some time.
I talk about truckers a fair amount in my book.
Being a truck driver is the most common job in 29 states.
nine states, three and a half million truck drivers, 94% men, average age 49.
And so if you can foresee that you might displace tens or hundreds of thousands of these truck drivers over a particular period of time, you might want to slow that down because you might need to buy yourself time to help assimilate that adjustment.
But generally speaking, trying to just stop automation is a loser over time because you might even be able to stick your finger in one part of the dam, but then something else is going to break anyways.
It's like if we tried to say, hey, you can't automate truck driving, then there'd be some other part of the economy where you'd look at it and say, well, I guess we're going to automate away the warehouse workers.
We're going to automate away the dock workers.
You can't stop it all.
So with all of that said, the solutions that you propose are pretty big government solutions.
You're a guy who obviously worked in the private sector and you ran a charity that was specifically designed for helping people in the sector.
Why do you think that stuff is insufficient?
Why isn't it that it should just be about private charity, for example?
It's been my proposal is that there needs to be a lot more upswing in private charity, that we need to encourage people to leave some of these dying towns.
You seem to suggest that these people should essentially be able to stay in these dying towns and the government should take care of them there.
Well, I think there are several paths forward, but we have to choose one, and we have to figure it out together.
It's like, what is the path forward for many, many Americans?
And the reason why I'm confident that we need to go bigger is that I was one of the most celebrated social entrepreneurs of the last number of years when I started this multi-million dollar organization, Venture for America.
You know, movie made about us, honored by the White House.
And I realized that our efforts, as much as I was proud of them, were like pouring water into a bathtub as a giant hole ripped in the bottom.
Just the scale is all wrong.
Where, if you look at the numbers, we're looking at three to four times the level of labor force displacement as the first industrial revolution, or the industrial revolution at the turn of the century.
And so if you say, hey, charities are going to handle that, like charities don't have the scale to address needs this big.
And I know this because I've worked in that space and I've, you know, hung out with the heads of foundations and just the scale is wrong for the scope of the changes.
So let's talk about the crisis itself.
So the book in particular, the first half is rather dystopian about kind of its description of the economy, particularly in certain parts.
And you do make sort of a bifurcation between big cities where you say the economy is growing and some of the outlying rural areas where you say that it's not growing.
What about the argument that the economy seems to be doing pretty well, that every time there is a technological change historically, there's been worker displacement, that there will be people left behind because that's just the nature of creative destruction, but that new jobs will be created in ways that we can't foresee right now.
What makes you think that this time is sort of the cataclysm?
Well, we will 100% create many, many new jobs that we can't predict.
And the issue is that they're going to be for different people in different places with different skills than the people that are going to lose their jobs are going to be able to take advantage of.
And so, if you look at a couple of big historical references, number one, the Industrial Revolution, which people generally refer to and say, hey, we've been through this before.
The Industrial Revolution at the turn of the century included mass riots that killed dozens of Americans and caused billions of dollars worth of damage.
We now have Labor Day as a national holiday because of those riots.
We implemented universal high school in 1911 in part as a response to these problems.
Bain and McKinsey project that this time is going to be three to four times faster and larger than that industrial revolution in terms of displacement of workers.
So even if you just rely upon history, you would expect a lot of violence and tumult and conflict.
Number two, I studied economics in college, and according to economic theory, if you were to automate away 4 million manufacturing jobs, which we did, those workers would move, get retrained, rescaled, find new, higher productivity jobs, and all would be well.
But when I dug into the numbers, it turns out that almost half of those workers left the workforce and never worked again.
And of that group, about half filed for disability.
And then you saw a surge in substance abuse and drug overdoses and suicides, none of which were in my economics textbook.
It didn't say, hey, workers are going to go home, fall off a disability, and start dying at record levels.
So if you look at that fact pattern, you say, OK, that's what happened when 4 million manufacturing workers lost their jobs.
That's actually a much better sign of what's going to happen when the 3.5 million truckers and the 2.5 million call center workers and the over 10 million retail workers suffer from the same sort of displacement.
Now, the conservative counterargument to some of what you're talking about would be, right, all these people went on disability, but they were able to, meaning that a lot of people were able to find a social safety net.
They've been reliant on that social safety net.
That hasn't actually rebuilt the forms of social capital necessary to have functioning societies.
You've seen people who are supported by the government, largely, who are still getting addicted to drugs, people who are committing suicide at record rates, who are staying unemployed for years at a time, and who are staying in towns where presumably I mean, there are 7 million unfilled jobs, apparently, in the United States right now, and there are a lot of people who are out of work, and people, as you mentioned in the book, are basically staying where they are.
Is the incentive structure maybe misaligned because of government intervention into the system?
You know, it's a very interesting question.
And one of the things that I found worrisome in the data was that Americans are migrating between states at multi-decade lows, which is a terrible sign for dynamism.
And I love dynamism.
I think people should be moving for work.
It's very good.
economically and culturally.
It's something very optimistic about moving to another state for a new job.
And so I would love to help more Americans do just that.
And one of my policy proposals is that we pay moving expenses for Americans who want to move.
Because to your point, there are a lot of Americans who are stuck in place because they're underwater in a mortgage.
There are costs associated with a move that they can't manage properly.
But a lot of them are also in place because they have families.
And so it's tough if you're going through a hard time and then you have like the only people that you're close to in your life are living in that same town and then you're like, hey guys, I'm gonna leave to move to the big city.
You know, you're asking people in some ways to sacrifice what little they can rely upon in their lives.
I mean, and I think that that's sort of where I am in the sense that I wonder if this is more about an American mentality shift that has to happen as opposed to government interventionism.
So maybe we need to reinstall the sort of pioneer ethos that supposedly animated the United States in the first place.
This idea, OK, you do have to pick up and you do have to move and you do have to make difficult decisions to better your economic life.
And do you ever worry that the description of the upcoming economic catastrophe is actually disincentivizing people from going out and trying to forge forth?
Because I do think that how people think has a major impact on how they decide to embrace the job market.
Well, like you say, you know, I mean, facts are very stubborn things.
And so, you know, like, I'm convinced that we're, let's say, for example, 30% of American malls are going to close in the next four years and working in retail is the most common job in America.
I mean, those are objective facts, like Amazon sucking up another $20 billion in commerce every year.
And so saying, hey, this is happening, I don't think that necessarily is going to freeze people in place.
Like the hope is that we can galvanize energy around folks trying to improve their situations and adopting real solutions.
But I couldn't agree with you more that there is a mindset that we would love to have more Americans inhabit.
