June 7, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
02:06:54
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| All right, YouTube. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me on The Rubin Report today is a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and author of the book The War on Normal People. | ||
| Andrew Yang, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks for having me. | |
| It's great to be here, Dave. | ||
| I am glad to have you here. | ||
| I'm going to give you props before we do anything else, because I like to soften up a guest before we get into the hard stuff. | ||
| Your team reached out to us, and not only did they reach out to us about being on the show, They said you could say whatever you want. | ||
| We don't want any advanced questions. | ||
| He has no intention. | ||
| He'll stay as long as you want. | ||
| This thing is as open and honest and real as it could possibly be. | ||
| Is that by design of how you're running your campaign? | ||
| Because that's pretty freaking rare these days. | ||
| I guess it is by design in the sense we don't know any other way to operate, and I think there are other candidates that would have talking points and various constraints, but that's not how I've gotten to this point. | ||
| That's not how I qualified for the Democratic primary debates, and we just want to keep on doing what's natural for us. | ||
| Is part of what's wrong with politics right now that people won't do this type of thing that often? | ||
| It's pretty rare to just sit two, three feet across from somebody, look them in the eye, and try to figure out what they think? | ||
| I actually had my mind blown that this was so unusual. | ||
| It took my running for president and being in the race for a number of months to figure out that most interactions are much more brief and scripted and less personal. | ||
| And I know there are some candidates who've gone back and forth about joining you, but to me, I'm grateful to you. | ||
| I think this is an awesome opportunity to introduce myself and the campaign to a lot of people. | ||
| And congrats on the work you do. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Well, I really appreciate that, and I think we're going to treat this probably more differently than any other interview you've done, because I don't have canned gotcha things, and I'm not trying to get you. | ||
| I truly want to know what you think about the issues. | ||
| Or did I just say, yep, we'll find out. | ||
| But I did tell you right before we started, this is the most questions that I've ever written for an interview, because When I've been on your website for the last week while doing the research on you, it's like you've actually really staked out all of your positions. | ||
| But before we get to any of that, let's just do for the people that have no idea who you are. | ||
| Because I think you've got some real nice sort of energy in the internet space that I'm in. | ||
| But for the more mainstream people that are watching right now, could you just tell a little bit about your family background, where your folks are from, you're a second generation immigrant, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| My parents met in graduate school at UC Berkeley. | ||
| My father got his PhD in physics. | ||
| My mother got her master's in statistics, so very nerdy Taiwanese immigrants. | ||
| My brother is named after the Lawrence Observatory, so we used to joke that my parents got busy there, but I'm sure they didn't. | ||
| So, you'd think I'd be a West Coast kid, but my father ended up getting a job at GE in Schenectady, New York, where I was born. | ||
| So, I grew up in upstate New York in Schenectady, and then in Westchester County in a town called Katona. | ||
| And so, I grew up—to me, it was, I think, a fairly typical suburban, You did see the Nintendo in there. | ||
| second-generation immigrant, child of immigrants. | ||
| We had an older brother, and we were very nerdy. | ||
| I saw the comic books in your green room, and I was like an avid Dungeons & Dragons player | ||
| and Marvel Comics reader and video game player. | ||
| So... | ||
| You did see the Nintendo in there. | ||
| We could livestream a little Nintendo after this. | ||
| It's been a while. | ||
| You realize that that's what people would rather watch than talking about policy. | ||
| Well, that's what my six-year-old would rather watch. | ||
| Because, like, I cannot believe how many freaking gaming videos there are where I just walk into the living room and it's like my six-year-old watching, like, someone else play video games. | ||
| That's particularly weird. | ||
| It's not that he's playing video games, it's that he's watching someone else play video games. | ||
| I would feel better if he was playing them. | ||
| Yeah, you could. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This is what your job as a father is to achieve, you know. | ||
| So you're right that I guess this would be very highly rated programming. | ||
| You and me playing video games. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, we'll see. | |
| We'll see how much energy we have left after this. | ||
| So you went to Yale and you studied... I actually went to Brown. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| You went to Brown. | ||
| No, don't worry about it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You went to Brown and you studied political science and economics, correct? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Before that, I went to a boarding school in New Hampshire called Phillips Exeter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So that's where it got weird. | |
| How did it get weird? | ||
| Well, so I was growing up, you know, in my suburb, fairly typical upbringing, I think. | ||
| I went to this nerd camp over the summer called CTY that was run under Johns Hopkins University, and then one of my campmates said she went to this high school called Exeter in New Hampshire and really liked it, and it seemed really nerdy, and I was pretty nerdy, so I was like, oh, let's do that! | ||
| So I came back that summer, went to my parents and said, hey, how about sending me away to school? | ||
| And one of my One of my motivations was that my brother was two years older than me and was leaving for college, and I didn't want to be left at home alone with my parents. | ||
| So I was like, why don't you send us both away? | ||
| Same year. | ||
| So I went to prep school in New Hampshire for two years, and then I went to Brown. | ||
| So what was weird about it? | ||
| I mean, do you have any friends who went to Exeter, one of the New England prep schools? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| No? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I've only lived in New York and L.A. | ||
| I'm another weird breed myself. | ||
| Well, I mean, I had a lot of friends who went to Binghamton because, you know, if you grow up in a suburb of New York, all the smart honor roll kids go to Binghamton. | ||
| I appreciate the props there. | ||
| Oh, it's true. | ||
| I went up and visited my friends there several times. | ||
| So, Exeter is a very snooty New England prep school, and I did not know what I was getting into when I showed up | ||
|
unidentified
|
there. | |
| I was 15. | ||
| It was a bit of a pressure cooker, and I actually went back to speak there as an esteemed alum a few months back, and so it had me revisit my high school years there, because I hadn't been back since I graduated. | ||
| And it was a really intellectually formative environment, like the education was top-notch, but it was also very high pressure, classes on Saturdays, and there was this deep sense of where you got into college was your value as a human being, like that kind of culture. | ||
| Not that they necessarily made that explicit, but it was very much there among the students. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that was all good, because it put a certain amount of pressure on you to succeed, or do you think there were drawbacks to that? | ||
| There were definitely drawbacks, because there were some kids I went to school with that had real problems. | ||
| And not just like, oh, they're stressed out kind of problems, but like institutionalization, at least one suicide I know of. | ||
| One of my doormates is in jail for murdering his ex-girlfriend as an adult. | ||
| So, I mean, there are some things that, like a lot of human-conditioned darkness that resulted from, in part, the pressure. | ||
| Yeah, do you think that that kind of pressure is partly why college right now and the universities seem so out of whack? | ||
| I want to talk to you about that a little bit later as well, but just the general state of pressure that young people feel like they're under, which is why I think some of your economic policies are so directed towards young people right now. | ||
| Yeah, very much so. | ||
| I mean, one of the things I say in my book is that, like, I got into Brown and Stanford when I was applying to college. | ||
| My parents were psyched. | ||
| The acceptance rates for those schools were 20 percent plus when I was applying back in 1992. | ||
| Then you look now, those acceptance rates are, I think, like 9 and 5 percent or something like that. | ||
| So kids are under even more pressure now to try and get into various competitive schools. | ||
| And then when they show up to these schools, the pressure doesn't stop. | ||
| And so you have these epically high levels of anxiety and depression and stress, in part because when they come out of school, their entering a really punishing economy where 44% of recent | ||
| college graduates are going to be underemployed and on some level | ||
| they all kind of sense this and so the light instead of an environment of intellectual exploration college seems like | ||
| like a culling Servitude or something in a weird way | ||
| Yeah, and because of the record levels of both cost and the school loans that were loading up on top of young people. | ||
| So to me, it is all tied together. | ||
| I mean, certainly Exeter is its own thing, but I think I have at least some exposure to the sorts of stress and anxiety that a lot of young people are feeling. | ||
| And a lot of it is because of very legitimate economic forces. | ||
| It's not just like in people's heads. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you have to take out loans to go to college yourself? | ||
| I was under partial scholarship from IBM, and then I took out over $100,000 in loans to go to law school, which was my next great move. | ||
| So when I graduated from Brown, I didn't know what to do, so I went to law school. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You went to Yale Law, right? | ||
| I went to Columbia. | ||
| Columbia? | ||
| Where am I getting Yale from? | ||
| Did I just make this up altogether? | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| I think I just completely made that up. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I mean, there were some mistakes to make. | ||
| Okay, fair. | ||
| Accused of going to Yale Law. | ||
| Accused of going to Yale Law. | ||
| So you go to college, and then you become a corporate lawyer first, right? | ||
| Yeah, I was an unhappy corporate attorney for five months. | ||
| Five months? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How miserable was it that you only lasted five months? | ||
| You strike me as a guy that could probably kind of plow through some stuff that you don't necessarily have. | ||
| Well, kind of you. | ||
| So, I'll tell you a story. | ||
| I'm not sure I've told this story before. | ||
| So, I was in my first or second month on the job and my phone rings on Friday afternoon at 6 p.m. | ||
| And I was like, oh, let me pick up the phone. | ||
| And I see and it's the the staffing coordinator, is the person who tells you, | ||
| like, hey, you're on this assignment. | ||
| And so, then it hit me. | ||
| I was like, wait a minute, if I pick up this phone, I'm going to be here all weekend. | ||
| And I was like, what happens if I don't pick up this phone? | ||
| And so, I looked at it, and I was like, huh. | ||
| And I didn't pick up the phone, and it stopped ringing, and then I just walked out and just had a weekend. | ||
| And then I came back on Monday, and I saw a friend in the office and said, hey, how was your weekend? | ||
| He was like, oh, I got a call at 6 o'clock on Friday, and I was here all weekend working on these documents. | ||
| And so, I was like, I don't consider myself like a shirker or a lady guy. | ||
| But I was reflecting on my behavior, and I was like, you know, I did not feel bad about not picking up that | ||
| phone. | ||
| So I was like, I need to find a job where I'm actually excited to pick up that phone. | ||
| And so I realized that I didn't want to do this job long term, and it was going to get harder, not easier to leave. | ||
| And so if those two things were true, then I should leave immediately. | ||
| So I started thinking about what my next step would be, and I co-founded this dot-com that ended up not working out. | ||
| So that's what prompted me to leave at the five-month mark. | ||
| How hard was that decision? | ||
| Because I find this when I go speak at colleges now a lot. | ||
| You see a lot of kids that are training for one thing, but they know it may not quite exist the way they want it to exist in five years. | ||
| So after you've gone to law school, you've racked up some debt, you've gotten a job at a corporate law firm, you think you have a path, to suddenly go, I don't want to pick up that phone on a Friday. | ||
| That's a major decision. | ||
| That's not something you do lightly. | ||
| It was somewhat rash. | ||
| I was 25, and I thought, I'm never going to have lower levels of personal obligations than I do right now. | ||
| Even with my six figures in school loans, I was like, I don't have, you know, a wife and kids. | ||
| I don't have a mortgage. | ||
| I don't have any of that stuff. | ||
| So if I don't try and do something entrepreneurial now, I may never do it. | ||
| Yeah, so you did the dot-com thing, and that didn't quite work out. | ||
| No, it did not. | ||
| Do we want to go any further on that, or should we just accept that it didn't work out, it was just one of those things? | ||
