PBD Podcast | EP 144 | Former Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang
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PBD Podcast Episode 144. Patrick Bet-David is joined by former Presidental candidate Andrew Yang.
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About:
Andrew Yang is an American businessman, attorney, lobbyist and political candidate. Yang is best known for being a candidate in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries and the 2021 New York City Democratic mayoral primary. The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Yang was born and raised in New York State. He attended Brown University and Columbia Law School.
To reach the Valuetainment team you can email: booking@valuetainment.com
About:
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
0:00 - Start
2:42 - Andrew Yang explains what both political parties are doing right
8:41 - Patrick Bet-David reveals the greatest third party candidate in history
11:21 - Why Yang started a third party
14:54 - Andrew Yang reveals whether or not he truly wants to be president
17:41 - Andrew Yang explains who the base of the forward party really is
24:23 - Did Andrew Yang vote for Joe Biden?
31:00 - Andrew Yang attempts to defend Universal Basic Income
49:10 -Andrew Yang gives his honest thoughts on Tulsi Gabbard
54:36 - Patrick Bet-David reveals whether or not Andrew Yang can realistically run the country
Okay, so for full disclosure, this is not pre-recorded.
Right now is what time?
It is 4.18 Eastern Standard Time.
Okay.
Andrew Yangins in the House, former presidential candidate, and the leader of a new party.
He left the Democratic Party, started a party called the Forward Party, which you got a nice little pin on your jacket.
Andrew, it's great to have you on the podcast today.
It is great to be here.
I have a confession.
The reason I'm here is because I noticed when you offered, I think it was $5 million to get Obama and Trump together on stage.
And I was like, that's my kind of guy.
Full disclosure, we paid Andrew $4.8 million to be here today.
But no, it's great to have you here, man.
You definitely shook up the world with, I believe we need to pay everybody $1,000 a month, UBI, and everybody lost their minds.
But I think that kind of created a lot of momentum.
And then you started explaining yourself and different kind of podcasts you went on.
And then people had a decision to make for themselves.
But for the audience that's listening, that maybe doesn't know your full background, the past, maybe take one minute.
And before running for office, what did you do before running for presidency?
It's another reason why I'm here today is that before I appeared on your TV screen running for president, I ran an education company.
That was a private business.
It grew to become number one in the country and was bought by a public company in 2009.
So I'm an entrepreneur, an operator, and I started a nonprofit in 2011 to train what I believe to be the next generation of entrepreneurs through an organization called Venture for America.
It took me to the Midwest and the South.
And I saw firsthand that our economy and our country is transforming in various ways that, you know, good for some people, not good at all for other people.
And that's why I ran for president was to say, look, technology and AI are becoming more and more powerful.
It's going to transform a way of life.
There are some Americans that are going to be left behind.
So we need to think, we need to think bigger about how we're going to build the economy of the future.
And so that happens.
And then from there, you run for office and then you work for CNN.
And then I think early October 2021 of last year, you guys had a breakup and then you left the Democratic Party to start a new political party.
Tell us how you came to that conclusion.
Oh, I'd love to.
So running for president, I treated it like a startup.
And when people said to me, it's like, oh, how are you doing this?
I'd be like, look, when you start something new, you know this, Patrick.
I mean, I imagine a lot of people listening to this know this.
You're looking at devoting five to 10 years to make it work or to see if it's going to work.
So in the context of politics, I was like, it's three years.
And I was like, I can do anything for three years.
You know, three years of breeze.
I've worked in startups for a lot longer than that.
So I learned a ton on the trail.
And then after I came off the trail, I still had this sense of foreboding where I was like, it still feels like our country is stuck.
And so I dug in and to try to figure out why we feel so stuck.
And this goes back to why I think you were trying to get Obama and Trump together.
Is that it turns out our two-party system is a big reason why we feel stuck?
You have a country that's more polarized than ever.
If someone's for it, then someone else has to be against it.
42% of Americans now see the other side as evil, don't want their kids to marry someone of the other party.
I mean, party has taken the place of what used to be religion in American life when you talk about or race.
And so, with this as a backdrop, and by the way, it's one reason I appreciate what you all do, is that the media is part of this.
Social media is part of this.
It's just trying to tribalize us and separate us into camps.
And so I concluded: look, no matter what you're for, the two-party system is just going to make things worse over time.
It's going to turn us against each other.
You need to go back to first principles.
And if you look at the founding fathers of the U.S., they weren't freaking partisans or Democrats or Republicans.
They thought political parties were toxic and terrible.
So the question is, how do we get from this dysfunctional duopoly to a more functional system?
And I thought, well, you need to start a functional third party.
And then I don't have it in me to be like, oh, you should do this and then not do it myself, particularly if I'm one of the most logical candidates to actually do it.
So this is during 2020 when we were all inside for COVID.
I was doing this research and coming to this conclusion that the U.S. needs to get beyond the two-party duopoly and move to a multi-party system.
Did you ever have a meeting with Michael Porter and Catherine Gale?
Because that's also what they talk about.
Yes.
Catherine on like two years ago, a year and a half ago, both of them on.
Oh, they were a profound influence on my thinking.
Anyone who you should go back and listen to that conversation.
You can also read their book, The Politics Industry.
Industry of Politics.
I think something like that.
Yeah, I think it was a politics industry where they break down the politics industry as if it was a business, where you look at it and be like, okay, why does it seem so dysfunctional?
Why is it so broken?
And what they concluded was, it's not that politics is broken.
It's that politics does not exist to actually solve problems.
It exists to provide jobs for politicians.
It exists to provide jobs for consultants.
It exists for these media organizations to gin up audiences.
And so when you make that leap where you're like, okay, the purpose of politics is not actually to do good things, then you conclude the same thing that Catherine and Michael concluded.
And those of you who don't know, Michael's a Harvard law professor who was one of the godfathers of management consulting.
And they concluded that, look, the incentives are broken.
They need to be fixed.
And what they recommend is nonpartisan open primaries to open it up and then combine that with a ranked choice voting process.
You can choose whoever you want.
So those two things are the foundation of the forward party, which I started, which is to say, look, we just need to have a more functional, rational system that doesn't amplify the extremes at the expense of the 50% of us who are in the middle somewhere.
You know, when you first started your campaign for New York and to be the mayor, I watched a video.
By the way, whoever cut the video, what a great video.
What a great.
You're walking around the street.
You're talking to people, hot dog, basketball.
I think you were playing.
I don't know what musical instrument you were playing.
I learned a lot about you and I said, this guy would be a very, and I wanted you to win.
Oh, thank you.
I really appreciate it.
You went from first to fourth in winning mayoral, you know, as far as winning the city of New York.
Do you think that was because New York, the politics in New York is not ready for somebody like you, and maybe the power players didn't get behind you?
Or was it just maybe timing or another reason why you couldn't?
Because day one, I think everybody said you were going to win the whole thing.
Yeah.
First, shout out to Darren Aronofsky, who's the director of that video.
He also made Black Swan and some other movies, The Wrestler with Mickey Rourke.
Oh, wow.
Professional movie.
No, no, I'm telling you guys, I've seen a lot of great campaign videos.
This is probably my favorite I've ever seen.
It was that good.
Yeah, Darren Aronofsky is one of the best in the world.
So I was out campaigning during that time, and I think that what turned against me at a certain point was that people just became concerned about crime, crime, crime all the time.
And that played to the advantage of Eric Adams, who had been a police officer.
This despite the fact that I was endorsed by both the police captains and the firefighters because they saw me as someone who was going to be good on these issues.
But I think the average voter looked up and said, former police officer, like entrepreneur, like, you know, the police officer is going to know more about how to get crime under control.
Because of the timing.
It's kind of like when Rudy ran the one time.
If he ran his campaign in a different time, he would have become president.
But at the time he ran, even Rudy Giuliani in New York, I'm talking about when he ran for president, not for mayor.
He even said, you know, he made a comment about LGBTQ LGB community.
And I was like, oh my God, I can't believe you can say something like that at a Republican that hurt him.
But same thing he ran on.
If he would have ran 10 years later, he would have become the president.
He would have had a chance to win the whole thing, Giuliani.
Sometimes it's timing and campaign and what your messaging of your campaign is.
But knowing where you are today and having left the Democratic Party and started a forward party, what are some things now you agree that the left is doing right, the Democrats are doing right?
What was something where it's a tipping point to say, I'm just, I can't get behind that?
And was there anything the Republicans are doing for you to say, I'm not fully there to say I'm a Republican myself?
But these are some of the things I do agree with the Republicans on what they're doing.
All right.
So this is one of the problems of the two-party system is you have these kind of increasingly ideological conversations and folks on one side will be like, hey, government should be doing all these things.
And then the other side will be like, no, government shouldn't be doing those things.