And what I'm going to suggest is that there's something Very optimistic and confident about that pioneer ethos that you described, which is like, hey, I'm going to just like go and we're going to make it happen.
I'm going to farm, you know, in some undiscovered frontier and like we're going to create a better life for ourselves.
And that is not happening for a lot of Americans.
The question is, how do we get them from where they are now to that point?
I want to ask you about your perspective on jobs, because it seems like you have an interesting view of jobs.
On the one hand, you say that people obviously need them, they need them for a sense of meaning.
On the other hand, you seem to suggest that those jobs aren't forthcoming any time soon.
So do you think that it's the jobs that provide meaning, or the check that provides meaning?
At one point in your book, for example, you specifically criticize this exact bifurcation.
You basically say that there are two completely oppositional ideas, page 182, two completely oppositional ideas that many people seem to hold simultaneously.
First, work is vital and the core of human experience.
Second, no one will want to work if they don't have to.
Well, where do you stand on that?
Do you think that work is vital and people are going to work?
Or do you think that work is not vital and that this hole can sort of be filled by the government paying for it?
So I assume that you believe work is vital.
I mean, you talk a lot about it in the book.
And you're opposing that to the idea that people won't work if they don't have to.
But you're acknowledging a lot of people aren't going to work, right?
I mean, your basic government proposals involve a lot of paying people, whether they're working or not, obviously.
With the goal that we create more work, because I'm very much in the work is vital camp.
And that's not just my thinking about it.
That's just in the data, where if you look at what happens to idle men in particular, we spend a lot of time on the computer playing video games and doing other things.
We volunteer less than employed men, even though we have more time.
Our drinking and substance abuse tends to go up.
And over time, there are some antisocial patterns that develop and idle men to a higher degree than women.
And so that's just data.
And so if you look at that and you say, OK, this actually is pretty consistent with my intuition that work is incredibly important and vital.
It provides structure, purpose, fulfillment, meaning, social structures to to people every day.
And so the question is, how do we create more things like that?
Now, to me, the best path to create that is to put economic resources into people's hands in the form of a freedom dividend of $1,000 a month, which would then allow more people to do the sort of work that either they want to do or that their community has a need for.
And the goal is to create jobs, and putting $1,000 a month into people's hands would create at least 2 million new jobs just because the buying power would just go right back into local businesses and communities.
Now, all that being said, I do think our definition, our notion of work should evolve.
And one example I use is my wife is at home.
We're talking about our families.
My wife is at home with our two young boys, one of whom is autistic.
And right now, she works very hard.
I mean, you know, she works harder than I do.
I mean, I'm running for president and she's working harder.
But the market values her work at zero.
Society, in some ways, minimizes the value of that work.
And so, to me, we should broaden the definitions of work to include being a parent or caregiver, but also arts, creativity, entrepreneurship, journalism, things that we know people coaching, volunteering, civic engagement, things that we know people want to do more of, but that right now society will systematically either undervalue or not have any monetary value.
So I want to ask you about the location of meaning.
So I've heard, as I say, I think there's a point where the populist left sort of meets the populist right.
And the suggestion is that if we structure the economy in certain ways that this will provide more jobs and that the jobs are what are going to provide meaning.
But you also suggest that You know, the Freedom Dividend, while it may create more jobs as sort of an ancillary benefit, there are a lot of people who are not going to be able to work, who are going to be on the Freedom Dividend, who are going to be receiving UBI.
In fact, UBI studies don't show increased employment in virtually any study.
At best, they show even employment or declines in employment in the areas in which they are tried.
And then you sort of suggest that people will be able to find meaning in all the other things you're talking about, volunteering and community and art.
But we're not seeing that with disability.
So people are dependent on disability.
They're not engaging more in art making or learning to play violin or volunteering more.
They're engaging more with video games, as you talk about, or drug use, or in some cases, they become suicidal.
We're seeing family breakdown with all of that.
So what makes you think the freedom dividend is going to have a different effect on human behavior than, for example, current government welfare systems have?
Yes.
So three things.
The first is that money does not somehow convey meaning.
And you know, the best it can do is maybe provide circumstances that help people find a path towards some work that they find fulfilling.
The second thing is that I have a friend whose sister is on disability and she's afraid to volunteer in her community because she's afraid she'd be noticed as able-bodied and thus lose her benefits.
And so this freedom dividend would be unconditional and free and clear and so that person would be volunteering and would not have any fear that, you know, her benefits are going to be taken away.
The third thing is that there's something very, very important about conceiving of yourself as either able or disabled.
And so if you're literally getting a check for being disabled, your two ideas of yourself are one, I'm genuinely disabled, which, and most people do have some kind of genuine ailment, you know, physical or mental, or two, I'm defrauding our society and I'm actually totally fine.
And I'm going to suggest that most people will fall into bucket number one.
That it's like a rare person who's just like, I'm 100% fine and this disability check I'm getting is just me being completely fabricating some condition.
And so if you invert that mentality and you say, hey, you are not disabled, you are fine, you are a citizen of the Richest, most advanced country in the history of the world and you're getting this cash and it's going to be yours no matter what because it's yours and you deserve it.
Then that would be more constructive in terms of pushing more people into things that they'd feel good about, that society would feel good about.
Then if we say, hey, there's something wrong with you and we're going to give you this cash in order to survive.
So, with all of that said, is your proposal for essentially universal basic income, the freedom dividend, do you see that as substituting for the vast agglomeration of welfare state policies we currently have, which was sort of Milton Friedman's proposal, or do you see it as another dividend on top of whatever is being paid?
We're already paying tens of thousands of dollars per household in poverty in the United States in welfare.
Yes.
So, my plan, the Freedom Dividend, would be opt-in.
But if you opt-in, then you will forego benefits from the existing programs.
And so, if you are currently receiving more than $1,000 in benefits, then you would look at this and say, hey, like, I'm not going to do anything and my life is going to be as it is.
If you decide to opt-in for the Freedom Dividend, it might be very appealing because it's unconditional, there's no administration, no case manager, it's $1,000 cash, you can do whatever you want, then you forego your current enrollment.
And so what you'd see is you'd see we would shrink the enrollment in the 126 or so different welfare programs that we have, and then over time those enrollments would go down, which is very much the goal, because the current programs, no one loves them, and they do have many unfortunate incentives attached to them, where if you do better, then you get less, and so many people are under-reporting how they're doing, or constructing a world where they are maximizing their benefits.