| Well, it's one of those things that I, you know, I empathize with folks who are trying to make positive things happen and start businesses, because there's a lot of mythology around entrepreneurship. | ||
| And the danger is that anyone who shows up on a panel is like, I went through the tail of woe, but then I ended up shiny! | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And you can too! | ||
| And then everyone's like, oh! | ||
| And the reality of it's really gritty. | ||
| It's very difficult. | ||
| Not everyone has it work out a lot of stress and there's a lot of bullshit around it to where anyone one of the things I say is like if anyone asks you how your Startup is doing you always have to say it's going great Yeah. | ||
| It doesn't matter how it's actually going. | ||
| So it's profoundly isolating because you can't have honest conversations about what you're doing. | ||
| You know, it's funny. | ||
| I had a friend about a year ago that I was playing basketball with. | ||
| I'd see him once a week on Sundays and he had this little startup company and he was always telling me it was going great. | ||
| It's going great, going great. | ||
| And then one day I'm flipping the channels and I see one of those reality shows where they go into businesses that are disasters and fix it. | ||
| And it's him. | ||
| And I'm like, that's all you need to know right there. | ||
| Yeah, so I went through that, and I had a very, very deep empathy for the folks who work and struggle and toil in obscurity, because that's 99% of entrepreneurship. | ||
| It's a bit like parenting, where 99% of it is not like taking pride in your kid's awesome achievements. | ||
| 99% of it is done in isolation and obscurity. | ||
| And trying to get the kid off the iPad watching other people play video games. | ||
| Yes, that sort of thing. | ||
| What did you learn, like sort of technically, through the struggle of kind of trying to build your own thing and | ||
| having it not work out? | ||
| I learned a lot. | ||
| So, well one I learned that at that point I was not strong enough to build a successful business. | ||
| And so that's one reason why I ended up working for another startup, a company that was led by someone I admired, because I thought, OK, if I'm not strong enough to do this now, then I should find someone who's stronger than me and then try and learn from him. | ||
| So I learned that. | ||
| I learned about my own relationships, because when you do something that you put your heart and soul into, like start a business or, in this case, run for president, Yeah, that thing, that thing. | ||
| That little thing, yeah. | ||
| You have some friends that come through for you, and then you have some friends that just disappear. | ||
| So you learn that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Pretty damn quickly, huh? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you grow a lot individually. | ||
| And people who've started a business and failed, I feel like we all have these battle wounds or scars that, you know, if you talk to someone who's been through it, you have a real shared commonality. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You think that gives you a little bit of the sort of courage you need to do something like this, which is obviously a pretty uphill battle? | ||
| Well, I will say for several years after my business failed, I was like, well, this can't be as bad as my business failing. | ||
| It makes you very bulletproof. | ||
| I owed still $100,000 in law school loans, and everyone I knew knew that my company had failed. | ||
| And so you feel really beaten up, but then you realize that Other people still like you or respect you or don't know | ||
| nothing about you And so you just like meet someone for the first time they | ||
| don't think like oh, you're a failure Yes, you know it's like no one knows you 100,000 unless you're | ||
| dumb enough to tell them so So you do know we're broadcasting this on YouTube | ||
| Well, you know, I mean, now I'm happy to say it was the most unfair thing in the past. | ||
| Though my parents, during this period, were just telling everyone I was still a lawyer. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| Because it was, like, easier for them than saying that I was, you know, this entrepreneur that had failed. | ||
| So, speaking of that, actually, you mentioned the pressure you were getting when you went to boarding school, but what kind of pressure did you get from your folks? | ||
| My folks were not thrilled when I left the firm, but I said, look, I'll figure it out. | ||
| I'm not going to ask you for anything and just respect my decision. | ||
| And they saw that I was working really hard, so then they warmed up to it over time. | ||
| It would be one thing if I would quit the firm and was doing something really frivolous, but they saw I was putting my heart and soul into the business. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So before we go further on your work adventure, let's back up for a second. | ||
| So because you studied political science, was your family particularly political? | ||
| Were you political? | ||
| Did you have a strong political bent before college? | ||
| And did that change in college or anything like that? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I always get one. | ||
| So I was a debater at Exeter and I went to the World Public Speaking and Debating Championships of 92 in London. | ||
| And so I had an interest in Card five is all about that. | ||
| and political science. | ||
| I never thought I would personally run for office. | ||
| Particularly the more exposure you get, and I'm sure many people watching this know this, too. | ||
| It's like, there's politics in the abstract, and then there's politics in real life. | ||
| And most people, as they mature into adults, want nothing to do with politics in real life. | ||
| Card five is all about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll get there. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So I had an interest in the abstraction of politics throughout my college years, but I did not | ||
| I did not think I was ever going to run for office. | ||
| Did you have a particular political belief? | ||
| Did you always consider yourself liberal or progressive? | ||
| I came of age during the first Clinton term, and so I considered myself a Democrat at that point. | ||
| And didn't really participate that avidly outside of presidential, so I wasn't actively involved in local politics. | ||
| And I was living in New York, and as you know, New York is so blue that there isn't that much to be engaged with politically. | ||
| Yeah, and now I moved to California, which is even bluer, so I should be doing something a little more purple, I think. | ||
| But that's why I do this online, because it's like... You reach everyone! | ||
| You got the true cross-section. | ||
| Yeah, okay, so the startup busts, and you learn some stuff from that, and then you go work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is now at a health Technology company. | |
| I was employee number four at a small software company. | ||
| So I worked in urban hospitals for four years trying to roll out this information service where surgeons could get access to the pre-surgery information that was in paper form. | ||
| They would fax it, we'd digitize it, and then post it online. | ||
| Now that sounds kind of standard, but that probably was pretty cutting edge at the time, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, it was. | ||
| I mean, we raised seven million or so while I was there. | ||
| We got one from zero in revenue to several million. | ||
| But I was so burnt from my own startup that died and another startup that I was at for six months or so that ran out of money. | ||
| And so when I was working at this health care technology company, I had a couple of side hustles because I was like, I need to be able to pay my bills no matter what. | ||
| So I started Throwing parties on the side. | ||
| I was a nightclub promoter downtown. | ||
| I don't think that's in your bio on your website. | ||
| It may not be. | ||
| It's buried somewhere. | ||
| It will now be on your Wikipedia. | ||
| But what happened was I had a birthday party in my late 20s and a lot of Asians showed up and they liked to drink. | ||
| And then I was like, huh, there's something here. | ||
| And so then I had a party and then, again, a bunch of Asians showed up and they liked to drink. | ||
| And I was like, wow. | ||
| throw parties, and like hundreds of people show up. | ||
| And so, we had a website and a mini technology backend and database and CRM under the name | ||
| Ignition NYC. | ||
| So, I did that as a side hustle. | ||
| And then I also helped my friend with his education company, high-end test prep. | ||
| I was the first instructor, and I helped develop the curriculum while he was starting the company, | ||
| also as a side hustle. | ||
| And so, that side hustle ended up morphing into my becoming CEO of that company several | ||
| years later. | ||
| But, for four years, I was working in urban hospitals, helping manage information systems. | ||
| So, since you were big on the party scene in New York City, I feel like contractually | ||
| I have to ask you, do you get the Asian flesh when you drink? | ||
| I get like the Asian sleepiness. | ||
| Is that a thing? | ||
| There's the Asian sleepiness that's different than white guy sleepiness? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that a known thing? | |
| I'm actually not sure if the Asian sleepiness is a known thing, but if I drink I get drowsy. | ||
| And so I would have these parties and be stone cold sober the whole time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So on the test prep stuff, since I think you're 43? | ||
|
unidentified
|
44. | |
| 44. | ||
| So I'll be 43 this month. | ||
| So we took the old school SAT. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you remember what you got? | ||
| I did well. | ||
| I was good at filling out the bubbles. | ||
| That's the first KG answer you've given me. | ||
| Do you wanna give me the number? | ||
| I wasn't planning on asking you this, but. | ||
| I actually don't remember the number precisely. | ||
| Okay, but you did well. | ||
| I did do well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm like, thinking about it because, so I took, I remember this number. | ||
| I took the SAT when I was 12 and got a 1220 on the old scale. | ||
| Oh, geez, all right. | ||
| And then everyone in my public school found out that score, and then it was like, I was like an alien And I did not, I was like literally 12 years old, so I had no idea why anyone cared. | ||
| But I do remember that experience. | ||
| Okay, well, if you got a 1220 when you were 12, then you're in good shape, because I got a 1200 when I was 16 or something, that got me into Binghamton, so it was pretty decent. | ||
| So you did okay. | ||
| Well, one of the things I try and tell people is like, these tests don't measure really anything that significant. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this is coming from a guy who ran a test prep company that I became a part of. | ||
| Is that really what you realized there? | ||
| Yeah, I did. | ||
| You know, it measures a very narrow set of intellectual traits. | ||
| And one of the major problems we have is that we're dehumanizing many of our young people through teaching to the test and having this hierarchical arrangement where the hierarchy, in my mind, obscures many other human and intellectual capacities. | ||
| So did all of this sort of lead to your interest in tech and AI and what eventually becomes the big discussion around you with UBI and all that? | ||
| Were just all of these just little steps that kind of eventually fit into the sort of person that we know you are now? | ||
| The person I am today. | ||
| There's a robot that you are, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, failed.com, four years in healthcare software, and then six years running a national education company that had a very high technology element like asynchronous online classes and question databases and a lot of social media use. | ||
| So, at that time, when that company was acquired in 2009, that was right after the financial crisis. | ||
| And the financial crisis really shook me up, because I thought, wow, all of my friends out of Exeter and Brown and Columbia, who are in Wall Street, were wrecking the economy, it turns out. | ||
| And so, I thought about what That would mean for the country long term, where we were having so many smart people leave Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, Ohio, to head to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and Boston, D.C., to a lesser extent, and L.A. | ||
| And it was going to be this massive brain drain from much of the country | ||
| that was not on the coasts, for the most part. | ||
| So, in 2011, I left my job to start this organization, Venture for America, | ||
| to help train urban entrepreneurs in Detroit, Cleveland, Birmingham, | ||
| St. Louis, Baltimore, places I'd never been, honestly, | ||
| because you could tell most of my career took place on the coast, though. | ||
| Manhattan Prep ended up with 18 offices around the country, so I traveled a lot for that. | ||
| But... | ||
| I At that time, and I wrote a book about this called Smart People Should Build Things, I became fixated on the fact that we had so much human capital doing certain things in certain places and not enough starting businesses around the country. | ||
| And that was a direct result of watching, you know, the economy crash, basically. | ||
| Well, it was. | ||
| And even if you look at my own experience, so I was good at school and went to law school | ||
| and then was plugged into Davis Polk and Wardwell, this high-end corporate law firm, | ||
| and became the embodiment of a transaction cost, where they were going to pay me six figures | ||
| to work on deal documents for some giant acquisition. | ||
| And that was my highest use. | ||
| Like, I thought to myself, this is a quote from the time, I said, this law firm's like a temple | ||
| to the squandering of human potential. | ||
| Because you had some of the top educational products in our society doing scut work, essentially. | ||
| And so if you can imagine me going through that experience, and then spending six years training the analysts at McKinsey | ||
| and Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, and seeing another version of the same thing, | ||