And I think what most of your listeners want is for government to actually be good at the things it's doing.
And if you look at the press, what is the press always about in terms of these political conversations?
How much money is going to this?
How much money is going to that?
We're going to cut this.
We're going to take that.
And then you're like, where the heck is this money going?
Is it being spent effectively?
Why do I have the sinking feeling that you could plow more money into the system and it wouldn't necessarily help?
During the swamp.
One of the clearest examples of it in New York City is there is a lot of money getting spent in the New York City public school system on educating these kids.
And the results have not kept pace with the investment.
And so if you look at this and you go to someone on the left and be like, hey, what the problem is, they'll be like, spend more money.
And you're like, I'm not really sure that's going to do it because you're already spending whatever it is, like $15,000 a head per year.
Where if you do the math on a classroom of 30 kids, you're like, wait a minute, that's like a significant amount of money.
And it's certainly not bearing fruit.
So this is what's missing from our political discourse.
And I'm going to suggest that this is what most business people and entrepreneurs would naturally do is like you show up, you'd be like, okay, like, how are we spending it?
What are we getting in return?
Is it working?
Is it efficient?
Is it accountable?
The fact is politicians just kind of come and go.
Money gets spent.
They show up.
They cut a ribbon.
They announce a program.
Does anyone actually come back to see, hey, did that program actually work?
Did that bear fruit?
No.
By the time you get any results of that, the politicians moved on.
Everyone's moved on.
The press doesn't actually drill about the efficacy of these things.
So that's where I am.
It genuinely is this middle road that I think most Americans just have common sense about.
It's like, look, should the government be doing some things?
Yes, in my opinion.
I mean, I'm not like a, you know, like someone who thinks the government should be doing nothing, but it should be doing what it's doing at a much higher level, more effectively, more accountably, and more efficiently.
Do you think I look up the top?
If you want to pull out the greatest third-party candidates of all time, okay, for most, do you know who's the greatest third-party candidate of all time?
Probably Ross Perot.
Ross Pro.
You know, Tom, who would you put as the greatest Republican candidate?
I'm sorry, the third-party candidate of all time.
In terms of effectiveness and polling and acceptance, I think in my lifetime, it's been Ross Pro.
You know who it is?
If you think about it, it's Abraham Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln.
Amen.
Abraham Lincoln.
I said the exact same thing, though.
I just discovered it relatively.
Because he's the first Republican.
There was no Republican.
Abraham Lincoln is the greatest third party candidate.
There was like Democrats and Whigs, right?
Yeah, the Republican Party was the brand new startup party when Lincoln wins in 1860 with 39.8% of the vote.
You know, there were four candidates, right?
And now you don't think about it because you're like, oh, Republicans is one of the two major parties, but they were brand new in 1860.
And here's another wrinkle.
When he runs for a reelection in 1864, his vice presidential candidate is from the other party.
He ran a unity ticket where he's the Republican.
Why has nobody done that since then?
I feel like there's a yearning for something like that.
I feel like if a Republican and a Democrat worked together and showed that they can get along, the country would be like, dude, that's amazing.
I love it.
Well, who did that, Tom?
Who is it that Lieberman?
Who is it that did that?
John McCain tiptoed around having Joe Lieberman, the Democrat, join him, and then he ended up choosing Sarah Palin.
And I talked to someone about that decision who actually got a call from John McCain at the time being like, hey, what do you think if I choose Joe Lieberman?
And the political calculation was not there for him.
It's like he thought that Sarah Palin was going to help more politically, but it was a real missed opportunity.
When you were running for office and you were kind of going through it and, you know, you got everybody on the Kamala Harris, you got Elizabeth Warren, you got Bernie, you got all these guys.
After everybody's off stage, did they kind of like brush you off?
Like, listen, you're not part of this industry, so who are you here?
You're not going to make it anyways.
Or did any of the candidates try to befriend you, have side conversations with you, have calls with you, have meetings with you, have dinner with you because potentially you could be a star?
How were you treated?
It evolved over time.
We had some jokes on the trail where it's all fun and games until Andrew Yang passes you in the polls.
So the candidates who were really, really like tier one were just about always good to me because they're like, hey, you know, I don't feel threatened by Yang.
This is in 16, Hillary.
This is 20.
This is like 2019.
There were some candidates who were kind of dicks to me, honestly, but they tended to be the second-tier candidates who were kind of insecure about their, you know, like their own campaign trajectory.
Are these any dicks you can reveal?
I don't want to be a jerk myself, you know.
So I remember one.
Who would be second tier?
I remember Beto, like, I remember something very specifically.
Sorry, I got my years away, but it was 2020.
I remember you were polling it 3% more than Beto, but he somehow made it onto something on CNN.
Do you remember this?
You know what I'm talking about.
Yeah, there's a period when the press was definitely like, hey, let's try and like fudge, you know, this Yang campaign's numbers where they'd have like a graphic up and then I'd raise more than people that were on the graphic.
And it's like, hey, guys, that doesn't seem right.
So Beto and I were always cool.
Maybe because he and I are both Gen X, since there are probably some other Xers here.
So I always get along with Beto, always got along with Corey Booker.
Most of the candidates down the stretch, Patrick, became genuinely friendly because I was on seven debate stages.
So you got like seven.
You can't be a jerk to someone over and over again.
You know what I mean?
Someone must have pissed you off for you to start your own third party, Andrew.
Like someone must have, someone must have said something or done something.
You said, you know what?
I just can't do this anymore.
The problem isn't anything in terms of personal interaction.
The problem is that everyone is stuck.
And then even if you're a successful politician within, let's say, the Democratic Party, you're stuck.
Your behavior is constrained.
Your policy positions are constrained.
And you have a ton of masters to serve and a media complex that's going to be pushing you in a particular direction.
I'm a problem solver.
I don't know if you all sense this.
I don't really care about my own political advancement.
But anyone who's in that system all of a sudden does care.
And you know that the big thing that people underestimate is that they get surrounded by dozens of professional political operatives who also have their careers on the line.
It's like, hey, we need you to do this and that because, you know, we need to get better jobs ourselves or we need to be able to go on to the next gig.
And that's one thing I appreciate about the folks who worked on my campaign is most of them were not careerists in that way.
Until we raised, we ended up raising $40 million.
So after we passed $20, $25 million, the freaking consultants came out of the woodwork all of a sudden away.
They were like, hey, I'm here.
And we can make some money here now.
Yeah, yeah, we're here to help.
And this is the thing that also, you know, as a business guy, at first I was like, frankly, like, you know, we don't need these consultants.
Like, where were they, you know, like six months ago?
But then when you're in a position where you have to spend $8 million on TV ads in Iowa, you do hire the consultants because you're like, well, hey, I'm not going to start from scratch.
Yeah, at that point, then it's like, well, how do I do this professionally?
But that's the smart move to do.
I think you do need to bring some people up.
It's like a company when the company is doing a million, two million, three million, maybe it can manage.
And when it starts doing 20, 30, 40 million, you kind of need to start bringing some of the C-suite executives who know how to put systems, infrastructure, protocols, all that stuff.
So that does kind of makes sense.
Yeah.
But the point is that the system's going to keep producing certain kinds of candidates and certain kinds of results.
And to me, that's not going to solve the problem.
Andrew, going back to it.
So forward party, how much momentum have you had ever since you announced it?
It's been tremendous because more and more people are waking up to the reality that the current two-party system is not working and it's not going to deliver what you want.
No matter what you want, it's not going to deliver.
Unless what you want is people that go crazy and get more and more upset at each other.
That's what you want.
It's going to deliver that.
Because it's delivering that in a hell of a way.
Yeah, it's going to deliver that.
So more and more people go to forwardparty.com every day.
They sign up, they volunteer, they donate.
And we have some really exciting announcements coming up.
So it's a good feeling because Patrick, you've been a part of these growth stories.
You know, when you have product market fit and you feel like, okay, like we're going to grow from here, that's been the feeling.
Is the ultimate goal to eventually be a president?
Is that kind of what you're solving for?
Where there is, because you said something very, very important at the beginning.
You said, I treat this like a startup and it's a 10-year plan, right?
Okay, that changes perspectives, which means if you're going for 10 years, the world kind of just watched you play.
And that was kind of like, you know, whatever you want to call it, all-star game.
People are like, okay, this guy can actually play.
Good for him.
He's got the talent to be on the state seven debates.
Nobody's going to be on seven debates.
And you were blobbying on being seven debates.
And they kind of didn't want you to be on there.
So you weren't afraid to go up against them and you were talking shit, which was great.
And then you were also proposing, hey, this short format debate, two-minute answers is not necessary.
We need something a little bit more long form so I can really explain what I'm doing and all this stuff, which people started listening to.