So when we talk about the cost of this thing, and you talk about it in the book, The War on Normal People, you talk about it'll cost maybe $1.3 trillion a year.
That would be in addition to current budgeting, presumably.
Honestly, that's obviously a lot of spending off the top.
But beyond that, it does raise the question as to, would this be limited in any way?
Because every government program, as Ronald Reagan said, basically has a bill of the mortal life.
And if it were to start at $1,000 a month, inflation adjusted, How quickly does this become somebody saying, you know what, it really ought to be $3,000 a month because that's a popular pitch.
Everybody gets more free money.
Where's the logical limit on that?
And how do we limit that from just eating the rest of government?
Because entitlement programs obviously are running us ragged now.
They obviously represent two-thirds of the federal budget.
Adding another massive entitlement program on top that doesn't have a limiting principle, how do we limit that so it doesn't become the overarching goal of government and actually put too much of a press on the capitalist system?
Yes.
So the first thing is, I would disagree with the characterization of a dividend as an entitlement program.
And there's one state that's had a dividend for 37 years, and that state is Alaska, which is deep red, was passed by a Republican governor, and he said, look, who'd you rather get the money, the government who's just going to screw it up, or you, the Alaskan people?
And the Alaskan said, us, and he said, I thought you'd say that.
And now everyone in Alaska gets between $1,000 and $2,000 a year, no questions asked.
It's created thousands of jobs.
It's improved children's health and nutrition.
It's decreased income inequality.
And here's the kicker.
It's wildly popular in a deep red state that hates taxes.
Because they see it.
It's like, this is one of the few things the government gets right.
Like, I actually get this dividend.
It's great.
I look forward to it.
It's real.
I can spend it.
My kids get it.
Like, life is better as a result.
And so, like, it's different from an entitlement in both its structure and the way it's utilized.
So that's big picture number one.
Number two is, right now you're right about the fact that our entitlement programs are creeping ever higher in terms of both proportion of the federal budget and the enrollments, where there are right now more Americans on disability than work in construction, as one example.
And these trends are not going to abate, they're actually going to accelerate.
So the question is whether we're going to try and restructure those programs to something that we can all embrace and get excited about, that will actually help keep American families and communities strong, instead of waiting for more and more people to get debilitated by, for example, an automation wave that's going to displace the significant proportion of the people that hold the most common jobs in the economy, which we're in the midst of right now.
And so the question is, do you wait and say, okay, I guess we're going to have more and more people qualifying for these welfare programs that have very negative incentives attached to them, or are we going to own the reality and say, look, we get it, we're going to have this dividend, and then we're going to reverse the incentives of those programs over time?
Now to your question about like whether there's a logical limit.
The reason why $1,000 a month is so magical is that it's enough to make a huge difference in the lives of individuals and families.
It's going to help children's health and graduation rates and mental health and you know kids will have a real chance to to learn.
We'll reduce domestic violence, we'll reduce hospital visits, but it's not enough to be a labor replacement because $12,000 is below the US poverty line of $12,700.
And so people are still going to have to work to prosper and have a life that anyone's going to be excited about.
So, my goal would be to put in this $1,000 dividend and then keep it at that level, but it's going to be up to, you know, and this is a big leap, but we have to trust that future legislatures will be responsible with the fact that... Yeah, good luck to that.
Well, but again, you can look at something like Alaska.
They've had it for 37 years and they've pegged it to a particular resource.
And so what I'm suggesting is what is the resource that we should peg this to?
And the resource we should peg this to is technology, where we have artificial intelligence and self-driving cars and trucks coming.
And Amazon, this trillion-dollar tech company that's sucking up $20 billion in commerce and causing 30% of malls and stores to close, they paid zero in federal taxes last year.
And so what I'm going around saying is like, look, that's not their fault.
It's their job to pay as little tax as possible.
But that means we've done a bad job designing a system if Amazon's paying less in federal taxes than you are or, you know, he is.
I mean, I wonder if that's true, though, because the fact is that we focused a lot on production, but we focus very little in this conversation on consumption.
And the fact is that, you know, when we talk about sort of this halcyon past where everybody was employed, And people in the manufacturing industry were employed.
Like, you describe at one point the 1970s, and I want to read it because I think it's sort of telling and interesting.
You say, some economic problems existed.
Growth was uneven and inflation periodically high, which might be a mild understatement.
I mean, the 70s were not great economically.
But income inequality was low, jobs provided benefits, and mainstream businesses were the drivers of the economy.
There were only three television networks, and in my house we watched them on a TV with an antenna that we fiddled with to make the picture clearer.
I'm not nostalgic for a time where I had three channels on a TV where I had to fiddle with the antenna.
There are obviously benefits and drawbacks to the economy, but the fact is that people are living significantly better on the average in the United States than they were in the 1970s, if only from the ability to consume more.
I mean, the fact is that everybody has a microwave, everybody has a cell phone, everybody has a car.
I mean, we're talking poverty line folks have these things.
So when we talk about what Amazon is not paying, the fact is that Amazon not only is one of the bigger employers in the country, but Amazon is making legitimately millions of lives better on the consumption side.
So are we focusing too much on the production side as opposed to the consumption side, especially considering that the number of people who are affected by consumption is 100% and the number of people who are affected by lacks of production jobs are significantly lower than that?
Well, you know, it's one of the things that I say in the book, which is that if you have like this focus on consumption, like cheap stuff and access to apps on your smartphone are great, but they don't substitute for having a functioning Main Street or a job to go to.
And so it's true that there are winners and losers in this economy.
Unfortunately, right now the losers outnumber the winners significantly by at least some measurements.
And we talk about the 70s to now, income growth has stagnated for many Americans from the 70s to now in real terms.
And the last three years we've seen this declining life expectancy that's hand in hand with a surge in suicides and drug overdoses, which is a sign that at least some Americans are experiencing the lack of productive opportunity much more sharply than having access to cheap consumer goods can somehow make up for.
Well, I think that's obviously true for a subset of the population.
It is also true that for 100% of the population, the consumer... We got cheap stuff, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's not just cheap stuff.
I mean, it's pretty fantastic and great stuff.
And if the idea of UBI is that raising living standards on a generalized level, results in better outcomes in a variety of areas, then one of the ways to do that is to continue to provide that cheap stuff.
And so there is a balance here, I would assume.
I like cheap stuff.
So let's talk about your view of capitalism, because I think that there's something interesting there.
So you talk about what you call human capitalism, the idea of changing our notion of capitalism where essentially it changes how we see the market.
You say human capitalism would have a few core tenets.