| where you had all of these talented humans who were almost getting beaten into submission | ||
| and being made into sort of lesser versions of themselves, highly paid, lesser versions of themselves. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then that set of activities contributes to the near collapse of our economy. | ||
| So After going through that for a decade, I thought, well, we need to do something that puts people in position to do something that's going to make them better human beings and would be better for our economy and society. | ||
| And so the vision that I thought was the most compelling was starting businesses in Detroit and Cleveland and St. | ||
| Louis and Baltimore. | ||
| And so that's what I did between 2011 and 2017, was help create several thousand jobs. | ||
| In those markets. | ||
| This may sound like a bit of an odd question, but what do you think it is about you that you saw something wrong and you actually did something about it? | ||
| Because I find this now all the time, like when it comes to just anything that's happening in the country right now related to censorship or political correctness or how out of whack our political system is, just everything. | ||
| It's like everyone feels that something's wrong. | ||
| They may be focused on a different thing specifically, but very few people are willing to do anything about it. | ||
| What do you think it is about you that you were like, I see what's wrong? | ||
| Because you probably weren't your only colleague that was like, my potential is being squandered here. | ||
| But people get the check and they just kind of suck it up. | ||
| Do you ever think about that? | ||
| Like, what is it about you? | ||
| So I was 24, 25 at the law firm, you know, during those unhappy five months. | ||
| And I said, why am I doing this job? | ||
| And then it was like, it must be for the money. | ||
| So what do I do with the money? | ||
| And so then I went to Bloomingdale's and I bought my family some nice presents and then I gave them to them that weekend. | ||
| And I was like, okay, this is nice. | ||
| Is this enough for me to keep doing this job? | ||
| Definitely not. | ||
| And so I think in my case, and my wife now finds this sometimes very annoying, | ||
| but I have low regard for creature comforts. | ||
| Like I really just don't care. | ||
| You know, like I'm perfectly happy with janky street food. | ||
| I'm perfectly happy with- We tried to offer you a lot of stuff in the green room. | ||
| You wanted water. | ||
| This man can't be bought. | ||
| But it's just like these material things don't make that much of a difference, | ||
| you know, just because of the way my utility curves are shaped. | ||
| And I know that sounds incredibly out of touch to say, it's like, oh, of course that dude thinks that. | ||
| But like, even as a young person, I just found myself caring a lot about certain things | ||
| and less about others. | ||
| And so in 2011, when I decided to start Venture for America, the part of it too, Dave, is that even at this point, | ||
| so I'd sold a company to a public company, and I thought that what's wrecking our country | ||
| is that we have so much talent and energy doing a handful of things in a handful of places | ||
| and it needs to be doing all these other things. | ||
| And I'd gone through that arc myself. | ||
| I'd been a failed entrepreneur and I knew how brutal that was. | ||
| And I thought if I could somehow form a pathway that would help support hundreds of younger versions of me and you to do something that would actually turn us into better versions of ourselves, I was like this is like the best thing I could ever do. | ||
| And I had this sense that if I busted my tail for five or six years, I could actually make it happen. | ||
| And I, at that point, knew that that wasn't true for everyone. | ||
| So, if it was true for me, then I should really fucking do it, because if I don't, then, like, I'm shirking, essentially. | ||
| Because a lot of people could look up and say, oh, someone should do that. | ||
| But it would not be realistic for them to quit their job and, you know, try and raise millions of dollars and build it. | ||
| But I thought I could. | ||
| And it turns out I was right. | ||
| So that's very exciting. | ||
| It's sort of just like you were young and like it's good to be young because you do some crazy shit pretty much, right? | ||
| This is true. | ||
| There was definitely some youthful exuberance. | ||
| Baked into this time period. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny because you mentioned the crash in 2009, and it's like you were, you know, had friends that were working at these companies and all that, and I was a struggling stand-up at the time, so I had no money. | ||
| I mean, I was scrounging around just to get unscathed. | ||
| And look at you now. | ||
| Look at you now. | ||
| I'm on YouTube, man. | ||
| I got Andrew Yang in here. | ||
| We're doing all right. | ||
| Just so you know, camera, this place is beautiful. | ||
|
unidentified
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It really is. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| But I remember I had no money, and I was working all these odd jobs and bartending and doing all this, and I had nothing. | ||
| I really had nothing. | ||
| And I was struggling to pay the rent and all that, and I had a friend that worked at Lehman Brothers. | ||
| And he was rolling in dough, but he was miserable. | ||
| And I remember when the crash came, I was like, oh, well, I didn't lose anything, because I didn't have anything. | ||
| But this guy lost his job and was freaking out and had been stressed out of his mind for about two years prior and warning that this thing was coming and all that. | ||
| And I thought, there's something about perspective here, you know? | ||
| So maybe it's good not to always have something, is the point. | ||
| Well, that's one of the fun things about entrepreneurship, is that if you were to chart, and this is a crude measurement, let's just chart how much money I made in a given year, it would be like, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And so it ends up, which is very different than your friend at Lehman Brothers, which And so if you're in like this mode, then you start equilibrating to making lots of money and you like develop like an expensive lifestyle and you have friends who have the same lifestyle. | ||
| But if your income is like, you know, highly variable, then you end up, you know, not developing a super expensive lifestyle. | ||
| I think that that's one reason why. | ||
| I even see that now with me just because of the way YouTube rev is so out of whack, which it's just a portion of our revenue. | ||
| But like on any given month, it could quite literally be five times what it is the month before. | ||
| So just for the limited amount that I am a businessman, which I guess I've become, I know what the numbers coming in and going out are at least. | ||
| and it's like, this is a tough way to operate a business. | ||
| Yeah, and so what you do, because you're smart, is you'll be like, hey, tell you what, | ||
| I'm actually gonna adopt an expense line that's toward the lower end of this thing. | ||
| And so, whereas your friend at Lehman, if you get income from an employer, | ||
| virtually no one can actually say, I'm gonna pretend I'm not making this much money, | ||
| I'm gonna pretend I'm making this much money. | ||
| Right, just by your title, that's it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what you're being made. | ||
| Okay, so all of this happens, and when did you start thinking maybe kinda, | ||
|
unidentified
|
you know, politics, what the hell am I doing kind of thing? | |
| Well, all right. | ||
| So over my time at Venture for America, the budget grows and grows. | ||
| So I put in $120,000 to seed the organization in 2011. | ||
| I asked some rich friends, do you love America? | ||
| And then some of them said, I love America! | ||
| And I'm being like, prove it! | ||
| Put in $10,000! | ||
| Put in $10,000. | ||
| And so, you know, raise $120,000 that way. | ||
| And budget grows and grows to $5 or $6 million. | ||
| Train hundreds of young entrepreneurs. | ||
| Help create several thousand jobs. | ||
| Honored by the White House. | ||
| Movie with an Oscar-winning filmmaker. | ||
| Gets made about us. | ||
| You know, write a book. | ||
| And then I have this sinking feeling the whole time, where I'm like, we're just scratching | ||
| the surface of the magnitude of this problem, where now I compare it to pouring water into | ||
| a bathtub that has a giant hole ripped in the bottom. | ||
| Because while I was getting accolades and awards for creating several thousand jobs, | ||
| our economy shed 4 million manufacturing jobs that were centered in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, | ||
| Wisconsin, Missouri, these places I was working. | ||
| And then Donald Trump wins in 2016. | ||
| And he wins because of the aftermath of the automation of these jobs in the swing states. | ||
| There's a straight line up between the adoption of industrial automation in a voting area and the movement towards Trump in that area. | ||
| It's one of the strongest statistical correlations you can find. | ||
| So strategically, it was very good what he did to win, right? | ||
| To just keep saying to those people, I'm bringing the jobs back or something to that effect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whether it was true or not, but I'm just talking about in terms of like just pure politic of I want to win. | ||
| Well, he got a ton of credit for just acknowledging the problem and the pain. | ||
| And even the folks that heard his solutions kind of knew that he wasn't going to like magically bring the jobs back. | ||
| But they were just pleased that someone gave a shit. | ||
| And then the Democratic response at the time was, so he was like, you know, we're going to make America great again. | ||
| And then the Democratic response was, America is already great. | ||
| And then the people that were listening to Trump were like, no, things are not great. | ||
| And in these communities, I was blown away by the disparities between Missouri and Manhattan or Detroit and San Francisco. | ||
| Have you done a lot of traveling? | ||
| This past year, I went to about 100 cities in the United States. | ||
| Then you may know, if you've been around. | ||
| Because when you fly between Detroit and San Francisco, you feel like you've traversed decades and dimensions and ways of life. | ||
| Well, it feels like we have many different countries within our country. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You can use that. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Well, you know, if I use that, we'll know where it came from. | ||
| When you throw it at a debate. | ||
| But it is true. | ||
| It feels like we're many different countries. | ||
| And so, when Trump won, I took that as a giant red flag, where I said, wow, like, this is actually getting away from us much faster than anyone seems to believe, that we're in the midst of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of the country. | ||
| Because I spent six and a half years working with hundreds of startups around the country. | ||
| And even if they're successful, they're not going to create jobs at the scale as what's being lost in retail, trucking, call centers, fast food, and accounting, bookkeeping, law. | ||
| I mean, one of the jokes I tell is that I was a lawyer long enough to know that you can automate away a lot of that job. | ||
| So, with all the AI advancement that's coming around the corner, | ||
| the stuff that got Donald Trump into office is just going to accelerate in a huge way. | ||
| 30% of American malls are going to close in the next four years, and being a cashier | ||
| is still the most common job in the country. | ||
| And the average cashier is a 39-year-old woman making $10 an hour. | ||
| So what is she going to do when the mall closes? | ||
| I mean, it's not like another store is going to be hiring. | ||
| And so, this is what I saw in 2016, where I was trying to unpack the actual data | ||
| as to how Trump won and why. | ||
| And then I saw our country was not having any conversation about the economic transformation that we're in the midst of. | ||
| Instead, we're scapegoating immigrants. | ||
| If you watch cable news, it's Russia, racism, Facebook, the FBI, Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And it's like, yeah, all of that was there. | ||
| But the real driver is the fact that millions of Americans lost their manufacturing jobs. | ||
| Millions of Americans will now lose their retail jobs, the call center jobs, the fast | ||
| food jobs. | ||
| And when it gets to trucking, it's going to be an epic disaster. | ||
| Being a truck driver is the most common job in 29 states. | ||
| There are 3.5 million truckers in this country. | ||
| Average age 49, 94% men. | ||
| Tens of thousands of them are ex-military. | ||
| Average pays $46,000 a year. | ||
| It's one of the higher paid jobs for high school grads. | ||
| What is their next move going to be when the robot trucks come in the next 5 to 10 years? | ||
| Yeah, so do you think part of the problem here, or part of the disconnect, let's say, was that while the manufacturing sector was sort of bottoming out, that the tech sector in its own way, just the way we think of the tech sector, meaning Facebook, Google, Twitter, all these things, they were all kind of blowing up and they were expanding and expanding and expanding, and then the media focuses on them. | ||
| So it seems like there's a gajillion jobs and tech is going to solve everything and all of that, yet That's actually not reality. | ||
| There was just this huge chasm between the optics of it and the reality of it. | ||
| Yeah, and certainly the media narratives are not helping any. | ||
| But some numbers, so people get a sense, only 8% of jobs in the U.S. | ||
| are STEM, and 92% are not. | ||
| Is it realistic to try and train 92% to do the jobs that are currently being occupied by 8%? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| If you look at the success rates for federally funded retraining programs for displaced manufacturing workers in the Midwest, 0 to 15% success rates. | ||
| Is that going to be enough when you're talking about hundreds of thousands of workers? | ||