Maybe this guy's got a point.
Maybe this guy's got a point.
But are you now saying, okay, I went for this?
People noticed, you know what?
This guy can hang.
Maybe next I go for, you know, mayor, senator, governor, Congress, and then eventually in 10 years, I'm going to go be a president.
What is that vision or the next five moves with you?
Yeah, my vision is to try and get this country through a really difficult time.
Because if you fast forward, not even that long, I mean, we all saw what happened on January 6th last year.
Unfortunately, I don't think that's a one-time event.
I think that you're going to see us slipping towards more consistent unrest and political strife and violence.
And so when you ask what my plan is, my plan is to do everything I can to keep us functional and shore it up.
To your enthusiasm about a unity ticket, I would be super pumped about a unity ticket.
Now, I'm going to convey to you all, like, are people actually talking about a unity ticket behind the scenes?
Yes, they are.
You know, like, am I going to do everything I can to help usher that into being?
Yes, I will.
So I'm about trying to solve problems.
Even now, I will say, like, I don't really care that much if I die X years from now, never having been president of the United States.
I mean, that was true even when I was running for President of the United States.
You know, I didn't go home and be like bemoan to my wife, it's not your dream.
I don't even care.
You know, I'm like the child of immigrants who's trying to do right by my country, and it's just not doing very well.
You know what that kind of reminded me of?
It's like when they asked Chris Paul or Westbrook, so let me ask you a question: if you retire play an NBA and you never win the championship, you okay with that?
Yeah, because I go to a beautiful family, I make $18 million, you're XYZ.
It's okay if I make it or not.
And then fans get so furious.
How could you say that?
I want somebody to want to win the championship, Andrew.
You got to tell me if I ever win, I would be, you know, that whole scene with Trump and Oprah, where Oprah says, do you have any plans of ever running for office?
You've seen this before a million times.
And not a million times, but it's all over the place.
And he says, I don't know, Oprah, but if I ever did, I would win because I'm a winner, right?
The idea is people want to get behind somebody that's saying, hey, if you vote for me, I'll be able to do XYZ.
So for you, if we go 10 years from now, let's fast forward, ideal place where you think you can contribute the most.
Is it more in the free market?
I'm going to go be a media personality, do that like you did at CNN?
Is it going to be more behind the scenes, leading a third party and helping somebody become president?
Or no front runner, I'm going to be the talent and the voice and getting in there, getting dirty to help make some real changes in this country.
And to do that, you kind of need to fight to get at the highest level of office if you're going to make some real change.
Where would that be?
What's the most likelihood of seeing Andrew in which of these situations?
I don't think our current structures are going to solve our problems in the time that we have.
And so I'm laser focused on trying to make it so that they could.
One of my great fears, so there's a period, you know, running for president, you know, thousands of people coming out to see me and support me.
And like, you feel like, wow, people are really investing their hopes for the future in me.
And one of my concerns was, to your point, Patrick, that you get in there and you can't actually deliver for them.
Why?
Because the system is not set up to allow you to actually solve their problems, either because the politics aren't there, the party mechanics, or our government itself.
And so that's what we have to try and resolve quickly because the problems aren't going away.
And in my opinion, the problems are actually speeding up somewhat.
So of those things you named, I think it's going to be around this third party movement, democracy reform.
Right now, as we're having this conversation, 62% of Americans want to move on from the duopoly.
And if you go back to the business metaphor, if you showed up at a marketplace and there were two providers and 62% of people wanted a choice, you would start a third provider immediately, maybe a fourth one, a fifth one, too.
Now, in this marketplace, the two companies have said, no, no, no, like you can't have a third choice.
You know, we're going to keep you from being on the ballot.
We're going to ignore you in the media.
We're going to like have, you know, we're going to sue you, like whatever the heck it is.
But the truth of it is that 62% of people want a choice.
And I'm saying like, well, well, let's get you that choice then, because if you get that choice, it's going to be good for the country.
So is it a problem with the current duopoly, the two-party system, or the current iteration of the two-party system?
Because we have other parties, the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, et cetera, et cetera.
But you're watching a sort of reformation within the parties themselves post-Trump.
Is it the two-party system or the current iteration of it?
The current iteration of it is the worst version of it.
And unfortunately, it's going to get worse.
So if you were to rewind 50 years or so, the two parties were actually somewhat indistinguishable.
It wasn't as dramatic.
There wasn't this left-right thing.
It's like Democrat and Republican were kind of different flavors of vanilla.
It would be like French vanilla versus just plain vanilla.
That changed over the last number of years where you ended up with it getting combined with different factors, whether it's urban, rural, whether it's racial, whether it's economic.
And so this version of the two-party system is possibly the worst.
But I say that believing that it's going to get worse still.
I don't know.
So you have, you know, this version is our founding father's nightmare come to life.
Regarding the Forward Party, I mean, quite candidly, everyone, you were very likable.
People started to see what you were doing.
And lo and behold, boom, boom, Yang Gang, you know, Yang Gang.
Everyone loved it.
It was fun to say, you're a fun guy.
People like to say that.
And it kind of built up who you are.
Now, with this forward party, who is part of the Yang Gang?
Who is the cornerstone of the Forward Party?
Like in the electorate?
Who's out there that's like, yo, Yang Gang, Forward Party?
This is us.
Yeah, so the Forward Party early adopters have been people who are fed up with the two-party system.
And those people tend to overlap very heavily with business owners, entrepreneurs, operators, tech people.
I was just at the Bitcoin conference.
Those guys.
So folks who are into Bitcoin libertarians are definitely in there too.
And so I joke that it's like a tribe of the people that are concerned about excessive tribalism.
You know what I mean?
And that tribe of people tends to be these like rational, pragmatic business types.
Pat, this is you, though.
Everything he's describing, business owners, operators, free thinkers, you know, libertarian almost.
What's your hesitancy to maybe being like, yo, yang gang it up, forward party?
Like, what's the flaws in what's going on?
We haven't even gotten into that yet.
I mean, that's a whole different conversation to have.
No, for me, here's where I would go with this.
All I think of, everything with me is sequencing.
You know, you've been around me long enough to know what sequencing is.
So if his goal is to make Forward Party a real household name, okay, hey, I left the Democratic Party to start the Forward Party.
Here's who I am.
And I left CNN October 2021 and I'm doing Forward Party.
Okay.
You have to have a man who was on Bill Maher five days ago.
So you have to have the platform to get the eyeballs for the right people to keep seeing it, right?
That's why.
And he's got it.
He's being picked up.
But I wonder if this is president, this is where he's at today.
Is there four steps before getting here?
And is the mistake if he goes automatically to here?
So we may, you know, like somebody may say, no, he can't do that.
Well, why can't he do that?
Well, Trump did it.
Yeah, but Trump already had a massive audience, you know, apprentice, business, success.
Well, he's an entrepreneur, not at Trump's level.
Well, he was on TV, not necessarily before he ran for office because he didn't have an apprentice.
So that's the part where what needs to happen in between?
Because if you don't, you know, India's got 45 political parties.
How many of them do we know?
45, 50 political parties.
So you and I can go start a political party tomorrow.
But to really make a third party like him that he's talking about really excel, George Jorgensen's going to be here tomorrow.
Why is she here tomorrow?
Because Joe Jordan was like, hey, this libertarian concept makes a lot of sense.
How come it hasn't taken off?
And that libertarian, 90% of crypto is all libertarian.
That's who they are.
They see themselves as libertarian.
How come there's not been a candidate that's blown up on the libertarian side?
You got John McAfee.
Okay, who else do we have?
Jaris, Joe Jorgensen, all this stuff.
But how come no one's taken off there?
I think there is some steps in between.
To your point, Patrick, if you look at the Democratic and Republican Party, they have this giant media infrastructure behind them.
So if you wanted a third-party movement, you would probably need a parallel infrastructure.
They have a donor network.
You would need one of those.
They have various influencers parroting talking points, which you don't necessarily want people parroting.
So there's like this massive infrastructure that needs to get built.
And in my view, and I actually have this experience every single day because of what I'm doing, there are more and more Americans who are like, okay, I get it.
Like, we need to build this parallel party infrastructure.
You know, let me roll up my sleeves and get to it.
And some of those people are folks who were Republicans or Democrats who are just like, this is not going to work as it is.
As you were out campaigning, you go out and you run for president and like any startup, here's our business plan.
And you're not certain about it because this, this, and this are the best knowledge and the best estimates and the best guesses you can make about going into it.
What surprised you about opinions, perspectives, or realities about the voters once you got all the way out into the primaries and now you're really seeing people, you know, 500 people in a gymnasium in Iowa, you get a lot of first-hand feedback.
What surprised you when you went out versus what the business plan was?