One, humanity is more important than money.
Two, the unit of an economy is each person, not each dollar.
And three, markets exist to serve our common goals and values.
On sort of an abstract, in a vacuum, I agree with a lot of that stuff, obviously.
I mean, I have kids, I have parents, right?
Humans matter more than money.
And if you ask me to sell my child, obviously the answer is no.
I like my kids, although it depends on the day.
If you're asking, you know, the units of an economy, dollars versus people, There I start to have a little more trouble, just on the economic level, because what I'm actually paying for is a skill set, not a person.
Obviously the value of each human being is infinite, but the value of each human being's labor is certainly not.
And then when you say markets exist to serve our common goals and values.
This is what, it's really interesting, because as I mentioned, I mentioned Tucker, because I think that you and Tucker Carlson are on the same page with regard to some of this stuff, so is Bernie Sanders for that matter.
The idea that markets exist to serve people, I think is something with which I disagree, and I'll explain.
When we talk about markets, my view of a market is essentially a recognition that my labor belongs to me.
A free market is just my labor belongs to me in the same way that free speech is my viewpoint belongs to me.
You can't say that the markets exist to serve our common goals any more than you say that free speech exists to serve our common goals.
Free speech is just a recognition that I, as an individual human being, have worth.
And so free markets are the same thing.
It's a recognition that I, as an individual human being, my labor has worth.
So the idea that the market is just something that is an institution that we have come up with together and then we play with, I'm not sure that's an accurate description of what markets actually represent.
There's an underlying value to human labor that is not just a common system we all decided to come up with one day.
It's just a recognition that I can alienate my labor and you can buy my labor.
Is that wrong?
Well, that, So to me, the fundamental shift that we have to start getting our arms around is that certain people's labor is not going to be worth enough for them to make the kind of living that is required for them to live what they the fundamental shift that we have to start getting our arms around is that certain And so if you look at Look at truck drivers as an example, because I use them because they're the most clear.
So you have three and a half million truckers making about $46,000 a year, and it's a punishing job.
They're behind the wheel of this truck for up to 14 hours a day, and they're away from their families four days a week, and the rest of it.
But their market value, with the market of their time behind the wheel, you know, it's about $46,000 a year.
Now, if five to ten years from now, my friends in Silicon Valley come up with trucks that can largely drive themselves, and then we're going to go to that truck driver and say, hey, turns out your market value, like your time behind the wheel, it's not $46,000 anymore.
It's $26,000.
It's zero.
It's like, you know, whatever the number is.
And so there's like a change building up in our economy that the freedom to trade your labor for money to make a good living for yourself, that's actually going to end up breaking down in more and more situations where that truck driver is no less willing to trade his time.
I mean, he still wants to do it.
But then the freight company is going to be like, turns out your time's not worth what it was.
And it's not just the trucker.
It could be a radiologist who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they interpret radiation films and say, I'm very willing to do this.
I like getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And then we say, hey, turns out that AI can see tumors you can't.
It can refer to millions of films, not thousands.
It can see shades of gray that are invisible to the human eye.
You lose.
Your time all of a sudden goes from worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to, let's call it, Like, half that, or zero, or whatever the number is.
And so, I think that it worked for a long time when the average American could show up and say, if I'm willing to work hard and I've got a strong back, like, you know, I can make a decent living for myself and my family.
Like it was in the 70s, where if I showed up even to a manufacturing plant, I might be able to provide a middle class life for myself and my family.
But then if that stops working, then we need to start thinking differently about how the labor market functions.
So if we've moved beyond sort of the concept of free markets as places where we can alienate labor because some people are not capable of alienating their labor, their labor's just not worth anything, then is the idea that the collective owns the labor of everybody and gets to redistribute the products of that labor, is that what we're talking about here?
Because it gets into dicey territory.
No, and I agree with that.
And that's actually the outcome we have to avoid, if at all possible.
And this is one reason why my flagship proposal is we give every American $1,000 a month free and clear.
And that doesn't somehow usurp your labor, your time.
That actually, if anything, liberates your labor, your time.
That if you have a little bit more freedom from scarcity, then you can start making moves towards the sort of work that you want for yourself, that you value, that you would find fulfilling and exciting.
So one of the things that you talk about, and I think this is interesting because you are obviously a big believer in the ability of people to make choices with their own money, and this is why you believe in the freedom dividend is the idea.
I'm giving you the cash.
It's your decision what to do with it.
At one point in the book, you talk about the idea that folks who are poorer in the United States are actually Good with money, that essentially that they are going to be responsible with the money that they have, you say, on page 185.
The idea that poor people will be irresponsible with their money and squander it seems to be a product of deep-seated biases rather than emblematic of the truth.
And you do this in sort of a broader attack on the meritocratic idea in which you say, well, you know, this isn't completely a meritocracy.
Obviously, there are some people who are born into situations they can't control.
You don't always control your own level of merit.
That's sort of a meritocratic myth.
And this is a position that's held by people, including Ross Douthat, who's sort of a more populist conservative at the New York Times.
I wonder, however, if that's true.
And the reason that I say that is because if you look at the spending habits of people who are lower down on the income chain, those spending habits don't tend to be more frugal than people who are at the upper levels of the income chain, at least not until those people at the upper levels are pretty secure in being at the upper levels.
You see conspicuous consumption among people who are earning insane amounts of money because they can afford it, but the way that those people largely became people who can afford to do that is a certain level of frugality.
I take, for example, the buying of lottery tickets.
So, the lowest income households in the United States, on average, spend $412 annually on lottery tickets.
Almost 3 in 10 Americans in the lowest income bracket play the lottery once a week.
Now, we know, just statistically, this is flushing your money down the toilet.
It's a complete waste of time.
There's no reason to do that.
And I understand people do this out of despair, but that doesn't change the economic truth, which is that people may not make good decisions with their money, which is one of the reasons we have programs like Social Security.
We don't trust you.
To keep your own money and put it in a 401k account, we believe that you're going to take that money and blow it on whatever you're going to blow it on.
Are you worried that we grant UBI and then people just don't spend it on health insurance or they don't spend it on saving for the future?
Instead, they just spend it on whatever they're going to spend it on.
It provides a temporary boost for the economy and we're back in the same position because people at lower levels, at least people who tend to stay at lower levels, people who are permanently poor in the United States, don't tend to make great decisions with their money.
Yeah, it's a concern, for sure.
And one of the things that drives me is that there's been a lot of research over the fact that if you're poor, if you're stressed out about your month-to-month bills, it actually consumes a lot of your mental bandwidth.