| Almost certainly not. | ||
| And so you never hear a politician say when they're saying like, oh, we're going to educate and retrain Americans for the jobs of the future, oh, by the way, we're shit terrible at that. | ||
| But any objective study, any independent study shows that we are indeed shit terrible at it. | ||
| And so why are we talking about doing something that we were not able to do for the manufacturing workers? | ||
| And I studied economics, so economic theory says we'd retrain all these people, but that's not how it's played out in real life. | ||
| So you truly view right now, because of the way tech is changing us and sort of the speed with which it's changing us, you truly view this as a unique sort of inflection point in human history, right? | ||
| Yeah, we're in the midst of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of the world. | ||
| What experts are calling the fourth industrial revolution. | ||
| I know you had Martin Ford on recently. | ||
| So he and I agree on most of the major themes of this. | ||
| The thing that has convinced me is that because of my work with Venture for America, I was invited to all of the high-level design sessions and social innovation conferences, and I got a sense as to what people are doing in this space. | ||
| And nothing anyone is doing is going to address the fundamental set of problems. | ||
| Okay, so now, all of that being said, have you heard about this universal basic income thing? | ||
| I have heard something about it. | ||
| You have heard about this? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, I guess then, can you define universal basic income for those who have no idea? | ||
| I'm kidding. | ||
| I mean, this is a freaking softball, man. | ||
| Here you go. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Universal basic income is a policy where every member of a society, let's say every U.S. | ||
| citizen, gets a certain amount of money to meet your basic needs, no questions asked. | ||
| So my proposal, the Freedom Dividend, would put $1,000 a month in the hands of every American adult, starting at age 18, to do whatever you want. | ||
| And that's universal basic income. | ||
| It sounds dramatic now in 2019, but Thomas Paine was forward at the founding of the country. | ||
| Martin Luther King championed it in the 1960s. | ||
| Milton Friedman and a thousand economists signed a study saying this would be great for America, also in the 60s and 70s. | ||
| It passed the U.S. | ||
| House of Representatives twice in 1971 under Nixon. | ||
| And one state has had a dividend for almost 40 years, where everyone in Alaska now gets between $1,000 and $2,000 a year. | ||
| So I know at first blush, everyone getting $1,000 a month sounds very dramatic and almost too good to be true, but it actually is very, very deeply rooted in American thought. | ||
| And when you say everyone, you mean the person that's, from someone that's unemployed to someone that is worth $20 million. | ||
| They're both getting that $1,000? | ||
| Yep, that's right. | ||
| OK, now how are we going to pay for this thing? | ||
| That has to be the next question. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So first, it ends up costing a lot less than most people think. | ||
| And there are a few reasons for this. | ||
| Number one is that about half of Americans are already getting direct support from the government in some form. | ||
| Dividend would be universal, but it's opt-in, and if you opt-in, you forego benefits from certain existing programs. | ||
| So the headline cost goes down a lot very quickly. | ||
| So this is like someone that's getting some other social welfare or something, and then if they choose to take the UBI, so like what type of thing would they lose? | ||
| Like food stamps? | ||
| Yes, so it's food stamps, housing subsidies, fuel subsidies, Cash and cash-like programs. | ||
| We have about 120 welfare programs, most of which are cash or cash-like. | ||
| So this excludes Medicaid, but it would include food stamps and most other welfare programs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And can you split the difference on that? | ||
| So could you say, I'm going to only take $500 a month UBI and I'm going to take No. | ||
| So you can't. | ||
| So you have to pick one, basically. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so I've talked to people who are on various welfare programs, and they love the idea of getting $1,000 unconditional, because they dislike the case manager, the reporting requirements, everything else. | ||
| And so you can reduce the enrollments in our existing program significantly. | ||
| And it brings down the headline cost very quickly, because if someone's already getting $700 in benefits, then the cost is $300 instead of $1,000. | ||
| Do we have good accounting numbers on actually how much people are getting? | ||
| Like, I'm gonna guess that a certain amount of people, it may be one thing for food stamps, but when you talk about housing subsidies and things like that, that has to be way more. | ||
| I mean, the one that I always use is that my sister and her husband live in New York City, struggling to get by. | ||
| They both have full-time jobs, two kids. | ||
| You can imagine how expensive schools are and just living in Manhattan and the rest of it. | ||
| And half of their building is market price and half is rent subsidized. | ||
| And then what happens is, And I know you know this, is that generation after generation live in the same apartment, then for like 400 bucks, and then my sister and her husband end up paying 4,000 bucks for a tiny two-bedroom. | ||
| So people basically just get locked in these programs, where if you were to say to the guy that's living in an apartment for 600 bucks, here's 1,000 bucks, you gotta get going, nobody's gonna do it. | ||
| You'd have to be an idiot to do it, basically. | ||
| Well, I think, knowing what I know about New York and the subsidized rents, it's not a federal program, I don't believe. | ||
| And so, their situation might be that they actually get the thousand bucks and then it's helpful to them. | ||
| But in terms of the math, it ends up reducing the headline cost of this by hundreds of billions | ||
| of dollars very, very quickly, because people will either not opt in, or if they do opt | ||
| in, it costs a lot less than $1,000 a head. | ||
| So that's reason number one, where that reduces the cost from like a top line, let's call | ||
| it $3 trillion a year. | ||
| It goes down pretty quickly. | ||
| The second big thing is that the money doesn't disappear. | ||
| In our hands, it ends up getting circulated through the economy over and over again, what | ||
| I call the trickle-up economy. | ||
| And so if you see that it would end up increasing consumer buying power and the size of the | ||
| economy by about 10 to 12 percent, we would generate hundreds of billions in new tax revenue | ||
| just on the basis of more economic activity in our society. | ||
| We'd also save hundreds of billions on things like incarceration, homelessness services, emergency room health care, and things that we're already spending about a trillion on. | ||
| Meaning because people are going to use that money for those things? | ||
| Either that or we get to spend less on it. | ||
| So one of the examples that, and this is going to sound very politician-y, so I apologize, but I was in New Hampshire and the corrections officer in New Hampshire said we should pay people to stay out of jail. | ||
| You've got to give me their name and tell me you put their arm around them and really ham it up for a politician. | ||
| I was like, I was there. | ||
| And so, we think we're saving money, but we end up spending the money on the back end anyway. | ||
| If someone ends up falling through the cracks and they land in our institutions, our institutions are incredibly expensive. | ||
| And at least one estimate was that if you reduce poverty in this country, you would increase our GDP by $700 billion just on the basis of higher graduation rates. | ||
| better physical health and better mental health. | ||
| So we're going to get back a lot of the money. | ||
| But the big change we need to make to pay for this dividend is that right now, | ||
| Amazon, trillion dollar tech company, paid zero in federal taxes last year. | ||
| Netflix, zero in federal taxes, less than you did on this awesome operation. | ||
| And you know Amazon's investing billions in AI. | ||
| It's going to be one of the mega winners from the fourth industrial revolution. | ||
| So we need to have a mechanism where the American people actually get some of that. | ||
| And so my big proposal is that we have to join every other advanced economy in the | ||
| world and have a value added tax that then gets the American public a tiny | ||
| slice of every Amazon sale, every Google search, every Facebook ad, | ||
| every robot truck mile. | ||
| And because our economy is now so vast at $20 trillion, even a mild value added tax generates over $800 billion in | ||
| new revenue. | ||
| So that plus the savings from existing programs, plus the economic growth, | ||
| plus the value gains enough to pay for a dividend of $1,000 a month. | ||
| So I know that a certain percentage of my audience, they know that generally I'm a small government guy, or I want it to be as small as it can be to function, as a general rule. | ||
| So it could be streamlined enough. | ||
| I want it to exist well enough so that things are working without all of the fat and all of the pork and all of the rest of it. | ||
| So some of my alarms go off here because of the idea that this would be federal in nature, so that a thousand bucks if you live in, say, Los Angeles, You get next to nothing. | ||
| A thousand bucks if you live maybe somewhere in the middle of the country, you're going to get a lot more. | ||
| Is there any way you can compensate for any of that? | ||
| Or is that not even worth thinking about in your estimation? | ||
| Well, there are a few reasons why it's a good idea to keep it uniform. | ||
| Number one is that there are other reasons why people live in L.A. | ||
| Often, not just the weather, but access to... That's pretty much it, yeah. | ||
| But access to certain economic opportunities, so you're making a trade-off already. | ||
| And it's also very hard to administer, because the fact is, if you're getting paid more to live in an expensive place, a lot of people would live in expensive places that, like, sneak off and, you know, spend the money someplace cheaper. | ||
| So, it's much cleaner for everyone to make it uniform. | ||
| It also ends up fueling mobility in both directions, because at least some people might feel like, hey, if I leave L.A. | ||
| and go go to Arizona, I can actually live much better. | ||
| It's like it will help balance things out. | ||
| What do you say just to the general idea, sort of I guess the philosophical idea | ||
| that if you just keep giving people things, that eventually they just start doing less for themselves? | ||
| That a thousand bucks, yeah, maybe there's some place in the country that you could live, | ||
| then you could play video games all day and smoke pot all day and not really do much | ||
| and that we're gonna cushion people's ability to not just get up and get going. | ||
| Not that people want that, but that just human nature is, oh, I start getting something, and I can just kinda ease up a little bit. | ||
| So there are three things I would say. | ||
| First, I agree with your vision of government. | ||
| And the great thing about this is that this actually does not grow the federal bureaucracy. | ||
| What we all hate is when you have money just flow up to the pipes and then disappear and then, you know, never see it again and you don't know what the hell happened. | ||
| This actually puts the economic resources back in our hands. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why the only state that's done this is Alaska, which is a deep red conservative state passed by a Republican governor, and it's wildly popular there. | ||
| Like the dividends, everyone's favorite thing about what the government does, because it's not a giant government program. | ||
| It's actually almost cost-free to administer and just puts money right into our hands. | ||
| So I agree with your vision of government, is that the last thing I want is like a new army of bureaucrats running around. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But do you fear that even if everything you've said is completely on point, that any time you, just the way that the system works, at least now, that any time you try to put in a giant federal program, that the bureaucrats and just that middle management part of the government will figure out ways. | ||
| Like, you could be like, it's real easy, guys. | ||
| We got 320 million people in the country. | ||
| Everyone's getting a thousand bucks. | ||
| The math works out. | ||
| It's like, it's all good. | ||
| But that then just the process of how government works will create all sorts of other problems. | ||
| Well, if you look at the way they do it in Alaska, it's actually very lightweight. | ||
| Like, as long as they can prove you're an Alaskan resident, you're there, it's like, this is how many people you are. | ||
| Like, they have a very, very low-level administrative burden, let's say. | ||
| So, as long as you can pull that off, which, in my opinion, like, this is where we have to go, because as the economy is transforming, and so, number one, I agree with your vision of small government if we can achieve it. | ||
| So I'm going to come back to it with number three. | ||
| Number two is... | ||
| Number two is the biggest misconception about this is that it's somehow going to reduce work. | ||
| And what I mean by this is you put this money into our hands, first it creates two million new jobs immediately in the economy. | ||
| Because just more economic activity, the smoothie shop hires someone, the mechanic needs an assistant, like on and on through the economy. | ||
| Basically people have more expendable income, more shopping occurs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pretty much the easiest way to say that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| The other thing, though, that it does, it ends up fueling a lot of the work that right now our market does not recognize. | ||