What's funny is how accurate the business plan was, generally speaking.
So what I would say to folks when they were saying, hey, you're running for president, can you do that?
Blah, blah, blah.
I'd be like, look, one critical success factor in this whole thing is just, can you get 40,000 Iowans on board?
Because that would have you win the caucus.
And then they hear that and be like, 40,000?
That doesn't sound like that many.
But it turns out only 6.4% of Iowans participate in the Democratic caucus.
So you like slice that electorate pretty quick.
So 40,000, I think, Bernie ended up winning with 41,000.
So the business plan was accurate in terms of the general goal and the parameters.
What surprised me about those folks when I got out there in real life was stuff that I actually could have figured out beforehand, so I should not have been surprised by it.
But they were older.
Average age of a caucus goer might have been 50 to 55.
They were very, very heavy cable news watchers for the most part.
There was a bit of an institutional vibe to the voters that I still felt myself to be somewhat surprised by.
And because of that, ordinarily, the kind of change that I was proposing would take longer than one cycle because of the nature of those primary voters.
If you look at the young voters in Iowa, I won the Iowa youth poll.
I'm the first candidate to have ever won that poll and not win the actual thing.
First candidate ever to win the youth poll, but not win the actual.
Yeah.
So if they'd cut off voting at approximately 19, I probably would have won that thing.
But so to your point about the surprise, it was that there is something of a delay because you're talking primarily to 50 and 60 year old voters.
Andrew, let me ask you, did you, I don't know if this is public information or not.
Did you vote for Joe Biden?
Is that who you voted for?
Yeah, I voted for him.
Okay, so how do you think he's doing?
I think that it is not a great time in America right now.
And I hear from folks who are close to Joe, and there's a sense that his energies are not what they could be, that his team sometimes doesn't trust him to freelance.
And so when he goes into a meeting, there are not traditional negotiations in the way that you would want them to be.
So if you look at it from the outside, you're like, hey, I'm not sure if he has the energy and the wherewithal.
And I think those concerns are very real.
Okay.
So there's a candidate that you remind me of.
Okay.
And let me kind of throw this out there and you can trash my idea as much as you want, so you have no clue what the hell you're talking about, Patrick.
Okay.
You remind me of Herman McCain.
Okay.
Let me ask you.
Herman McCain.
My bad.
Herman Kane, not Herman McKinnon.
He said Harold earlier.
So Herman Kane.
The whole family.
Here's why you remind me of Herman Cain.
Okay.
And if you're not familiar with Herman Cain, I don't think they look anything alike.
No, no, not on looks at all.
Not visually like us.
Not looks at all.
And by the way, he passed away during COVID, I think, 2020.
I totally get it.
But Herman Cane.
999.
So he came up with this campaign and he said 999.
We heard it a billion times.
Every 999.
If God only wants me to tie 10%, why should the government want more than God?
That's why it's 9% federal, 9% state, and 9%, you know, sales tax, whatever the 999 was.
And you sat there, you're like, that kind of makes sense.
Cool.
Let's go with it.
Okay.
I like Herman Cain.
999.
This is fantastic.
And the next thing, you know, boom, he goes like this.
And then it was boom like this.
Republican, by the way.
Republican, totally.
He was a former CEO, businessman, you know, a godfather's pizza.
Godfather's pizzas.
What is that?
So then when you do the math, you're like, yeah, I don't know if this 999 thing is going to work out or not.
So you came out and you said UBI, okay?
$1,000 a month, you know, because I agree with Elon Musk.
And here's the direction we're going and pa, ba, ba, ba, ba.
And we need to do a thousand dollar UBI.
Okay.
So some people are like, I kind of like that idea.
It's kind of like Milton Friedman when he said reverse UBI and then the way, hey, but you got to contribute to do this.
And you look at the way he explained it, slightly different.
Yours.
Yours, you don't necessarily have to earn $1,000.
His, you have to earn to give back to get some kind of money from the government.
Okay, fine.
I see where the idea is coming from.
And then the last two years, we actually got UBI and we realized it doesn't work.
And here's why.
So 40% of America's money has been printed the last two years.
Whatever the numbers, you've seen it.
I've seen it.
We've seen it all over the place.
Okay.
So where did the money flow?
We send this $1,200.
Oh, my God.
It's going to change people's lives.
Well, we realize this low and middle-income families.
The reason why they're there sometimes is because they don't have the right financial habits.
They don't know how to save.
They spend.
They're putting back into the market.
They're buying products and it goes back to the business owners.
Oh, my God.
Amazon.
He got richer.
Oh, my God.
Elon Musk, he got so rich.
How did he become $300 billion?
Oh, my God.
All these billionaires and all these.
Well, yeah, because UBI money always flows back to the rich.
So you can trash whatever I said and said, Patrick, you're wrong because of XYZ.
We're now here.
This is April of 2022.
We bought into UBI a few years ago saying, maybe this man's got a good idea.
Let's pay attention to, just like we did with Herman Cain.
Now that we're here and we know we tested UBI the last two years at the federal level, not just Nebraska, not just Nebraska, Alaska, or some of the smaller markets that we're testing.
Where is your opinion now with UBI?
So I want to unpack what we've done over the last couple of years.
The vast majority of the money that went out to folks was in enhanced unemployment benefits.
And those benefits were tied to not working.
I have always thought that's a terrible way to go.
You don't want ever to tie funds to someone not working.
If anything, you'd want to somehow tie incentives to work into it instead of having a very powerful disincentive.
So that's number one.
Number two, over 80% of the $1.7 trillion CARES Act or this other stuff was nowhere near these little checks that people got.
83% of that money went to banks, airlines, cruise companies, you name it, the financial system itself.
They just plowed hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial system.
They did not send that stuff out as checks to people.
So if you start picking out the way that the money actually got into people's hands, one thing that I am very much for was this enhanced child tax credit.
Like that stuff brought kids out of poverty.
It actually apparently helped keep a million people working because when they took it away, then they couldn't afford childcare, so they don't go to work anymore.
So they stay home with a kid.
Like is that a win?
So The things that are being put out there right now are still, in my view, like not designed in a way that you would expect to yield positive results.
And then some of the results, you know, I would be the first to say, I'd look at it and be like, look, this should have been done differently, designed better, and positioned so that more people were able to pursue opportunities, not provide incentives for them not to do so.
If you ran this midterm and you're running, let's just say you're running for some, let's just say you're running 2024, 2023, right?
Would you still run on $1,000 a month UBI or would your campaign be different?
Well, right now, my focus is trying to set up the third party movement for success.
If it were Andrew Yang, presidential candidate, like, do I still believe in UBI?
Yes, I do.
I believe in some version of it.
I do think that we need to reformat the way the government administers a lot of this stuff.
I think the current disability programs and welfare programs are not well designed and they are attaching various negative incentives.
And I found that out when I was out campaigning, where a woman, like two women, like 20 women, but like, you know, 20 men would say to me, hey, I am scared to volunteer at my local church because I'm afraid someone's going to see me as able-bodied.
I'm going to lose my benefits.
Hey, I want to work part-time, but like if I work part-time, they're going to take this child payment away from me.
I heard those stories all the time.
And in my mind, we should be putting people in position to succeed and not be afraid to volunteer or work part-time.
What happened with because what you're talking about is federal stimulus, right?
And then some of the unemployment was federal and also state.
But I think you actually did a UBI test case in the Bronx.
You had a million bucks.
You gave them to 500 low-income families.
There's a thousand families, a thousand families.
Okay, a thousand families.
So what happened with that?
Well, so that was the beginning of the pandemic.
And that was just an emergency measure where it's like, look, you know, we have to just try and keep people from, you know, like starving.
Or in that case, there was a period when, you know, people weren't sure whether the government was going to do anything.
So I was like, oh, yeah, I got a million bucks.
Like, let's just send it out to some families in the Bronx.
We did get some very, very positive results from that.
We actually ended up telling, I'll tell you guys a story because it's kind of funny.
So it's actually harder to give away a million bucks than you think.
Andrew, I'm willing to try it out.
If you want to give it over here, I mean, UBI me up.
All right.
So check it out.
First thing I do is I call senior people at Citibank and JP Morgan Chase being like, hey, can you identify like a thousand struggling families in the Bronx?
And then they take a couple of days and they get back to me and said, no, we can't.
And you're like, you do realize I'm just trying to give your customers money.
And they're like, no, no, privacy regulatory, et cetera.
And I was talking to senior people.
It wasn't like I was talking to the bag teller.
You're in a vault.
Mary, how are you?
I have a million bucks here.
So then my second thing is like, hey, can you just send me a thousand bank debit cards from your bank for a thousand bucks each?
Like you'd think they might be able to do that.
And I was like, I'll find a way to get those into people's hands.