And it reduces your decision-making ability, it reduces your functional intelligence by 13 IQ points or one standard deviation.
And so, if you get the boot off of someone's throat and say, look, you're going to be here, your kid's going to be here, all will be well, then their incentives to save will hopefully be higher.
Now I'm not naive enough to think that everyone's gonna go and do exactly what I would see as optimally responsible with their money, but big picture, to return to your original point, I think it's their money.
I think that if you're a citizen and shareholder of this country, we can easily afford a dividend of $1,000 a month, and if you make a bad decision or a decision I would consider poor in January, maybe you'll make a better decision in February, maybe you'll make a better decision in March, but it's going to be up to you It's going to be, you know, your life, your choices.
And I certainly do not think that the government saying like, hey, we think you should just use the money on this or that, like would be a better way to go.
So that's a pretty libertarian idea, actually.
So that doesn't seem to fit necessarily wholly within sort of the democratic belief that, on the Democratic Party side, that when money is signed to you that we have to kind of stand guard over the money.
There are a lot of libertarians who believe in UBI, and they have the same sort of libertarian view, which is your money, you do with it what you want, you live with the consequences.
Obviously that comes with downsides from, I think, the left-wing point of view.
Well, you know, I think many Americans have lost confidence that what we need is another program where someone comes in and says, hey, you know what we think is best for you?
This.
We're in agreement on this.
So, you know, I mean, I like I think many Americans are going to be very excited about being able to make their own decisions on this.
So let's talk about the cost side of this.
You proposed value-added tax.
You point out that in Europe there is value-added tax, which is essentially a consumption tax.
You want to add that on top of the income tax and the business tax as opposed to replacing it.
If we're talking about replacing it, I'm on board with you, man.
I'm totally for a VAT replacing whatever income tax system we have right now.
Where do you think the breaking point is as far as how much the system can support in terms of taxation?
Right now we're living Pretty heavily on debt, obviously, and adding a bunch of new costs in the form of UBI or quashing economic growth to a certain extent, because as you increase the tax rate at a certain point, you're going to hit a breaking point.
Where do you think the tax, the ideal tax rate lies?
You're setting the taxes.
How does the ideal tax system work?
Well, I agree with you that ideally we are not taxing labor in the same way we do now.
Because you don't want to tax things you need more of.
And in my opinion, we need as much work and work-like arrangement as possible.
And so ideally, you would find ways to tax things that are not labor arrangements.
And so when you say like, hey, if you swap out to take up taxes for consumption tax, you're on board, that to me should be the long-term vision.
The question is how you get from here to there.
And so the way I would start is by implementing this value added tax at half the European level is quite modest, but it would help capture some of the gains that Amazon and these other mega tech companies are experiencing and return those gains to the American people.
And some of it will float back up to, you know, Jeff and Amazon again, because you just buy an extra toaster.
But, you know, like a lot of it will go to your local restaurants and the mechanic and the tutoring service and the hardware store.
And, you know, it'll help replenish the Main Street economy and create jobs.
There is, to me, like a movement in that direction that we need to get to because right now we're just taxing, in my opinion, we're taxing highly inefficiently.
And you look around and the way that we're trying to address this is like, hey, you know, it's like there's like this high marginal tax rate.
I try to explain to people all the time, look, Jeff Bezos is worth $160 billion and most of that is Amazon stock.
And it went from zero to being worth $160 million, and he's way too smart to have a taxable event.
Like, I can ratchet up the marginal tax rate very, very high, and it's not going to help anything.
This is exactly, by the way, what was in the 1950s.
When people say that there was a 91 top tax bracket in the 1950s, no one paid that percentage because there were a bunch of loopholes in the law that allowed people to escape paying that percentage.
The effective marginal tax bracket at that point was effectively the same as it is today.
People were paying basically the same amount of taxes.
Yeah, people are very, very smart.
You work with a lot of those people.
Tax avoidance is a strategy and people will do that.
Some of our smartest friends in law school are helping people avoid taxes right now.
Of course.
And by the way, one of the things that's fun about talking to you is that you and I have very similar backgrounds.
I mean, I worked for a law firm for legitimately 10 months, and I was like, I can't do this.
I am out.
There's just no way to do this.
I'm going to ask you one more question about UBI.
And it's more of a general question.
Then I want to get to some of your other proposals because one of the things that's so fascinating about your candidacy is that you have proposals from here up to Wattisoo.
I mean, you're a policy-heavy dude.
So, on UBI, final question, which is, how much can money actually do?
I wrote an entire book, which right now is doing very well, The Right Side of History, in which I talk about, I think, the lack of meaning and purpose in people's lives.
And I wonder whether signing a check is going to actually alleviate that in any real way.
It seems like there's been a loss of social capital and social fabric that can't necessarily be filled with a government program, and that no matter what government program we propose, if that social capital is not restored through certain basic beliefs in fundamental principles of the country, certain freedoms and certain beliefs in community and the kind of charitable organization certain freedoms and certain beliefs in community and the kind of charitable organization that you are the head of, that it's going to be very difficult for people to find meaning even if they're making a little more money, because the fact is we're the wealthiest country in the history People are exorbitantly wealthy.
The poorest among us, I mean, the rich would have been clamoring in 1880, or for that matter, 1920, to live like the poorest among us live now.
It's So, is there, can we fill what is effectively a spiritual hole with a government program?
This is, to me, the generational challenge that we're facing, is how do you create more community ties and structure and purpose and fulfillment and paths forward for Americans who feel this central void in their lives?
And, of course, like, a thousand bucks a month does not fill that void.
But, and here's to me the path forward, is if you take a town in Missouri with 50,000 adults, and they're struggling with that sense of purpose, and then you say, hey, good news, now there's another $50 million in your community every month.
So, what happens to that money?
Some of it goes into local businesses.
There's a person there who wanted to start a bakery, and the bakery was a dumb idea, but now the bakery is a good idea.
And then he starts it, and then he hires a couple of people, and then people like his baked goods, and then some of that money goes into religious institutions.
Some of that money goes into non-profits.
Some of that money goes into arts organizations and cultural organizations.
And then you end up giving people an opportunity to at least start To address that new sense of structure and purpose and fulfillment and meaning by making it so that everyone feels like they have some value, they're not going to die, their kids have a future.
And then putting at least the beginning of some resources into their hands to try and rebuild.
And maybe for some of them it's like, hey, now I'm going to leave this town.
That could be the way I'm going to rebuild.