| So that's some of the stuff that you've done throughout your career, like arts, creativity, entrepreneurship, like a lot of that stuff doesn't get recognized by the market until you become, you know, frankly, like someone successful. | ||
| But also work like my wife does. | ||
| My wife's at home with our two boys, one of whom is autistic. | ||
| And the market values her work at zero, even though it's incredibly hard and incredibly important. | ||
| So, it's not that putting this money into our hands somehow makes us work less. | ||
| It creates conventional work. | ||
| It ends up also fueling the sort of work that we want to do. | ||
| So that's number two. | ||
| And then number three is this notion of what's happening in our economy. | ||
| If you look around at the fact that suicides and drug overdoses have overtaken vehicle deaths for the first time in American history, our life expectancy has declined for the last three years, almost unheard of in a developed country. | ||
| You know the last time our life expectancy declined three years in a row? | ||
| I guess it was probably like in the late 1920s, something like that? | ||
| Yeah, it was the Spanish flu of 1918. | ||
| It's like where they kill millions of people. | ||
| And this buzzsaw is just going to accelerate when AI comes in and starts getting rid of call center workers and bookkeepers and accounts and the rest of it. | ||
| And so when you're facing a set of changes that's this mammoth, putting cash into people's hands is actually the most lightweight thing you can do. | ||
| Some of the other proposals that are out there are the ones that we must avoid, which are things like a jobs guarantee or creating a whole new array of subsistence jobs for Americans to survive. | ||
| So that's a massive difference you have than some of the other Democratic candidates, right? | ||
| Because Bernie and I think Elizabeth Warren and a couple others are talking about a federal jobs guarantee, which to me, again, as basically a small government guy, that sounds horrible to me. | ||
| That sounds like indentured servitude to me. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| One of the things that's like, why not just get everyone gray overalls while you're at it? | ||
| Give us the uniform and we'll flip widgets all day and that's it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so I try and point out obvious things. | ||
| It's like, Hey, what if someone doesn't like the job they have? | ||
| What if they're bad at it? | ||
| What if they don't like their boss? | ||
| What if their boss doesn't like them? | ||
| What if the job actually like, you know, turns out you don't need it after a while. | ||
| Like if you're literally dependent upon a government job to survive and like actually have food on the table, then all of those things become existential. | ||
| and you end up creating a whole new army of bureaucrats to administer this massive jobs program. | ||
| So I'm for infrastructure, creating jobs, because those are jobs you need, | ||
| we need to rebuild the infrastructure, but starting out saying we're gonna guarantee everyone a | ||
| job is exactly what we have to avoid. | ||
| So when they say that, when you hear them say that, do you honestly think that they believe | ||
| that is the right thing to do, or even a feasible thing to do, | ||
| or that they're just saying, because it sounds, if you're not really thinking | ||
| about these issues that hard, to me, saying free everything sounds good. | ||
| It all sounds good, free college, free this, free job, all these things. | ||
| Just if you're not thinking, it's just like, oh, great, free, why not? | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| If you're young and you haven't really put the acumen in to figure out what these things mean. | ||
| One of the dangers is that a lot of these politicians have never actually run a business, worked in a business, understand what the mechanics of these organizations look like on the ground. | ||
| They're just lurching from press release to fundraiser to cable news hit, and they don't understand what a lived reality would be for a person who has to show up and check in for their McJob. | ||
| And the institutionalization of this thinking, it is sincere. | ||
| It's not like if you poke the person who's for a federal jobs guarantee, they're like, ah, I was just kidding. | ||
| No, no, I mean, they actually feel that. | ||
| Well, they feel it, right, but I guess feeling it and knowing are two different things. | ||
| Well, I mean, they believe it. | ||
| Let's put it that way. | ||
| They're sincere in their belief. | ||
| And so, if you buy that we're in the midst of the greatest economic transformation in the history of the world, which we are, and then, in my mind, you wind up with, like, a couple of major models to try and respond to it. | ||
| And my model is put economic buying power into the hands of every adult as fast as possible and help us rebuild our own communities, our own lives, our own families, and, like, find new forms of work that we find fulfilling and purposeful. | ||
| The other model, in my opinion, is the government trying to figure out what sort of work we find meaningful and valuable and purposeful. | ||
| And this, to me, is what we must avoid at all costs. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Well, it's also a self-perpetuating thing, right? | ||
| Because then the government always has to grow. | ||
| We always have more people. | ||
| We will always need more jobs. | ||
| So they will always keep bringing more and more people into the system. | ||
| Yeah, and to give you a sense of the immediacy of this, as we're sitting here together in year 10 of an expansion, the U.S. | ||
| labor force participation rate is close to a multi-decade low of 63%, the same levels as Ecuador and Costa Rica. | ||
| Wait, say that again, 63%? | ||
| Of working-age Americans are presently in the workforce. | ||
| So when we hear this thing about job... Headline unemployment. | ||
| Yeah, that unemployment is at an all-time low, or this type of thing. | ||
| That doesn't factor in that people just have checked out, right? | ||
| That's basically what you're getting at? | ||
| Yeah, and if you remember candidate Trump in 2015, he was like, oh, this headline unemployment number is fake news, it's bunk, 95 million Americans out of the workforce. | ||
| And now he's in office, and he's like, oh, it's great. | ||
| He was right the first time, because if you leave the workforce, you're not calculated into the headline unemployment number. | ||
| It also doesn't include the fact that 94% of the new jobs created since 2005 are temporary gig or contract jobs. | ||
| It doesn't include the fact that 44% of recent college graduates are underemployed in a job that doesn't require a degree. | ||
| So the headline unemployment number is, at best, misleading and incomplete, at worst, bullshit. | ||
| Like, it's somewhere in that range. | ||
| Right, so what about, I think a certain set of people would basically say, well, all right, some of this is making sense, and I can see why it would get rid of some of the bureaucracy, and you're doing a governmental program, but not totally expanding the government, but why not just do it for people under, say, $50,000, so that you don't need to give it to the guy that's making $75,000 that lives in Kansas City, who's got a decent life, but why not just give it to the people, whatever the number you might come up with. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| There are a few reasons. | ||
| So one of the reasons why it's so wildly popular in Alaska is that it's universal. | ||
| So it's not like, oh, rich Alaskans don't get it, poor Alaskans do. | ||
| It's just like, no. | ||
| You live here. | ||
| It's a right of citizenship. | ||
| You get your dividend. | ||
| And so, by making it so it's not a rich-to-poor transfer, you destigmatize it, you universalize it, and then you make it more politically popular, because it's just something that we all get as citizens and owners and shareholders of the richest, most advanced country in the history of the world. | ||
| Number two, you get rid of any incentive to under-report your income or to have monitoring requirements. | ||
| Let's say I'm married to someone who's not working, and then maybe we could be like, hey, how about we file separately, and then you make nothing, and then you can get the dividend and like all this stuff. | ||
| So basically it removes the cliff situation where you'd actually want to earn less. | ||
| So this is one of the things that I've struggled with the most about this, about the general idea, not the way you're laying it out, but that I don't like things that de-incentivize people to make more. | ||
| And you mentioned this thing before about you can struggle for a long time and then suddenly you're making more and it's like, last year I paid more in taxes than I had ever made in my entire life before that. | ||
| So I don't like the idea that the more work you do, the more value you bring, the more you sort of get punished. | ||
| Yeah, and that's one of the problems with our current welfare programs. | ||
| Like, in the extreme examples, a friend of mine, his sister is on disability. | ||
| She was afraid to volunteer at a non-profit because she was afraid someone would say you're healthy and then take away her benefits. | ||
| I mean, what a terrible incentive system that is. | ||
| But most welfare programs are constructed such that if you flourish, then you get less. | ||
| Whereas if you have a dividend that's universal, You know, you do nothing, you get the dividend, you do something, you get the dividend, then like your incentive is actually to do something. | ||
| So why not just blow apart, so I think the best libertarian argument that I've heard for UBI is that basically if you want to do UBI, it's got the right idea, why not just blow apart the social safety net as is, take, because we know it's just a boondoggle of middle management nonsense with all the whacked out incentives that you're talking about, why not just take all of that money, which do we even know how much money is actually put into these things? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| So how much right now? | ||
| 600 billion, give or take. | ||
| Give or take. | ||
| All right, so why not take the 600 billion that are on programs that we know are creating as many problems, probably, as they're fixing, if not more, and then do it that way? | ||
| Do you think, because it almost feels like it's a little bit of a stopgap, that you'd still have to get to that problem eventually? | ||
| Well, that's the beauty of this—the Freedom Dividend proposal, is that you have this $600 billion or so, and then you're saying, hey, guess what? | ||
| Like, it's now a new right of citizenship. | ||
| Everyone gets it. | ||
| And then what's going to happen is you're going to dramatically reduce the enrollment in these programs very, very quickly, because a lot of people will be like, I prefer the cash. | ||
| And then this new incoming population would just opt for the dividend and then never end up on these welfare programs. | ||
| So you'd end up shrinking the enrollments over time in the way you described. | ||
| You just wouldn't do it all at once. | ||
| Because, you know, there are a lot of people in very distinct situations. | ||
| And this is actually much more politically feasible and popular than going and trying to tear these programs up and, you know, from the roots up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you worried, though, that because states have different things related to social programs that, I mean, we sort of addressed this already, but just that different states will deal with it so differently? | ||
| In terms of how they're giving benefits off UBI, that it just is going to create this weird, we may have a gajillion people moving to one state and leaving another state, or the rest of it, or you just think that that's... Well, that's one reason why having uniform benefits, because right now there are block grants that go to various states, and the states do different things with it, as you're suggesting, and those are the programs that would be swapped out for UBI, so the more people that opt into UBI, then the smaller those grants would be. | ||
| So, parallel to all of this, one of the things that we hear the Democrats always talking about is $15 minimum wage. | ||
| I actually don't know your policy on that. | ||
| Well, I'm for the spirit that if you're working full-time, you should not be poor. | ||
| But, if you were to increase the minimum wage to $15, it would hasten the automation of all these fast food jobs that pay $9. | ||
| Burger King. | ||
| Everywhere. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| iPad. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| There are all these hardware stores and Main Street retailers that are just scraping by that are paying people $9, $10 an hour. | ||
| You take that up to $15 an hour, they're 100% going to cut shifts, cut workers. | ||
| It's much better just to give everyone $1,000 a month. | ||
| It's an effective raise of $6 an hour for anyone who's working full-time. | ||
| It doesn't come out of the pockets of small businesses. | ||
| It recognizes parents and caregivers and nurturers that the minimum wage does not touch. | ||
| And it's actually better for small business, because is that hardware store going to be | ||
| busier if everyone has money? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so, instead of taking it out of this hardware store—and this is one thing that drives | ||
| me nuts about the left. | ||
| I mean, I run a small company. | ||
| It's like sometimes people imagine that every business just must be somehow made of money. | ||
| And it's totally not the case, particularly in this era of mega consolidation, where you | ||
| have these giant companies just coming and running amok. | ||
| They're made of money, sure, but is the average independent business made of money, such that | ||
| you can just say, hey, pay everyone $15 an hour, and it's not going to have any effect | ||
| on shift? | ||
| What happened there, that disconnect in the left now, where they do this with this $15 | ||
| Because I agree, they sort of think that everything is equal, so that my small business, where we have five full-timers, let's say, and five part-timers, is equal to Amazon, which they're also not thrilled with Amazon. | ||