And they couldn't do that either.
But being an entrepreneur, in parallel, the whole time I was talking to various community orgs and I found one, Neighborhood Trust, that helps provide financial literacy and services to working poor.
And I said, can you find me a thousand families?
And they said, not only can we find you a thousand families, but we have their bank account information and we can sit down with each and every one of them and give them a financial literacy coaching session.
And then we said, done.
And we went that direction.
So that's the way we ended up distributing the money.
And a lot of positive results.
By the way, just, if you don't mind, real quick, what is the basic founding?
Like, if I'm part of the Forward Party, what do I believe in?
So the Forward Party has six tenets.
The tenets, I think everyone's going to be like, oh, that's totally reasonable.
It's open primaries, ranked choice voting, human-centered economy, which is like, hey, like we should matter in addition to how the giant companies are doing.
Fact-based governance, so it's you should agree on some facts.
That's like that.
You'd think that would be obvious, but it's not.
The fifth is UBI, and then the sixth is grace and tolerance, which is, look, you can disagree with me.
We're all Americans.
We're all human beings.
Like, we shouldn't be demonizing each other, canceling each other, treating someone like they are worth less than us if they have a different point of view.
You're not a censorship guy.
You don't believe in censorship.
No, I mean, you know, it's like Trump should be on Twitter, so Babylon B should be on Twitter.
So those guys should be on Twitter.
You know, so the Twitter thing, it's rough because Twitter is a private company.
You know, it's like if you're a private company and then we put you in a position where it's like, hey, you're now like the public commons, but here are these rules.
So I'm a free speech guy.
Like I think that people should not be afraid, frankly, to hear points of view that are different from them and this fact that we've kind of degenerated to a point where we liken these words to like physical attacks and whatnot.
I don't think that's productive.
But it's a tough one with these tech companies because we're treating them like they're public commons and they're, you know, they're just like a private firm that's traded on the stock.
I don't disagree with you.
When Prager and his wife Sue were going through Prager University, they said companies are not held at the same standards as the government is for freedom of speech.
But say you were sitting on a board seat of Twitter and you're one of 11 voices, okay, and they're talking about we want to take Trump down because he's offending a lot of people and people are getting upset.
Would you vote for him taken down or staying on?
It wouldn't be based on him offending a lot of people.
If it was something where he was inciting violence and there was something, you know, like there was actually like a direct threat of harm, then, you know, you would take him off.
If it was like, hey, you're saying things that people don't like, then you'd leave it alone.
Andrew, then why is Khamenei still on Twitter?
You know, I mean, that's why is Khamenei still on Twitter?
Why are some.
I'm from Iran and I see some of the stuff.
I'm like, I totally get it if you're like, you know, if you're my father and you're consistent with me and my sister and my brother, I'm cool.
Totally get it.
My dad's consistent.
But if you're not, then you're full of shit.
So now your consistency is not there.
So you're okay with Putin being on, but you guys are calling Putin's the worst thing and liaison, but Trump is off and Trump was a U.S. president.
Do you not like, let me put it to you this way.
From another country, I wasn't born here.
You were born here.
If I see it from another country, you're more worried about your own president, but you're not worried about my ruler, Russia or China or Iran.
You're going to get your ass handed to you because of how soft you guys are.
You're your own enemy.
You seem so weak.
If I look at it from another country's standpoint, I would just sit there and say America's coming down, going down because they can't even get on the same page together.
Well, I mean, to your point, there are a ton of foreign governments who are enjoying access to our social media companies and the rest of it.
And I would agree with you that I'm sure our standards are all over the place when it comes to different actors from different places.
Yeah, I mean, it's an unenviable position for some of the tech companies.
When I talk to them, and I'm friendly with some of them, I'm friendly with Elon, too, who's now the biggest shareholder of Twitter.
Some of them have said, look, having us be the arbiter of what is fair game and what isn't isn't a position even we want to be in.
Like, you know, we're running a business.
We want to just make money and not, you know, like not be on, you know, the decision makers and all this stuff.
So some of them were like, maybe we start like a council.
It's not our board where you have media, nonprofits, journalism, government, others.
And then, you know, like it's like a more collective decision.
The tough part there is that a lot of these decisions are being made instantaneously.
They're being made by AI because you're talking about whatever, billions of messages.
Pat, you know what would be good for you to ask Andrew, if you want to.
What's that?
The question that you ask of the five things.
He would be a great person.
Well, let's see what he's going to say.
So who do you think has the most power in America today?
Okay.
Five organizations and individuals.
Who's got the most power?
The richest people in America?
Billionaire class.
President of the United States, virtual governments, which is like Twitter, YouTube, Google, Facebook, those guys, or educational system or mainstream media.
I'll say it one more time.
Richest billionaires in America, president, mainstream media, virtual governments, or our educational system from first to last.
Who's got most power?
Who's got least?
Well, this is fun.
Or from least to first.
Whatever direction you want to go.
I'd say number one is big tech.
I mean, they're nation states unto themselves.
They're number one.
They're on the same power.
I agree with you.
I think Facebook has 2 billion folks.
I mean, that's very, very significant.
Number two, the one that popped into my mind was the billionaire class.
It was like the Jeff Bezos' of the world.
It overlaps with big tech.
Elon Musk just bought 90% on Twitter.
Yeah, so Elon, like, but, you know, I would flip-flop between like the billionaire class and the president because the president does have some very, very vast powers.
You know, obviously they can make world history changing decisions where foreign policy is concerned and military intervention.
But even domestically, you know, like there's a massive impact.
So, you know, I could be talked into either one of those as two.
You could think of them as, in a way, it depends upon the president.
As of the president, it depends on the billionaires.
And then mainstream media four and educational system five.
Wow, you put educational system last.
Yeah, yeah, I did.
Why is that?
You know, I mean, it's a tough thing to say, but, you know, like the educational system, I wish it were higher.
I mean, I'm a parent.
We all got two kids, you know, nine and six.
But you look at it, and it strikes me as really remember, the question is influence.
Influence.
Who's got the most influence?
You think the educational system has the least influence out of the five?
More than less than mainstream media?
Yeah, I do.
Really?
Unpack that.
Why?
So kids go to school, and my kids are a little young, so I could change my perspective when they get a little older.
My kids are nine and six.
You know, they get certain messages and inputs.
They get some messages and inputs from me and my wife.
But I see the impact that mainstream media has every day on our politics, our public discourse.
And when it turns on a particular person or organization, like it really does end up moving in concert and in tandem.
And it could be, too, that I just went through a couple of media ringers myself when I was running for president and like the mainstream media had like a certain treatment.
And so it could just be that I was closer to it.
But with your, you put education last, which Pat is a little shocked by, but I've seen you, I've listened to you.
I think it might have been on Rogan talking about student debt and the education of the college system and basically the burden that it is.
And you did your math and how much theology is.
I think we're up to like, you know, 1.9 trillion in school debt.
The cost of college has gone up 250% since I went.
And my joke was it's not like it got 250% better in that time.
It probably got significantly worse.
So you do have this onerous system.
You know, 65% of Americans don't go to college.
And you could say that, you know, that that's because they couldn't afford it.
But there are a lot of people that, you know, college just isn't the right fit.
So I think that that maybe is another reason why I answered the way I did is because there's this vast, vast universe of people that like, you know, like after they graduate from high school, they're like, all right, good to go.
And then they head out into the world.
Yeah, I think a president is, I may be wrong, but I think president's the least because you only got eight years.
I think education is one of the highest, not necessarily the highest, because you got 20, 30, 40 years of indoctrinating the next generation of people that are coming up.
Mainstream media is not as powerful as they used to be.
They're going to be lower because virtual governments have taken over.
Billionaires, hey, you piss off Elon.
He can go buy something.
You piss off Jeff Bezos.
He can go buy WAPO and then write an article talking about the fact that if Elon Musk buy Twitter, you're going to lose freedom of speech.
And they talk shit to each other, right?
Which is hilarious to say Elon Musk is going to take freedom of speech away from you, Andrew.
Be very careful.
An innovator could do that to you.
But yeah, that's why I think educational services.
Are you saying that someone like individual like an Elon Musk or a wrong is more powerful than a Trump or a wrong Elon Musk with the wrong intentions is very dangerous to the world if you think about it.
The wrong guy with that kind of money, that's a very dangerous position to be.
It's meaning.
So let me, and this is how, like, it's not the guy that made his money because Elon made his money, working his ass off.
But if Elon's, one of his kids, when he dies, gets $1.9 trillion and he's never worked for anything, that's a scary thought right there on what that kid's capable of doing.
Do you have a family yourself?
You have kids who are going to be a kid?
Four kids, 10, 8, 5, and 9 months.
Wow.
Yeah, you got 9 and 6.