But that, to me, is the generational challenge.
How do you restore that sense of self-worth and social capital and the rest of it?
So, it's not like money does that, but what money does do is that money helps create the conditions where we can at least start to try and address that central challenge.
Okay, so now I want to race through some of the policy proposals.
I want to get one out of the way immediately because people think the reason you came on here was to discuss circumcision, which was not the reason you came on the show and not the reason I asked you on the show.
So, your position on circumcision, you are anti-circumcision, but you are not in favor of banning it, is that correct?
Yeah, that's totally right.
I mean, I have two young boys, and when the first was born, my wife dug into various reasons for circumcising your kids, and then she was unconvinced, and then she convinced me to be unconvinced, shall we say.
But I've attended my friends' bris for their son, and it's up to parents what they want to do.
And certainly for any religious or cultural reason, people should be free to adopt whatever they want for themselves.
So fine, we're cool.
Because, you know, the medical evidence is at best conflicting.
Sometimes it's trendy, sometimes it's not.
There's talk about, you know, the prevention of penile cancer, urinary tract infection and stuff.
But, you know, the fact is that as long as you're not looking to ban it, I don't care, right?
Your perspective on it is your perspective.
Fine.
And I have to say how taken aback I was at what a thing it became.
I mean, you mentioned circumcision, so now it's a thing, right?
I mean, this is the stupidity of the internet.
You know, let me ask you about that, because the stupidity of the internet is truly astonishing.
If you look at your candidacy online and you look at how the media cover it, they cover it not as just a mainstream candidacy of ideas, but as something weird and curious, because you have a lot of particularly young white men who follow you online, and because you speak about the middle of the country that largely has not been talked about.
There's a lot of focus right now in the Democratic Party on the problems of racism or sexism or bigotry.
And you've talked about some of those things, but you've talked more about the fact that there's essentially an underclass of people, many of whom are white, living in the middle of the country in an area where technology is eliminating their jobs.
And the media have thus labeled you some sort of near alt-righter.
Where do you think this is coming from?
You know, I mean, like, I think that we need to start just trying to have, like, honest conversations about the problems on the ground in this country.
And certainly, that's my goal as a candidate.
Right?
I'm not quite sure where, like, I've been frankly a little bit surprised by what I'm happy to say that now we're rising to a point because I'm pulling at 3% and we're raising, you know, hundreds of thousand dollars per week and everything else that the mainstream media will now have to reckon with this set of ideas.
But I agree with you that the media response to us has been curious.
Up to a certain point.
I'm about to become much more mainstream, I believe.
But it's been an education for me.
OK, so I want to ask you about your perspective on health care.
So you talk in your book, The War on Normal People, you talk about what you would do with the health care system.
And you recommend a single-payer health care system.
Obviously, I'm a massive opponent of a single-payer health care system.
That is acknowledging the problems with our employment-based health care system.
That's something I think both of us agree on.
I'd prefer a system where people are effectively paying for their own health care so that they can actually see the cost of what it is that they are consuming.
And then we can form coalitions, as we do, and associations to help defray the cost for people who have pre-existing conditions and all the rest.
You recommend a single-payer health care system.
Why do you think that's the best option?
Well, I think you and I might have had similar experiences, where if you run a small company, you see that our current employment-based system is a real weight on the economy, where it makes it harder to hire people.
It makes it harder to treat someone as a full-time employee, because you have these incentives to treat them as a contractor.
It makes it harder to start a business.
It makes it harder to change jobs.
It's like this massive source of friction.
And so the question is, how do you separate, uh, healthcare from your employment situation?
Because right now you can imagine how many more entrepreneurs there'd be in the U.S. if they didn't have to stress out about healthcare for themselves and their families.
I mean, there'd be many, many more people starting businesses.
Now, I agree with you that there has to be some kind of skin in the game.
Like it can't be that if you just show up, it's like always cost free because, you know, there's some people that, um, are hypochondriacs and like consume a lot of treatment.
So there should be some sort of individual skin in the game.
That said, I feel that healthcare is an environment where the market is going to be an imperfect solution because one, you get very cost-intensive if you have a serious illness or your loved one is seriously ill.
Two, it's like the pricing is very confusing and opaque, you know, and then you're relying upon specialists for various pieces of information to say, oh, you need this, you don't need that.
And so it's not like the same sort of market as many, many other consumer goods or experiences where you can trust that, like, you know, you're going to say, like, hey, I'm educated on what that product means for me.
So I think that we need to try and get the cost down.
And right now we're living in the worst of all worlds where we're spending twice as much on our health care as other societies to worse results.
And it's a massive impediment to our economy and hiring and dynamism.
So I just think that having a robust public option, you can improve the access, bring down the costs, just because we're saddled with this incredibly inefficient system right now.
So there are a couple of points to be made in defense of the American health care system, putting aside the employment basis, which I think is deeply wrong and was initiated in response to actually wage controls in the 1940s.
One of the things to be said is that when it comes to five-year cancer survival rates, the United States still ranks number one.
When you remove homicide and car accident, the United States still has the longest life expectancy.
Yes, we're expensive, but if you look at us on a per capita GDP basis, we're going to be able to do that.
We're actually not all that far out of the realm of possibility because the fact is that we're a very wealthy country, people are choosing to spend, we do develop more than half of all new medical patents, so there's some upsides to the fact that we have a market in healthcare.
And one thing I do want to say is I would not, like I'm not for a system where we're somehow eliminating private insurers, where there would be these gold-plated concierge private health plans that would still have massive financial incentives and resources for various forms of innovation and the rest of it.
So there's one point in the book where you talk about doctors.
And this I took a little personally in the sense that, as I've mentioned many times, my wife is a doctor.
She's gone through one million years of training at this point.
What kind of doctor is she?
She's a family medicine doc.
Wow, good for her.
Yeah, so she'll be finishing her residency this upcoming June.
And literally since we were dating, she's been on this path.
We got married when she was a junior in college.
And then she did a couple of years working in a lab.
And then she went to medical school.
And now she's in residency.
I'm doing the math.
I'm doing the math.
Twelve years.
Exactly.
Almost 11 years in July.
Well done.
So she's been doing this for a very long time.
And you talk in the book about this idea that we're going to have to shift how doctors think of doing their jobs.
And you sort of suggest that doctors are going to have to become more altruistic.
Instead of seeing this profession as a way of making money, they're going to have to see it as just, you'll make some money, but you won't make enormous money.
The fact is that you're not going to get people to go through a 10 to 12 year system of education if you're telling them on the other end they're going to get paid like postal workers.