| They have too many employees, I maybe have too few employees. | ||
| There's always some weird number. | ||
| Maybe if I had 27 employees, it's the exact amount that's right. | ||
| But I know, even right now, we're hiring interns, but we're paying them, because I don't want people to work for me For free, I want them to feel good about what they're doing, you know what I mean? | ||
| And I want them to feel incentivized and all those things. | ||
| But that concept that you just hit on there, how do we break through to that? | ||
| Because it seems so obvious to me. | ||
| You can't tell a guy that's got a little business, just forget me, just take some YouTuber who's got one employee and wants to bring on someone else. | ||
| Now there's some kid that really wants to learn YouTube. | ||
| And it's like, he'd probably work for free, but I want to give him $8 an hour. | ||
| To me, there's nothing wrong with that, but they would literally force you to not hire the guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so that's, again, why I think this Freedom Dividend is so superior. | ||
| But what do you think they're thinking? | ||
| I got what you're thinking now, but truly, this is the disconnect that I can't figure out. | ||
| Do they actually think they're doing the right thing, or does it just sound easy, so you just say it? | ||
| $15 minimum wage, of course, why not? | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| I think many people have come of age in a time when capitalism has become so corrupt and extreme that they are deeply skeptical of businesses acting morally, which that's legitimate. | ||
| It's like a lot of businesses are doing very messed up things. | ||
| And so they're taking from that. | ||
| It's like, oh, these businesses are systematically exploiting their workers when they have ample resource to do so. | ||
| And so they're imagining that all businesses are like Amazon. | ||
| They have ample resources. | ||
| And it's in part because they haven't worked in like a lot of different settings where they would understand the distinctions between different types of employers. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So you're giving them the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| Well, you know, it's like, I mean, the intention, the spirit is positive. | ||
| It's like, do I think that people who are working full time should not be, you know, like scraping to just get by? | ||
| It's like, sure. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But is that also part of the disconnect? | ||
| Because everyone always brings this to fast food jobs when they frame this argument. | ||
| They say $15 an hour because the average person at a fast food joint can't live on a full-time wage. | ||
| And it's like, but that actually, except if you're a manager, say at McDonald's or something like that, that shouldn't be your full-time job. | ||
| There's another layer of an economic problem there, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, there is. | ||
| And McDonald's is rolling out self-serve kiosks in every location in the country by 2020, right now, with the wage the way it is. | ||
| So it's not like, I mean, automation's gonna come, even if you do keep that low. | ||
| Right, right, you could probably, right, even if you lowered it, actually, you could have the government come in and say, we have to pay you less, and they'd still be doing it, right? | ||
| Yeah, and then the question, if you're the government, is like, what is my intention? | ||
| Like, is it that, like, no, you have to preserve that job? | ||
| It's like, well, how about we just automate that job? | ||
| And the question is, what is that person doing instead? | ||
| And so there is this really important evolution that we need to undergo as a society, which is to say, look, the market right now is a highly imperfect determinant of what jobs we should be doing. | ||
| So if you take these people who are working in fast food restaurants, and these jobs get automated away, like, in my mind, they should be automated away. | ||
| And trying to preserve those jobs is not where we should be going. | ||
| But there's also this massive gap as to what the jobs of the future will look like. | ||
| It's one reason why the Freedom Dividend is so important, because if you have a town of 10,000 adults in Missouri, and then you put $10 million more into their hands, then you end up creating not just more jobs in the Main Street, but you also end up supercharging their religious organizations, their nonprofits, their community organizations. | ||
| You create different forms of opportunities for people. | ||
| And that Do you consider yourself a progressive actually? | ||
| where in the midst of is trying to figure out what the jobs of the future look like | ||
| when the market is going to try and zero out more and more Americans very quickly. | ||
| Do you consider yourself a progressive actually? | ||
| Because it's interesting, because you said the thing about slim government | ||
| and I get it that partly what you're doing with UBI is that you want a simplistic, | ||
| a relatively simplistic answer to a complex problem because you don't want the government to grow. | ||
| But so often every policy, and we've talked about some of them here, | ||
| with $15 minimum wage and guaranteed federal job and the rest of it, that progressives come out with | ||
| are just expansion of government. | ||
| So do you consider yourself just an old school liberal? | ||
| Do you consider yourself a progressive? | ||
| Is there some overlap on that or something else? | ||
| I consider myself a progressive because I'm pro-choice, I'm pro-gay rights and gay marriage, I'm pro-gun safety, things that I associate with progressive values and vision, like I line up on. | ||
| We'll get to all those. | ||
| I think for me the challenge is that I don't think that government is necessarily the vessel to achieve every goal. | ||
| And I believe more in people than I believe in government as a problem-solving force. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So to me that's an old school liberal. | ||
| Yeah, I'll take it. | ||
| Which strikes me as different from progressive in that they're always trying to find governmental answers to things. | ||
| So what I think is that government is very bad at many, many things. | ||
| And it's good at some things. | ||
| And so we need to lean into the things it's good at. | ||
| So what are the things it's good at? | ||
| Well, one of the things it's really excellent at is sending large numbers of checks to large numbers of people promptly and reliably every month. | ||
| That's like a core competence. | ||
| So we just lean into that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You may not want, see that's where my libertarian bell goes off and it's like, oh, the best thing the government can do is give people stuff. | ||
| And it's like, even if they're good at getting the check delivered, we got a bigger problem, you know what I mean? | ||
| Well, part of it, and here's the argument I'd make, is that it's our stuff, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's like our wealth. | ||
| We're the owners, we're the shareholders. | ||
| It's not that the government's giving me stuff that's not mine. | ||
| I'm an owner of the richest, most advanced country in the history of the world. | ||
| We're up to 20 trillion in GDP, and we can easily afford a thousand dollar dividend. | ||
| And if a company does that, it's just good management. | ||
| Like, you know, no one gets mad at Verizon when they're like, hey, we're taking the dividend up. | ||
| It's like, what are you giving these shareholders, like, money? | ||
| It's just considered good corporate management, and it's good management of a society. | ||
| So I know you've explained a little bit of how you pay for some of this stuff, but how does this affect taxes in general at the federal level? | ||
| I mean, to me, we have to go where the money is, and the money is in the economic activities of companies like Amazon, particularly as technology just keeps on getting more and more efficient and powerful. | ||
| Do I think that our current tax rate should be more progressive? | ||
| Like, I do. | ||
| But I also try and convince people, it's like, look, Jeff Bezos post-divorce is worth like $120 billion or whatnot. | ||
| You can take his income tax rate to whatever you want. | ||
| And he's not going to end up paying any significant proportion of that $120 billion, because most of it is an Amazon stock. | ||
| He's too smart to have a taxable event. | ||
| So, like, income tax is not the way you actually balance things out. | ||
| So that also puts you really at odds with a lot of the mainstream Democrats, right? | ||
| Because they seem to want to put the progressive tax to make sure that these billionaires don't exist. | ||
| Or, like, if you look at AOC's Green Deal, it was like, we're going to tax the hell out of the billionaires. | ||
| But then at the same time, she's always telling you how evil billionaires are. | ||
| So there's an odd thing. | ||
| We need the billionaires to pay for this thing even though we know we can't actually pay for it. | ||
| But then also they're evil and we have to get rid of them. | ||
| Well, so one, I definitely don't think that billionaires are intrinsically evil. | ||
| I mean, they're the natural byproducts of this economic system that we've had in place for years and years. | ||
| And two, again, I'm for a more progressive set of tax rates, because we're anomalously low relative to our own history and other developed countries. | ||
| But I don't see that as the actual way to get the resources we need to do some of these things. | ||
| What about flat tax? | ||
| Why not just flat tax the whole thing? | ||
| 15% for everybody, lowest 50 grand and under, you get nothing. | ||
| No taxes, you're good to go. | ||
| And then everyone else just pays the same, and we go from there. | ||
| Well, one thing I will say is that if you were to, and one reason I love the value-added tax so much, and that every other country has it, You don't want to tax things that you're trying to encourage. | ||
| And I want to encourage jobs and labor in every situation. | ||
| So over time, I would love it if we get off of the taxation of labor income. | ||
| So payroll tax. | ||
| Yeah, like that stuff actually is the opposite of what you want. | ||
| Because you want people to work more and you want more people to hire folks. | ||
| So one of the reasons why... I feel ya as a small businessman. | ||
| I feel it, right? | ||
| Like I'm paying the payroll tax. | ||
| I would love to be hiring more people right now. | ||
| Yes, and the biggest burden on you is healthcare. | ||
| It's like, I've been an employer, and guess what? | ||
| If you put me in a position where my incentives are to make everyone a temp, and that if I hire someone full-time, then it's going to take my cost of hiring that person up 20%, then I'm going to hire fewer people. | ||
| Can I just pat myself on the back in front of a presidential candidate for a second? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I pay 100% of my employees' health and dental. | ||
| Because I just view it as, I want people to feel good about working here because I know if they're happy and healthy and the rest of it, like to me it's self-preservation. | ||
| It's like if they're happy and healthy, they want to work here, feel rewarded, they're going to do better work. | ||
| I'll say Dave, I did the same thing when I was in your boat for the same reasons, but I will say that our incentives were to go a different direction, particularly if you end up employing Well, I can already see that as we're expanding. | ||
| It's like, I don't think this will be sustainable over the next version and the next version. | ||
| I was in the same boat. | ||
| It's like you have a small team. | ||
| You're like, sure, I'm going to pay for you all. | ||
| And then the team grows, and you're like, wait a minute. | ||
| Do these numbers work out? | ||
| And the worst part is you make the decision, and then your health care costs just keep getting dialed up and up every year at several times the cost of inflation. | ||
| And what it does is it discourages hiring growth. | ||
| So, payroll taxes, the opposite of what you'd want. | ||
| You'd want to somehow, like, get that off of the backs of both the business and the worker. | ||
| But our current healthcare system, also the opposite of what you'd want. | ||
| It's like, the last thing you wanna do is make it harder to hire people, harder to change jobs, harder to start businesses, and that's what our current healthcare system does. | ||
| Okay, so let's shift to healthcare, actually. | ||
| So you're for Medicare for All. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So first off, let's just do the 101 on that. | ||
| Like, what does that actually mean in your estimation? | ||
| So that's government-provided health care. | ||
| So Medicare right now kicks in at an advanced age. | ||
| And so Medicare for All generally means that you lower the eligibility age and you make Medicare available to, in my case, all Americans. | ||
| Where does private insurance come in on that? | ||
| Because I can get on board the basic idea. | ||
| This again, it's a struggle for me as a limited government guy. | ||
| It's just like a hard hurdle for me to get over. | ||
| But I can sort of get there intellectually. | ||
| The part that's now been scaring me is that some of the Democratic nominees are literally talking about getting rid of private health care altogether. | ||
| And to me, it's like, why would you obliterate the marketplace? | ||
| I get it. | ||
| You want to try to give something to everybody. | ||
| Whether that would work or not, we can get into that. | ||
| But you don't have to blow apart all of private insurance too, which creates competition and ingenuity and all that. | ||
| So I am with you in that I am not trying to outlaw or eliminate private insurance. | ||
| I'm trying to provide blanket coverage to Americans and we can do it. | ||
| One of the reasons why I'm confident we can do it is because we're already spending 18% of GDP on a highly inefficient health care system that's also providing massive profits to private insurance companies and drug companies. | ||
| Like the levels of of expense are staggering. | ||