I got a full household.
Yeah, you're an overachiever, man.
I would have 20 if I could.
I'd have 20 kids if I could.
What do you think about Tulsi Gabbard?
What do you think about Tulsi?
You know, Tulsi and I got along well on the trail.
So that's one of the underrated things about that set of experiences is that it's like people respond to us.
And you've probably met a lot of us.
So, you know, to us, to you, we're human beings.
But, you know, to each other, it's like I've hung out with Tulsi and her husband Abraham a dozen times in the stakes of New Hampshire, just like, you know, waiting to go on in the Union Hall or whatnot.
So, you know, she and I became quite friendly.
Why do you think the left doesn't support her?
I mean, you got a woman who is marketable.
You got a Democrat.
You got a military.
She's young, great speaker, very good communicator.
Why do you think the establishment doesn't elevate somebody like her?
Why do you think they don't like somebody like her?
It was very obvious.
Oh, I mean, she had like an open feud going.
Going back and forth.
She calls her a Russian asset.
Nobody calls Tulsi that.
Yeah.
So I'll just tell a story that might be fun and bring everyone back.
But I was actually standing between Tulsi Gabbard and Kamala Harris on the debate stage when they're going at it.
It was almost a comfortable thing.
I was like, you know, you'd actually probably rewrite that footage in CVB.
I'd like just like I had my head go back and forth.
In the moment, are you actually uncomfortable?
Oh, I was really uncomfortable.
I was like, oh, my gosh.
I can't believe I'm standing between these two people going after each other.
Why do you think?
By the way, I got to tell you, folks, I want to give Andrew Yanks a lot of credit here.
I've got to give you credit.
In my mind, I'm trying to calculate how many questions you actually directly answered.
I want to say it's less than 50%.
You become a pro.
Really?
You become a pro.
And I pride myself.
You become a pro.
Listen, there's coaching to running for office, and you got to figure out a way.
And you've given the politically correct diplomatic answer, nothing that's going to rub anybody the wrong way.
So you're playing it safe the way you're going, which maybe it's a political strategy you got.
I don't know.
Maybe you don't want to get that kind of publicity with all of a sudden.
Andrew Yank said the following on this podcast and he pisses 50,000 people up and you don't want to have that happen to you.
Your audience is bigger than that.
I'm kidding.
But I want to ask you, I want to ask you specifically, why do you think they don't support somebody like Tulsi?
Why not get behind somebody like Tulsi?
The way that the media builds up their take on candidates, you know, is born of a number of things.
I think for Tulsi, she came out as being against certain establishment positions relatively early.
And then when some reporters went and tried to spend time with her, you know, like some of the treatment was not good.
And so you ended up developing this really adversarial relationship, which as a candidate, it's tough because you feel like if I sit down with you and have a conversation with you and like we have an interview and then the article comes out and it's mean and negative, then you're like, oh, like I spent some time and I tried to open myself up some and then you were kind of harsh to me.
So let me stop doing that.
And then you stop doing that.
And then you know what happens?
Another harsh article comes out.
Because you're not willing to talk.
Because you're not willing to talk to the person.
So those things can build up pretty quick.
And Tulsi, I think, marches to her own beat, and everyone sensed that.
And so when she would be willing to take on certain establishment figures, I think that made it worse with the press.
And that's not a compliment to the press.
It's part of that, the fact that she had beef with the lady in charge, Hillary Clinton, and they were like, uh-uh, buddy, like, you're barking up the wrong tree.
Or her going after Kamala on the debate stage.
I think that was another thing.
Yeah.
Kamala or Tulsi.
Can you imagine like the two on how they deliver messages, Kamala versus Tulsi?
100 out of 100 times, Tulsi's going to do lapsaran Kamal.
You think so?
A thousand out of a thousand times.
Do you agree?
In a method of delivering message.
Now, he may disagree with it.
I don't know.
He was on stage with the both of them.
They're different types of figures.
They're different types of messengers that they are.
I've seen them both speak an awful lot of times.
Most of the time in a forum where no one else was paying any attention.
It was like, you know, weird.
Those are the best, though.
Yeah, you know, it was a fascinating process.
I recommend if this thing happens again, which it will in 24, it's like just spend a weekend in New Hampshire or Iowa if you're close to either of those things because you can see all the candidates up close.
In New Hampshire.
In New Hampshire, I'll tell you a random story.
It's a Hollywood story kind of.
Before we do that, I just want to say this, folks, if you do want to call them, we're going to take some calls the last 15 minutes.
So if you do have a call and send us a text at 310-340-1132, we may take a few callers.
Is that the number that we do or what's the number?
Post the number so they can see it.
Go ahead, Andrew.
You were saying.
I was saying, so Paul Giamatti, you know, the actor from Billions, like he just drove up to New Hampshire for a weekend and just went from event to event, just saw, you know, half a dozen presidential candidates, including me.
And so that's the kind of thing.
I was like, that's really smart because you could actually see people up close and personal if you just invest a couple of days.
So that's something you can do in either Iowa or New Hampshire.
I think Andrew Yang just gave us an idea.
2024 will be in New Hampshire.
Andrew, do you think having been in business yourself?
You know, there's different number ones, number twos, number threes, number fours, and number fives in companies, right?
And somebody may be a good number one of a $10 million auto company, but they're number eight of a $100 million auto company.
Somebody may be a number one of a $100 million auto company, but a number four of a billion auto company.
Somebody may be a number one of a billion auto company, but a number two of a $50 billion auto company.
Like there's levels to life, right?
Do you see yourself as a number one of the United States of America?
Can you see yourself being the number one decision-maker president of the United States of America?
Oh, yeah, I can see that for sure.
And I can see that even more so, frankly, having been around other people that maybe have actually had that responsibility.
And this is probably something common to a lot of entrepreneurs, but you trust yourself in your own judgment more than you trust other people.
You'd rather be responsible for your own destiny.
You know what I mean?
Now, I will also say that I've been in situations where I'm very, very happy to entrust the responsibility to someone else who's better situated.
If you're on Safari and there's like a freaking guide, you're like, hey, let me give this to you.
But, you know, I have a lot of confidence in my own ability to make decisions.
I want to hear a little bit more.
So you said, if you saw some people that I saw, I fully have more confidence in being number one.
What did you see that got you to be more confident about being a good number one?
Well, this is one of the reasons I ran for president, Pat.
And you've had this experience too, I think, because of the fact that you've met so many of us over this time.
So I started an organization called Venture of America to train entrepreneurs.
And during that time, I met three former presidents, 20 senators, governors, members of Congress.
And after you have that experience, you don't come away necessarily thinking, wow, these people are all amazing and are capable of doing things I could never do.
Like instead, you're like, you know what?
Like, I think I actually have the same level of overall ability or competence, or in some cases, frankly, a bit higher.
I addressed a group of entrepreneurs at like YPO, you know, like or EO.
President organizations.
Yeah, these like, you know, ass-kicking entrepreneur types.
And I said something to them that was honest, and some people can judge me for this, but whatever.
I was like, I would trust these 30 CEOs in this room more to run the country than the people who are currently actually doing so.
You know what I mean?
Because if you had like a bunch of number ones of significant organizations the way you're describing, Pat, I mean, they make these decisions every day.
They're really results driven.
They're good at building teams.
They can like develop cultures.
And then you are around the folks in DC.
And a lot of those people do not have that experience or set of qualities.
A lot of these political figures have never run anything.
And then you, you, and then we're judging them not based on whether they can operate, but whether they can operate politically, whether they can just show up.
You know, there's a chapter in my last book called Priests of the Decline, where it's like we've reduced political figures to folks who just make us feel a little bit better as we go home and the problems don't get solved.
Like that, that's what we've reduced folks to.
So, you know, I know what makes me tick.
Like, you know, if I got in there, I'd be like, look, I'm going to solve as many problems as I can.
And if you didn't like it, then you can vote me out and I'll find something else to do.
You know, like a lot of these politicians are addicted to the field, the job.
If they don't have that attention, they wither.
You know, that's not what makes me tick at all, which I believe would make me a better figure to actually make some of these things happen.
Yeah, do you think, and by the way, great answer, appreciate you for that.
But do you think, like, I thought you were going to say, like, if I hang out with some of the people, I got a lot of confidence that I can be a number one.
I thought maybe we were going to say Joe Biden gives you a lot of confidence because his videos on C-SPAN, I'm sure they're very inspirational for you.
But going back to going back to this whole topic here, being a great number one, you can smile.
It's okay if you want to smile.
That's okay.
Every once in a while, I tell funny jokes.
But do you think your ability to get dirty, because it's very dirty, you seem like a really nice guy, okay?
And your answers are, if this is like pushing the envelope where Trump's going to be bam, pushing the envelope.