Well, certainly not postal workers.
But even $150,000 a year.
I mean, the fact is that, thank God, I've been able to pay for my wife's education this whole way.
But if we had not, then she was working below minimum wage in her residency because she's working hours and hours and hours.
And even if that's $50,000 a year, she's working legitimately 80 to 90 hours a week.
She has, most of her colleagues, have hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical school debt, and they're going to have to pay all of that off.
It seems to me that if we have a supply and demand problem, we need to increase the supply of doctors, and the way to do that is to actually incentivize people to join the medical profession, not by telling them that they need to be paid less in the name of altruism, but they need to be paid more through transparency and pricing and being able to decide their own standards.
Well, have you seen why our supply of doctors is constrained?
I mean, yes.
I mean, people don't want to deal with the administration, they don't want to deal with the insurance companies.
No, it's because the doctors and the medical, so one, it's incredibly expensive.
Medical licensing as well, yes.
Yes.
It's incredibly expensive to educate a doctor.
And the supply has been constrained for years, even as many, many communities have become what's called primary care deserts.
Because when someone, and this is one reason why I'm congratulating your wife on being a family medicine doctor, is that when she's in training, she's racking up all this debt, And then she's like, wait a minute, if I specialize in certain things, I'll get paid a lot more than if I become a primary care doctor.
And if I live someplace where they can afford to pay me more, then I'll live better than if I go to some rural community or small town or something where maybe they don't have a doctor like me, maybe they could really use a doctor like me, but my life's going to be harder, I'm going to get paid less, etc.
So right now, to me, you are 100% right that we need to increase the supply.
But it's not a compensation issue.
We just need to increase the supply because right now the doctors and the medical schools have not created new paths to train doctors.
And that's been a problem for years and decades.
Well, it's certainly true that we have to deregulate a lot of medical licensing.
So you're a libertarian on that one, too.
I mean, it sounds like, you know, having nurse practitioners being able to do more things would be a very good thing.
Yes, particularly when we get really good AI.
And this is something the doctors have fought, is that if you were to say to a doctor or the doctor's lobby group, it's like, hey, there's a primary care in desert.
Like, we need to send someone over there and they need to be able to treat patients.
Doctors have been like, no.
needs to be an MD.
Right.
And then you're like, but wait, there's no MD there.
Literally, none of you wants to move there.
And so we need to make it so that nurse practitioners can do more.
And this is particularly true when we're going to have AI that can at least help diagnose a significant proportion of conditions and recommend treatment.
And then you can always refer to a doctor if it's helpful.
I mean, we agree on all this, but I think the question is when it comes to Medicare for all, the truth is that fewer people are going into the medical professions They're choosing to be lawyers, they're choosing to be businessmen, specifically because they don't want to deal with the hassle of the government.
There are lots of doctors, increasingly, who won't even take Medicare.
They'd rather take private insurance because the Medicare reimbursement rates are 60%.
And you are mandated to get through a certain number of patients, in many cases, if you're working at one of these hospitals to do a shift.
So right now there's a double whammy going on.
And so what you're suggesting is like, hey, it's because of low reimbursement rates, which is certainly an issue.
But the other issue that's attendant, which is at least as important, is just the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork and administration and like, are these doctors?
I'm friends with, because I'm Asian, I have a lot of doctor friends.
Where they say it's like, I'd love to just actually be seeing a patient, but instead for every, you know, like 10 minutes I spend with a patient, like I'm spending or one of my staffers is spending, you know, four minutes on like documentation or administration or billing.
A lot of that has to do with medical liability.
A lot of that has to do as well with regulation of these insurance companies and lack of transparency because the truth is if you walk into a doctor's office right now and you ask a doctor how much an x-ray costs, they have no idea.
They have to submit it to the insurance company.
Yes.
A lot of this seems like regulatory problems to me, not necessarily to be cured by the collective bargaining of Medicare.
Well, we've created this incredibly Byzantine labyrinth.
Oh yeah.
And so the question is, how do you clean it up?
And how do you free up doctors to actually focus on patients and care, rather than billing codes and paperwork?
I totally agree.
And to me, the most obvious example of the free market at work is concierge care.
I mean, you're starting to see this rise.
You're seeing apps that are designed to have doctors just arrive at your door.
The doctor comes to you in many cases.
It seems to me that, you know, we'll differ on this, but it seems that free markets actually do apply and obtain in the vast majority of cases when it comes to health care, just like they do anything else.
And declaring something not a good doesn't make it more plentiful or more robust.
Yeah.
So let me just say that I think bureaucracy is the enemy.
And my goal would be to diminish it, not elevate it.
not elevated.
Okay, so let's talk for a second about some of the other proposals.
OK, so let's talk for a second about some of the other proposals.
Some of them I think are fun.
Some of them I think are fun.
I totally agree with you that the NCAA should pay athletes.
I totally agree with you that the NCAA should pay athletes.
Frankly, I think that we should stop college athletics altogether, which I will say right in the middle of March Madness.
Frankly, I think that we should stop college athletics altogether, which I will say right in the middle of March Madness.
I don't even care, man, because the fact is that if you're going to college and you're going to a top college not to actually get a degree, but we're going to basically bring you here for a year so that you can have a tryout for the NBA, and then they're going to make millions of dollars off you, totally on board with that one.
Let's talk about the Green New Deal.
So you say you're aligned and on board with the Green New Deal.
Which part of it?
I assume not the part for unable and unwilling to work in killing the farting cows.
I'm for the fact that climate change is a growing threat, where the last four years have been the four warmest years in recorded human history, and that our projections about what's going to happen, unfortunately, are getting steadily worse.
And so the question is, is there something that we can do about it?
And this is a space where the government, to me, has to play a key role because the financial incentives right now are towards forms of energy that, you know, are just more developed and more economically advantageous at this point.
So if someone says, hey, we need to move dramatically in a direction towards renewable energy, like I applaud that vision, because I think that is where we need to go.
The way I disagree with some people, some other people on this is that we sometimes pretend that the United States is somehow 100% of global emissions.
We're about 15%.
And so even if we were to go whole hog, we would probably diminish the rate incrementally.
And so I'm for trying to address and mitigate the worst effects of a warming planet with the recognition that it's probably going to happen whether we move towards renewable sources of energy or not.
So this is hilarious, because you and I are on exactly the same page on this.
Also, you've endorsed nuclear power, for example, where many of your colleagues have said, I don't even know how it's possible to say that you want to reduce global warming, but you're also against nuclear power.