| Like, we're spending twice as much as other countries to worse results. | ||
| And so, we can make coverage much, much more. | ||
| I'll give you one basic example. | ||
| We don't even negotiate drug prices. | ||
| Like, can you imagine that? | ||
| You know, it's like these drug companies are like, we're gonna charge you this. | ||
| I'm like, alright. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But is the problem, then, if you hand that, if you expand Medicare, well now there's less incentive for them to negotiate those prices? | ||
| Or you're saying you're basically forcing them to do it? | ||
| You force them to do it. | ||
| And so you can get drug prices lower very, very quickly. | ||
| You can get access up and cost down very, very quickly. | ||
| But I would not get rid of private insurance for some of the reasons why you think that having competitive markets and incentives to innovate, I agree with you. | ||
| And this is America. | ||
| You know you're going to end up with some gold-plated concierge version Right, and you should. | ||
| I mean, if you have the money to do it, why should you not be able to buy into those things? | ||
| But there are, I'm actually not totally sure, I think it was Bernie who said no more private insurance. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that strikes me as just deeply dangerous, actually. | ||
| Well, it strikes me as anti-American, actually, because you should be allowed to buy, why could you not buy extra insurance if you want? | ||
| Yeah, this is true. | ||
| I agree with you that there's a place for private insurance in the private market. | ||
| And to me, in America, it would just be unfathomable to me that there would not be something available for people that wanted to buy it. | ||
| Yeah, so you mentioned the profits that these companies are making. | ||
| Should there be a limit on what they can make? | ||
| Why not just let them make whatever they want? | ||
| I was talking to a friend of mine who's an investor in public companies, and she said she has never seen profit margins. | ||
| What do you think about quality of service? | ||
| like this in the device companies, drug companies, some of the private insurers. | ||
| She said that she actually started shorting those businesses | ||
| because she said there is no way this can continue. | ||
| She said it's out of whack with anything she's seen in any companies ever. | ||
| So that gives you a sense of just how extreme the profiteering is right now. | ||
| It's completely out of control. | ||
| What do you think about quality of service? | ||
| So now everyone has Medicare, and we know that there's just gonna be | ||
| more government paperwork. | ||
| And I know actually through technology, and we referenced this an hour ago, that you might be able to clean up some of the mess and get some of the paperwork off. | ||
| But even right now, I know with Obamacare, I have a good friend who's a doctor, and it really challenged his practice almost to the point where he wanted to get out because he was spending more time on paperwork than on working directly with patients. | ||
| And that's something I want to help doctors with. | ||
| I'm Asian, so I have a lot of doctor friends. | ||
| Are you Asian? | ||
| Yeah, you noticed that. | ||
| We have to lighten their bureaucratic load. | ||
| And the last thing I'd want is to increase it on doctors, because they need to spend more time actually caring for patients and less time dealing with paperwork and the rest of it. | ||
| So how do you actually do that? | ||
| Because once you now have made a federal program bigger, I mean I think you can see a sort of theme in the way I think about these things, like once you make the federal program bigger that all the bureaucrats get in and They have more paperwork and more paperwork and more paperwork and there's less competition so they have less chance to go somewhere else and do what they want to do. | ||
| So here's what I think I have a different set of experiences on is that it's not necessarily the case that dealing with the government on this one is higher paperwork than dealing with private insurance because I've worked in the industry and private insurance has you know like also like a lot of administrative hurdles and the trick is though that If you're a practice, you're dealing with maybe half a dozen different private, maybe not half a dozen, maybe like several of these private insurers. | ||
| So it is conceivable, I know this is very counterintuitive, but it's conceivable that having this expanded government coverage would actually reduce paperwork on the average medical practice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| I guess conceivable. | ||
| That's a pretty rare word for a politician to use. | ||
| But I'm certainly with you on the goal. | ||
| So I've been looking at what's making Americans unhappy, and there are three things that are making us unhappy in terms of our cost structures. | ||
| Number one is health care, number two is education, and number three is housing. | ||
| And so, to me, any competent administration has to try and attack those sources of, really at this point you could call it even hyperinflation, because education and healthcare have skyrocketed relative to any other consumer product in cost. | ||
| So, before we get into some of those specific issues, philosophically, how do you decide What the federal government should do versus what state governments should do. | ||
| So I understand your argument of why UBI should be a federal program, but just generally, how do you think about those things? | ||
| Well, to me, we're at a point now where our government has been decades behind the curve for a long time. | ||
| And you can see it in sort of this increased desperation in the American people. | ||
| I mean, so many Americans have just completely given up on government as a problem-solving force in our lives. | ||
| Most of us are like, I'm just going to avoid government if at all possible. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I mean, I'm there, too. | ||
| I hear you. | ||
| I'm there, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So I'll give you a sense of my vision for this. | ||
| If you were a business and you were getting hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue from your customers every year, you'd probably thank them. | ||
| You'd probably try and make that process easier, and you might even celebrate it. | ||
| So I would turn tax day into a national holiday. | ||
| I would call it revenue day. | ||
| And I would auto-fill our taxes, because that's actually very straightforward to do based upon previous filings and public info for, | ||
| like, you know, 88% of us. | ||
| And then I'd have an election where you could choose where to give the last percent of your taxes | ||
| and then get a thank you video from that part of the government. | ||
| And then just get a thank you video generally, just like, this is like, to me, | ||
| a vision of like a competent government that doesn't treat us like crap. | ||
| So basically some portion at the end of your taxes where you could go, well, I don't wanna give, | ||
| you know, you're giving whatever you're giving. | ||
| I don't want that much to go to military, let's say. | ||
| I'm gonna give more towards helping homeless people or something like that. | ||
| You have a little more of a discretion. | ||
| Yeah, you'd feel like you have some agency in it. | ||
| And then you'd get like, oh, and then the following year, maybe, you'd get a report being like, hey, here's where your money went. | ||
| And this might marginally improve our attitude towards our government. | ||
| Would it turn us all totally into big fans of the government? | ||
| No. | ||
| But would it make us feel like, okay, at least they're trying? | ||
| You know, at least you had like a cool video with, you know, Oprah and The Rock being like, thanks! | ||
| So this is all branding, really? | ||
| This is your PR party who comes in and it's like... Well, this is just to me just like business 101. | ||
| It's like try and treat your customers not like crap. | ||
| So, that's to me like a rudimentary step you would take. | ||
| To me, the federal government should be trying to solve the big problems. | ||
| And so what are the big problems? | ||
| It's automation of jobs. | ||
| It's climate change. | ||
| It's infrastructure. | ||
| It's things that states and cities don't have the scale for. | ||
| And about—the majority of our states have balanced budget amendments. | ||
| which means they can't actually make giant commitments, which is not a terrible thing. | ||
| But it just goes to show that if there are going to be any big bets on the future of our society | ||
| and our way of life, it's going to have to come from the federal government. | ||
| Okay, so let's shift with that. | ||
| With that in mind, let's shift to education. | ||
| Again, small government guy, but I am the function of, I've only gone to private schools my entire life, | ||
| elementary school, junior high, high school. | ||
| I went to State University of New York at Binghamton. | ||
| I was a poli sci major. | ||
| They must have done something right through that. | ||
| So I do believe that that is one of the functions of the government. | ||
| That being said, we're obviously throwing tons of money into education and it's seemingly at a point where we're seeing less and less results because of that. | ||
| Get us out of this problem. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So the first thing is that studies have shown that 70 to 75% of kids' academic performance is determined by out-of-school factors. | ||
| So that's parental time, number of words read to the child when they're young, parental income, stress levels in the house, type of | ||
| neighborhood, things that the teacher cannot really control. | ||
| And teachers know this, you know. | ||
| And so, right now, we're going to teachers, hey, take 100 percent responsibility for a | ||
| process that you can control 25 percent of. | ||
| And the educators are like, well, we're going to do our best. | ||
| So the data shows that if we wanted to get serious about improving our educational systems, | ||
| what we would do is we'd give the kids a better chance to learn by putting money directly | ||
| their households. | ||
| That's what the Freedom Dividend would do. | ||
| It would reduce stress levels in the house. | ||
| It would free up maybe a little bit of parental time. | ||
| And studies have shown that this sort of cash actually improves graduation rates, and it even improves children's personalities if their households are getting some more stable cash and there's not as much So, this might sound counterintuitive, but the first thing you do to fix education is you actually just put money into the hands of families and parents so the kids have a shot at learning. | ||
| The second thing you do is you have to pay teachers more, because the data also shows that a good teacher is worth his or her weight in gold in terms of educational outcomes. | ||
| And one of the best ways you can attract and retain better teachers is by increasing comp. | ||
| What do we do about the bad teachers? | ||
| Just to take the other side of that for a second. | ||
| So I'm pro-charter and I think it's ridiculous that we're tenuring teachers at like the two-year mark or something and make it so you can't be paid or you can't be disciplined or fired. | ||
| And so one of the trade-offs for a higher level of compensation would be what you have to do is you have to empower principals and school leaders to be able to build their own staffs and teams. | ||
| And right now principals have their hands tied by union regs. | ||
| Are you basically for as much school choice as possible? | ||
| attack both sides of it. | ||
| You want to attract and retain good teachers and pay them more. | ||
| And you want to give principals the ability to hopefully make changes as necessary. | ||
| So are you basically for as much school choice as possible? | ||
| Charter schools, whatever it takes, whatever a parent wants to do, in effect? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'm pro-good school. | ||
| And this is one thing that blows my mind, is that people are just attacking all charter schools. | ||
| But that's because a lot of the progressives are not happy with charter schools. | ||
| They don't want, because they want something more federally mandated, or at least mandated by the government. | ||
| So they don't want charter schools. | ||
| To me it's like, choice, choice, you're a parent. | ||
| If you can send your kids to a school that you like and it's not the government school that's right by your house, why the hell not? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there are excellent public schools and terrible public schools. | ||
| There are excellent charter schools and terrible charter schools. | ||
| We should just be pro-excellent school. | ||
| And saying that this entire category of school is somehow problematic. | ||
| If you were trying to steel man their argument, I mean, what is the argument against charter schools? | ||
| I get it that some of them aren't going to be good. | ||
| But there are public, as you just said, there's public schools that aren't good. | ||
| Have you heard an argument that really makes sense on this? | ||
| Unfortunately, I think the main argument is a political one, where teachers' unions hate charters. | ||
| Teachers' unions are a very, very powerful constituency, and so some politicians have said, I'm better served by getting behind this point of view. | ||
| Yeah, that's probably the biggest thing that you have to break, right, in politics, more than anything else. | ||
| I don't mean the teacher union specifically, but just like that type of thinking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That we have an answer, choice, let people decide what they want to do, and then there's some other equation, politically, that causes the politicians not to do it. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| So I'm running for president, doing quite well, I'm very happy to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wait, talk to me about the numbers real quick, because we talked about this briefly right before. | ||
| What's the donation situation? | ||
| Because maybe we can crack this. | ||