You know, Clinton was not afraid to go bam, bam, bam, bam, or even Kamala.
Hey, you know, Vice President Joe Biden, I remember when you were this and what you did with the bus, and holy shit, boom, she goes here, right?
And I think when you did that with UBI, the idea was so crazy where the world's like, holy shit, that's pretty crazy.
You kind of poked a little bit.
But do you think maybe you've gone a little bit safe and a little bit too nice where you're afraid to poke the bear to make a lot of noise?
And maybe that's part of your strategy.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Again, I'm just a business guy.
I don't know what I'm talking about.
I'm just simply asking questions from you.
You know, Pat, I think different occasions call for a different type of energy.
I mean, I've led rallies of thousands of people, and then you go into rally mode.
You know, right now I'm in party building mode, which is like, look, you know, we can sense that this system's not working and our children deserve better.
Let's give them better.
Let's solve problems.
Let's give rise to a home for the people who feel politically homeless.
You know, so there are different ways I can make that case.
Maybe I'm trying to make that case in a way that people find like appealing and agreeable.
And like, you know, there are other people who might prefer a more, hey, you know, fiery, like, you know, the country is heading off a cliff and like we need to do something about it, which by the way, I totally believe.
I mean, I could present that case too.
But, you know, I think there are different occasions, different times.
But one thing that people who know me know is that, and this is something you suggested a little bit earlier.
I mean, I've run companies, man.
I mean, when it's winning time, you go for the win.
Like, I'm not here to mess around.
I'm here to save the country.
Fair enough.
Do you have some callers?
You also got to give him credit for one thing.
What's that?
He did kind of, you know, your one famous other than UBI, I remember your one famous line where you kind of took a jab at Trump.
You're like, I can do math.
Like, what was that line that you did?
Because you kind of did.
What I said was that the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian guy who likes math.
And then math is an acronym for Make America Think Harder, which is what I'm messing with.
You got the mud a little bit.
I want to double back to this UBI.
So the idea is you're going to give everybody over 18 $1,000 a month.
Is that accurate?
That was what I was running on, yes.
So that's 260 million people.
Okay.
And this was based on automation taking away the jobs.
Was the idea behind it?
Yeah.
Okay.
So Forrester predicts 1.4 million jobs are going to be lost by 2032.
Why not take that $1,000 a month and put it into a government fund to retrain people, to train them in hard skills, plumbers, carpenters, possibly into tech, into coding?
Why just give them the $1,000 a month?
Because it seems like a band-aid problem than actually fixing the root issue of things.
Oh, I'm all for investing in apprenticeship programs and vocational and technical education.
We're underinvesting that stuff enormously right now.
The tough thing, though, is that if you look at the success rates of government-funded retraining programs, the success rate's 10 to 15%.
And that's not a typo.
I mean, you're talking about like an 85% fail rate.
And this goes back to the entire politics thing.
It's like, what is a politician going to say?
We're going to train all Americans for the jobs of the future.
Then you actually go to that manufacturing town, you know what people are doing?
They're not coding.
They're drinking themselves to death and getting more and more upset.
So we should be doing what you just suggested.
But I do think that we need to try and give people a foundation.
And as a numbers guy, I mean, you look at the numbers and they're freaking terrible.
It's like relocation rates were lower than they'd been.
Business formation rates, deaths of despair up, life expectancy down.
I mean, there are a lot of people that like the talking points just are not working.
And we have to actually do something that might help.
Does that help you out?
Ish, but we'll get to college.
Okay, John, do we have any callers?
Yes, we have Phil on the line.
Phil, how are you, Phil?
Phil, can you hear us?
Yes, I can.
Thank you for taking my call.
Honored, honored to be here.
Philip Richard from the Cayman Islands here.
I have a question for Mr. Yang in regards to universal basic income.
I used to be a big supporter of universal basic income and would actually go on my local radio shows on Island and talk about UBI, but I just localized it for the local audience.
And people were a big fan of it.
And I was too until COVID happened.
And then I saw members of the community who lost their jobs because of COVID.
But then when their jobs came back, they were very comfortable with the government stipend and didn't want to go back to work.
And that's when I realized I don't think this program can work.
But an alternative I have is four-day work weeks.
I believe a four-day workweek could work out.
You know, it would give people that, you know, A, the wheels of capitalism will keep turning.
And B, people have more time to, you know, live their life, hang out with their friends and whatnot.
I'd like to hear Mr. Yang's opinion on a four-day work week.
And congratulations, Mr. Yang, on your freedom.
Oh, no, your forward party.
I think it's awesome.
Thank you, Phil.
Congrats to you on living in the Cayman Islands.
So I've run businesses.
I've worked in various settings.
And I think we all know what happens sometimes when you come in on Friday where you're not actually working that hard.
Not around here, Andrew Yang.
No, no, here it's hard working all the time.
I know.
And I'm a pretty hardworking guy, but work tends to expand or contract to fill the time you give it.
If you give yourself six hours to get something done, magically, it's going to get done in six hours.
If you give yourself 20 hours, it'll take you 20 hours.
So as a numbers guy, the stats around four-day work weeks are really positive.
Productivity sometimes goes up.
Well, it goes up.
I'm talking about like in total, like you actually get more done in four days than you do in five days in other instances.
Increases worker loyalty and satisfaction, improves mental health and like, you know, sick days.
So all the data indicates that we should be at a minimum experimenting with four-day work weeks in more environments and organizations and a maximum implementing it broadly.
So, you know, huge fan of the four-day workweek.
And thank you, Phil, for suggesting it.
Fantastic.
Thank you, Phil.
Anybody else that we have, John?
Yeah, we have Gil on the line.
Gil, how you doing?
Hey, how's it going?
Fantastic.
What's on your mind?
So I love Andrew Yang.
I actually live in New York City.
I live in the Bronx, and I voted for you in the primary.
Thank you.
And so I wanted to just share a question I had about student loans.
You touched on it briefly.
You talked about sort of like going forward, how to stop the bleeding.
But I wanted to talk about like the debt bomb that we have.
You know, we have about $1.6 trillion of student loan debt in America.
I just want to know how you would go about resolving it.
On one hand, you have many borrowers that just you have a lot of borrowers who literally cannot pay it back.
And then on the other hand, if you forgive it, you're kind of screwing over people who did pay it back or paid tuition the first time around.
So I just want to know how you would deal with that huge debt bomb that we have.
Well, thanks for the call and the support.
A lot of that money was taken out excessively or under, you know, if not false pretenses, at least kind of exaggerated pretenses on the part of these universities.
I had 100K in school loan debt myself for a while.
To call it my mistress because write a check and be like, I hope they're happy at the next town or wherever the money was going.
But there is a fairness issue.
I also think it would be a great economic stimulus because the money that you forgive, it's going to end up getting spent.
A lot of these borrowers are on the younger side.
You want them to be able to buy a home, to raise a family, all of this other good stuff.
So I'd be, if I were president right now, I'd be looking at much more aggressive forgiveness, forbearance.
If you are going to owe it, we can adjust the interest rate and make it so that it's something that you can actually pay.
And if there are other people that either didn't go to college or already paid off their debt, if there's some way that we can say, look, we're not going to do exactly for you, we're doing for these folks who are debt holders, like I'd like to do that for you too, because you don't want to be unfair for folks who made different decisions.
It's one reason why I liked something that was broad and universal.
But given the way the system's designed right now, if I were in Joe Biden's chair, I would be much more aggressive about trying to get people out from under these debt loads because it's a stimulus.
And like you said, a lot of these people are not going to be able to pay this money back.
It's a lot of numbers right there.
What do you think about how much college cost of college is increased?
So this is the thing that drives me nuts too.
It's like, and this is something I would lay at the feet of Democrats because for Democrats, colleges can do no wrong.
Hospitals can do no wrong.
And you look at it and be like, wait a minute, these hospital prices make zero sense.
It's like, you know, you can drive 60 miles and the surgery is like 300% more or less.
College just goes up and up.
And if you look at the returns on college, the returns on college relative to not going to college are okay.
You can still make the argument that the college pays, though there are a lot of other factors in there.
But the cost of college going up is a result primarily of them becoming really bloated bureaucracies.
They've just hired like a gajillion administrators.
If you ask people why is college so much more expensive, they'll say like the buildings.
No, it's not the buildings.
The buildings, actually, rich people are happy to donate money to get the name on it.
They're like your name on the gym.
You just wind up with like really, really complicated, tangled bureaucracies.
And then you pass that cost along to families.
And then the families who can't pay it, you know where they pass along to like the government because they just turn around and be like, hey, the vast majority, it says federal student loan debt is $1.6 trillion.
That's out of the government.
So there's no accountability.
You have to go to universities.