That just seems completely mad to me.
Yeah, yeah, I mean nuclear has to be a big part of the solution if you're going to head in this direction.
Okay, so let's talk also about, this is one of the things I really enjoy about your candidacy is that you do have so many ideas and some of them are really kind of heterodox.
So you want to revive earmarks and you talk about reviving earmarks.
It's actually something that it's a third rail of politics.
You're not allowed to say that you're in favor of earmarks.
But the truth is that the death of earmarks has actually led to budget impasses because people have no incentive to essentially wall roll.
There's nothing to freaking bargain with anymore.
It's like, you know, I show up in your office.
I'm like, hey, we got to make a deal.
Like, what are you going to do for me?
It's like, I can't do anything.
It's like, that's no way to get anything done.
Yeah, so that's a practical policy.
One of the areas where I do wonder about the practicality of it is you say that you're in favor of a four-week paid leave policy for all full-time workers, and you say it's a mandatory four-week paid leave policy.
So can you explain what you mean by that?
Well, so I think it was, you know, it's like There were projections that our work weeks would get shorter and shorter over time as we became more productive, and people were projecting like a 15-hour work week.
But unfortunately, that's gone the other direction.
And studies have shown that it's not necessarily that our productivity is in lockstep with the amount of time we spend.
And so I think that a certain amount of time off and I would exempt various small businesses and the rest of it that You know that that it might somehow be disruptive To your operations, but generally speaking.
I think time off is good for people.
It's good for Organizations, it's good for processes like when I ran a company I would tell people to take time off and they would never do it and And they wouldn't do it because I wasn't doing it.
And then when I realized, OK, I get it.
I need to do it.
And then you will do it.
And then lo and behold, I think I'd come back refreshed and with a different outlook or new ideas.
And the same would happen for them.
And so to me, it's a good way for an organization to have to evolve and adapt so that it's not like you have to be on the firing line or the front line all the time.
I mean, listen, I would very much love to take four weeks of vacation this year.
I highly doubt that I will, despite the Jewish holidays.
I guess my question is, whenever you have the government sort of just creating goods, isn't that a damper on the economy?
And also, aren't you going to get the same thing that you have with the tax code, where basically businesses just hire part-time workers?
Businesses just decide that they're going to hire independent contractors.
They're not subject to such regulations.
You know, again, I mean, we'd have exemptions for people.
So I'm sure that in your case, if you do not want to take four weeks, I'm sure you would not.
Yeah, so the goal is not to somehow make it harder for businesses to operate.
And I understand that the margins might seem like that's the case.
To me, it actually helps make organizations more sustainable and somewhat more organic.
So one of the other things that you've talked about is getting the government involved in sort of how we consume information.
So you've talked about the Department of the Attention Economy, which would basically be the government policing the amount of time on social media.
Not necessarily time, but also just the way the social media apps are designed.
Because one of my friends, Tristan Harris, who worked on it, was like, look, we have brilliant engineers turning these supercomputers into slot machines that are hypnotizing teenage girls and making everyone depressed.
And that's where their financial incentives are.
So it's not just time on the app, it's actually the way the apps are designed.
I mean, do you fear that giving the government that kind of power leads to the power of censorship?
Obviously there have been a lot of complaints from the right, from people who are heterodox politically, that the social media companies are cracking down on particular political points of view.
Putting the government in charge of this sort of stuff can easily slide over into government censorship, where they say that they are policing the form of the app, but in reality what they're actually policing is the form of consumption of content.
Do you worry about that?
You know, I feel like those concerns are somewhat less pressing than they were in a time when we had limited means of accessing information or consuming information.
If you were to adjust Snapchat's design algorithms where it's like, hey, stop pinging the teenage kid all the time, I'm optimistic that that would not necessarily curb people's access to quality political information.
One of the things that you've talked about, if I'm not mistaken, is you've talked about sort of a kind of regulation of the news media where the government polices the sort of information being distributed as news.
That's where I start to get really frightened because the fact is that the government in the business of news, whether you are a fan of Trump or not a fan of Trump, if you are on the right, you're afraid of Barack Obama doing this to you.
If you're on the left, you're afraid of Donald Trump doing this to you.
How exactly do you restrict the powers of government when it comes to intervention and that sort of stuff?
Well, so I was looking at some of the models abroad, because right now we're in a bit of a mess in terms of our information consumption.
There are very powerful market dynamics where if I'm a media company, I figure out, ooh, if I cater to getting the most extreme 30% excited, that's actually better for my business than being more moderate.
It's like clickbait, but clickbait across information silos.
And so I looked at what some other countries have done and that if someone has demonstrably false information, then you come and say, look, that was actually fabricated.
And then you just have to issue an apology or there's some kind of process.
But we're at a point now where we legitimately have a hard time agreeing on facts and we have at least some foreign actors that are taking advantage of like this soft underbelly to sort of gin up various like groups against each other and make it so that people can't And this is before deep fakes and the rest of it arrived where literally they could show you and I like doing something.
And then it's like, well, it must be real because I saw the Internet.
So it's a mess.
And it's a situation where you have to look at it with like a perspective and say, OK, it's a mess and it's going to get messier.
Like what are possible ways out of this?
And at least to me, the government may have a role to play in saying this is fake, this is fraudulent, this is from a foreign actor, this is not true.
In the absence of any sort of action in that direction, then we're in for an even worse environment in terms of polarization, in my opinion.
I mean, to me, obviously, the response is that the government Empowering them to determine what is true and false sometimes shades over into an opinion on a fact, and the government decides that this is what PolitiFact does to us on a regular basis, and it gets into a little bit of dangerous territory.
In a second, I want to ask you about race.
I have one final question for you, which is, where do we stand racially in the country?
But if you want to hear Andrew Yang's answer, you actually have to be a DailyWire subscriber.
To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation over there.
Well, thank you so much for stopping by.
It really means a lot.
I think this is a great discussion.
I'm sure that our listeners are going to have a lot of thoughts in response.
If people want to give to your campaign, they can check you out at what, yang2020.com?
Yes, yang2020.com, or just Google Andrew Yang.
But would certainly love to have everyone's help and support in this campaign, as we're going to make history together.
We're going to bring the revolution of reason to the American people.
It's not left or right, it's forward.
Well, thank you so much.
I really appreciate it, Andrew.
Thanks for stopping by.
Thank you, man.
- Thank you, Ben.
It's been a pleasure. - The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer Mathis Glover.
Edited by Donovan Fowler.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Cates.
Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Olvera.
Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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