One of the things I was saying too is like, you look at Harvard and it's like 30 billion or something like that.
I actually argued it's like, look, instead of opening locations in Shanghai or Abu Dhabi, open one in Ohio.
New one in Michigan.
We got a freaking tax break to the tune of billions of dollars.
It's like, you know, like, you know, let's try and stimulate some growth and activity here.
Anyway, don't get me started.
You said the Democrats are not the ones who are.
No, so Democrats, what they do is, and this is one of the toxic things.
You get fiery at the end of the podcast.
You're driving me nuts.
You just made a powerful point, but I got three minutes left with you.
That was powerful, right?
Why don't you just finish?
No, he did.
But the point is, that's the messaging because even with this whole gas situation, right?
Oh, look at how much money Exxon made.
Well, look how much taxes you're charging in California.
Correct.
Why are we doing all these things?
So fine.
I do think Exxon needs to all say, guys, we're going to take this much and do XYZ for gas.
But hey, why don't we do something here?
Why don't we draw?
Why don't all of us kind of figure out a way to make this work?
If you run a startup and we're down to $10,000 on a bank account, you may come to me and say, Pat, you're taking a $300,000 salary.
I'm taking $300,000.
I can go a year without salary.
Can you?
Yes, let's do it.
We own the company together.
Fine.
I got pain.
You got pain.
But it's only the business people and taxpayers take pain.
It's only, it's not, let's all of us take a little bit of the pain and figure this thing out.
You made a very, you got me fired up right now.
What gets you the most fired up?
I think that's what Pat wants to know.
Is that what you want to know?
No, no, no.
No, I want to know because I've listened to him more than when he was on the campaign trail.
I listened to his debates.
I think he's very necessary.
An entrepreneur on the left that comes out of nowhere, we need more stories like this.
I agree.
But I also think to create some momentum, you're going to need to do a little bit more of calling out rather than playing safe because playing and safe, they're going to destroy you playing safe.
Trump came in, he didn't play safe.
He poked everybody there.
Then all of a sudden said, shit, this guy's got some stuff.
I think he needs to do a little bit more poking.
I may be wrong, but that's just my idea.
He just poked us something right here.
If I can add on to it very, very fast.
It says, you know, measure one.
John, do you have Anas on the call?
Please text me.
Go ahead.
You have the student-loan debt.
It said $136 billion is the private debt, which means that the public school debt's $147.
I mean, I'm $1.47.
$1.47 trillion, which means that there is 10 times the student-loaned debt if I went to the University of Nebraska than if I went to Harvard.
10 times.
And so when Bernie Sanders says, let's forgive all the student-loan debt, there's something to be said for the systems that have made it so unbearable and unpayable.
But it's also basically what he's saying is, let's forgive ourselves.
So that's the state systems that are running state universities that are completely bloated.
So to your point, and people like to poke at, oh, it's Harvard and it's Yale and it's all these things charter.
Well, no, that's not true.
The statistics show that there's 10 times student-loaned debt on state colleges than there is in private colleges.
Well, I believe that because if you look at the Harvards and Yales of the world, they're so rich that they actually can essentially take poor kids in and say, don't worry, we'll cover your costs.
I don't know if you want to.
For 100 years.
For 100 years.
Harvard can do that for 100 years.
100% of their students every year, they can take 100% of the students they have and not take a penny from them.
For 100 years, they can do that.
You know what they don't do?
They don't actually expand their student body.
Like, if you had those level of resources, which they do, then you'd want to do more good, expand.
But they don't do that because it would reduce their selectivity and their prestige and the rest of it.
So they just go around jitting up the endowment per student ratio instead of saying, look, let's get some more students in.
We got a lot of people that want to talk to you.
Let's do one last one and wrap up.
John, do you have anybody for us?
Yes, we have Anas.
Okay, Anas, what is on your mind, Anas?
Hello, Pat.
How are you doing today?
I hope you're doing well.
God bless you.
Happy Omaha.
Okay, so my first question, it has to do with freedom of speech, basically.
Hello?
Yes.
Yeah, we can hear you.
Go for it.
Yeah.
So when it comes to the economic and economic freedom and political freedom, when it comes to Israel, for example, the Republicans on the right, they censor pro-Palestine advocacy.
That's number one.
And when Palestinians, they do business or when Palestinian advocates do business, they're not allowed to do business with the government because they criticize Israel.
In my opinion, look, you have the right to criticize the Iranian government.
I don't mind.
That's your freedom of speech.
But when it comes to Israeli crimes or Saudi crimes, to be honest with you, I don't see you talking about it the same way how you talk about Iran or Turkey or Afghanistan.
And in my opinion, this is my personal opinion.
I respect you as an individual.
I respect your show, but I don't see the same criticism against the Israeli government.
So my question, to keep it short, how come the Israelis, they could censor Palestinians and censor the American people, criticizing Israel, but it's okay for other governments to be criticized.
Is this question for Andrew or for you?
Both of you.
Andrew Gang, Patrick, because Andrew Gang also had comments when he came to Israel.
He was very pro-Israel when Israel was killing my people and they were massacring us in Gaza not too long ago.
So I want him to answer that question also.
So and I'm going to talk about it.
We got the question, Andrew.
What are your thoughts?
Thank you, Pat, for having me on.
Anas, first of all, I appreciate the question and you're always active listening.
Whether we agree, disagree, the fact that you're always on here, we appreciate you being on here.
So, Andrew, what would you say?
I respect you because you allow freedom of speech from both sides.
That's why I'm always going to watch this.
Thank you.
I hope you succeed, and I hope a value teammate gets on the flash screens, hopefully.
Appreciate it.
God bless you, Patrick, and have a good day.
I hope you've come here.
You'll see me here one day.
You as well.
Go ahead, Ann.
It was a tragic situation last year.
And like just about, I mean, everyone just wants people to be able to peacefully coexist.
I mean, when I was running for president, my stance was that there should be a two-state solution, which I still hold.
And I think that that's something that a lot of people desire.
And I wish it was something that was more achievable in addition to us wanting to be that way.
Certainly, you know, I have many friends who are Israelis and Jewish.
And I have friends who are Palestinian.
And from, I think, a human perspective, we all just want people to be able to coexist peacefully.
Yeah, Anas, I would say the following, and to wrap up on one end, is the following.
You're right.
Hollywood is owned by who?
Jewish community.
That's what they own.
They own Hollywood.
But what has capitalism done?
Capitalism's kind of opened it up where other companies are allowed to bring other stories in.
Independently, what I would encourage you to do, Anas, is the following.
This is what I'm doing.
Let me tell you what I'm doing.
I had Oliver Stone here in this seat two weeks ago.
Was it two weeks ago or two or three weeks ago, right?
And I saw Oliver Stone go to Russia and interview Putin.
Multiple times.
Multiple times over a four-month period.
He goes and does a documentary on Ukraine.
He goes and does a documentary on JFK.
He goes and does a documentary on what he, his life mission was to bring attention to the things based on his experience of going to World War II, his father, all that other stuff.
You have such fire behind us, Anas.
My suggestion to you is team up with somebody, create a podcast, write about it, give your opinions out to bring guests in, go make a ton of money, make documentaries, make short clips, get your voice heard, and let the right audience decide.
That's the great thing about America.
Ain't nobody going to take your videos off if you went and talked about a Palestine against Israel.
Let people decide.
That's America for you.
And some are going to say, you have no clue what the hell you're talking about.
Some are going to say, I agree with you.
And then we can have the debate.
So that's my challenge to you.
Instead of doing a lot of the screaming, which you're doing, I want you to keep screaming, but I want you to make some money, use the money, produce the content, give your argument, team up with people that team up with you, and unless that argument be decided amongst the people.
Anyways, well, appreciate the cost from everybody.
Andrew, this was a blast having you on, man.
I really enjoyed it.
Appreciate you for coming out.
Appreciate the heck out of you.
And again, I am here because this man offered Obama and Trump $5 million.
They had to get an event.
I was like, that's the kind of American we need to get behind.
I love it.
I'm looking forward to that.
Are you willing to throw in on that?
Create some momentum.
Oh, yeah, I would throw in there for sure.
Something tells me you at least give $1,000.
A lot of people, a lot of people would like to see that.
Andrew, any last projects for people that can follow you?
What's the place to send them?
Would you like us to send them to a book or your site for Forward Party?
Yeah, so forwardparty.com, I wrote a book called Forward that's about this movement.
If you want to try and move on from our corrosive politics of yesteryear, like we can do it together, and we have to do it together because without us, it's not going to get any better.
There you go.
The link is below in the description as well as the chat box, as well as the comment section.
Andrew, thanks for coming out.
Folks, tomorrow we will have with us Joe Jorgensen, libertarian candidate who ran for president.