| I can't sit here and endorse you, but you know what I'm saying. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| What are the numbers? | ||
| So, I've qualified for the June and July Democratic debates. | ||
| I have 116,000 donors, individual donors, well above the 65,000 donor threshold for June and July. | ||
| And here's the fun thing, is that the DNC just announced the threshold for September and October, and it's 130,000. | ||
| So you're knocking on the door right now. | ||
| So I am 14,000 donors away from qualifying for the third and fourth debates in September and October. | ||
| And if we could make that happen, that would be history-making. | ||
| Because if we clear 130,000, then all of the press accounts, when they talk about who the, let's say, 10 candidates that are gonna make it to September and October are, Andrew Yang's gonna be on that list. | ||
| So it's very exciting. | ||
| So you're 14,000 off, and it's literally only a dollar. | ||
| I mean, this is just how it works, not just for you, but for everybody. | ||
| It's a dollar donation, you're good. | ||
| So you need 14,000 more people. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now you understand that because this is YouTube, this is where you have to offer the people something. | ||
| You have to be willing to do something nuts. | ||
| You've got to dump cold water on your head. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Splash! | |
| We got another 45 minutes or so, so you have a little time to formulate. | ||
| What will you offer at the end? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| This will be fun, okay. | ||
| If we get through this, during my time here with Dave, I will pour this water in my head, but that's not good enough. | ||
| So then I will sing my favorite karaoke song. | ||
| You will sing your favorite karaoke song if we get 14,000 more minimum $1 donations, if you qualify, during the duration of this livestream. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Yes, I will. | ||
| You will do both? | ||
| So it's the water on the head and sing the song? | ||
| I will sing the karaoke song with a wet head, having splashed this water on my head. | ||
| Asian people love karaoke. | ||
| Is this too easy? | ||
| I can do something, like, less Asian-friendly. | ||
| Where the hell were we? | ||
| Okay, choice. | ||
| So school choice. | ||
| Alright, I think we pretty much got there on that one. | ||
| What would be very Asian-unfriendly? | ||
| I will disparage my parents now. | ||
| I actually wouldn't do that. | ||
| I love my parents. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, I'm not trying to make you disparage your parents here. | ||
| All right, let's just move through. | ||
| So you do have on your website, I mean, I think you've done the best job of saying, these are my actual policies, because a lot of times people just don't know what politicians' policies are. | ||
| So let's just plow through a couple of them. | ||
| Yes, so we have over a hundred policies on my website, in large part because I'm a newcomer and I wanted to introduce myself to America as efficiently as possible, and I thought the most efficient way to do so would just be to spell out exactly what I would do as president. | ||
| Is there a weird thing for you, just like as a policy guy and as someone that thinks through these issues, that we live in a time that's not really a policy time? | ||
| Like, Make America Great Again, it's a good slogan, I understand why people like it, it's not necessarily a policy. | ||
| Like, we live in a time of, you know, like, you know, if you dumped water on your head and sang karaoke, that gets you on drudge today, or something like that. | ||
| And that's very reverse, sort of, I think, inherently, who you are. | ||
| Wow, that's so interesting. | ||
| So, it is It's fun that it turns out that a rational, data-driven, problem-solving approach has its own emotional appeal to a certain subset of voters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this is not deliberate. | ||
| This just happens to be who I am and how I'm wired, where, to me, if there's a problem, you try and solve it, and, you know, you listen to what the data tells you. | ||
| Is that an advantage or disadvantage? | ||
| I'm actually very excited about the fact that it seems like there's a huge appetite for that approach right now among the electorate that is sick and tired of, like, the like the arguing about like various symbols | ||
| and culture war issues and things that are relatively marginal relative | ||
| to the problems we actually face. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so let's actually dive into some of the culture wars though, | ||
| because the one, especially for me and that we're doing this on YouTube, | ||
| that's incredibly important is the censorship stuff and big tech and have these companies grown too large. | ||
| I'm becoming a broken record here, but as a small government guy, | ||
| I don't really want the government involved yet with the amount of information that Google controls | ||
| and owns over us and all of these things and the way they control all the avenues of communication. | ||
| It's pushing my libertarian beliefs to sort of the end of the road here. | ||
| Uh... | ||
| Do you view this as a big issue? | ||
| Is this something you care about? | ||
| Do you want government involvement? | ||
| Et cetera. | ||
| It's a very big issue. | ||
| I care deeply about it. | ||
| And then the question we have to figure out is, who do we want making these kinds of decisions? | ||
| I would suggest that we probably want to have some say ourselves in these decisions, which would suggest that the government be an active decision maker, as opposed to just letting big tech platforms make decisions as our proxies. | ||
| And at this point, even some of the big tech companies are throwing their hands up and saying, we should not be making these decisions. | ||
| Do you think they want regulation at this point? | ||
| Not only because it's an impossible set of decisions, but also in a weird way that would ultimately hold their monopoly on all of this stuff once the government was involved? | ||
| I think that they expect that regulation is inevitable, and they're trying to make it like the most benign version for their interests that it can be. | ||
| So what would your strong preference be then? | ||
| Are we talking about breaking up these companies? | ||
| I always say this, but it's like, I'm in California, I pay my state taxes on a California state website. | ||
| It looks like Prodigy in 1993. | ||
| The idea that the government is gonna come in and understand the epic problems. | ||
| A government regulator is gonna come in and understand the algorithm and the rest of what's going on at YouTube sounds so bananas to me. | ||
| It's like, I could only see this creating other problems down the road. | ||
| So you definitely don't want government controlling it and executing on it. | ||
| I think you do want government to be able to provide very, very clear rules and guidelines so that everyone knows what Really, where we all stand. | ||
| And in terms of where I would stand, I think that we have become overly sensitive to the fact that if someone has an idea that is something I disagree with, that it's somehow going to be harmful to me to either be exposed to that or to have some sort of contact with that person or organization. | ||
| So, one, I think the government does need to get involved. | ||
| I think the tech companies at this point are expecting it. | ||
| And two, if you were to create guidelines, I would want them to be as mindful of the fact that we live in a country where free speech is protected and that people need to be able to express different types of viewpoints without feeling like they're going to get cast out of the public forum. | ||
| So you would basically sort of treat them like a public utility, | ||
| that basically everyone should have access to them and as long as you're not breaking the laws | ||
| of the United States, something like that. | ||
| That's pretty much where I'm at if I had to go the government route. | ||
| It's like, if you're not breaking the laws of the United States, | ||
| I believe everyone should have access to these things. | ||
| And then if you're selling drugs on them or involved in terrorism or something else, | ||
| but beyond that, it's like, if you're Steven Crowder and you make a joke | ||
| or you're me and you talk to somebody who's shady or whatever, you know what I mean, as an interviewer | ||
| or whatever, it's like you have a right to do all of those things. | ||
| But if you're breaking the direct laws of the United States, Yeah, I'm on the same page. | ||
| But, you know, this is one of the struggles. | ||
| This guy, Jaron Lanier, have you spoken to him? | ||
| He's one of the internet pioneers. | ||
| No. | ||
| He said something that really stuck with me. | ||
| He said that the internet is much better at transmitting negative sentiments and ideas than positive sentiments and ideas. | ||
| Have you been on Twitter? | ||
| And that has very profound repercussions. | ||
| And so, that's one of the reasons why people are struggling so much with this, is that they feel like, in principle, you and I are on the same page. | ||
| It's like, look, as long as you're not breaking the law, people should be able to say what they want. | ||
| But then, some of these negative ideas and sentiments and emotions are so... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So basically, you're saying you have to suck it up though, right? | ||
| Because that's the risk you have to take. | ||
| and say, oh, I guess you have to clamp down on that. | ||
| And then say clamp down on this, that, that, and then it ends up being a line drawing problem | ||
| and a slippery slope. | ||
| Yeah, so basically you just, but you're saying you have to suck it up though, right? | ||
| Because that's the risk you have to take. | ||
| You're gonna hear some bad stuff. | ||
| Yeah, I think the real, there's like a saying, it's like, it's something like, you know, | ||
| train the child, not the road. | ||
| Is that like, we need to make ourselves more resilient such that if I see an idea that I find antagonistic | ||
| or offensive, that I don't think that's necessarily something that's criminal. | ||
| Yeah, in a weird way, this is sort of personal to your campaign because you've gotten, as I said to you earlier, I think you get a nice amount of coverage in the online space, and I think because you talk about ideas, and this is where there is fertile ground for that, it's working. | ||
| but I've seen some of the mainstream things on you where it's like, oh, the trolls of the internet | ||
| like Andrew Yang or the alt-right or something like that. | ||
| And it's like, I'm so in this thing that I always know when I see one of these articles. | ||
| I'm like, if that's what they're saying, then it's obviously not true. | ||
| But the piece that I would say is true is I think there's this sort of meme makers, | ||
| the Yang gang on Twitter and all that, they like you and there's a reason for that. | ||
| And then the media doesn't know, the mainstream media doesn't know | ||
| exactly how to relate to that. | ||
| They can't understand that memes could be being made of this guy who's talking about universal basic income | ||
| who isn't promising the world to everybody. | ||
| So then they sort of have to make it sound like, oh, well, he must be in bed | ||
| with the evil forces under the internet or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, and I try and say, it's like, do I look like a white nationalist to anyone? | ||
| It's like, you know, I mean, I'm a freaking son of immigrants and I feel like they, you know, might not welcome me. | ||
| Yeah, gay Jew, welcome to the party. | ||
| It's like, we're really doing this thing wrong, man. | ||
| Yeah, something is going to miss. | ||
| But what do you make of that? | ||
| It's been surprising to me. | ||
| The treatment in the mainstream sometimes has been very confusing to me. | ||
| Well, because I've seen once or twice you get asked this question on mainstream things, and it's like, and then it automatically makes you defensive, like as if you have some ownership over it. | ||
| And it's like, that's just why people can't stand mainstream media, I think, at this point. | ||
| Yes, I have had that experience, and it's been sometimes difficult to answer the same question over and over again. | ||
| If you've seen any other interview with me in a similar channel, it's like, why are you asking me the same question? | ||
| I'm just going to say the same thing I did there. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| We could just press play. | ||
| You could just be walking around with your iPhone going, well, here's my answer to that one. | ||
| Yeah, there's like a fixation on it, and the way I think about it is that people on the internet are actual real human beings who happen to have an internet connection, and distinguishing between them and other types of citizens just strikes me as bizarre. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like people on the internet equals just people, as far as I can tell. | ||
| They're just people. | ||
| They're not all Russian bots? | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, someone inventoried my social media following and it came up like 97% human, so it's predominant. | ||
| That's got to be the best of the crew that you're involved in. | ||
| Yeah, so if you do the same exercise on other politicians' social media followings, you get much lower proportions of humans. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| You're not trying to throw anyone under the bus here. | ||
| Let's just say there are a lot of bots out there for some reason following a lot of these candidates. | ||
| Beyond just sort of the gotcha questions of mainstream media, what do you make of the general state of media in general? | ||
| Where it seems like it's just, you know, the short questions, cable news, I mean, just the state of our sort of paralysis and right versus left and Trump this and, you know, the focus on sort of all the wrong things. | ||
| I did not realize how institutionalized the media companies were until running for president. | ||
| And a lot of it is the format of a cable news hit, where the most time you're going to have is five or six minutes, typically, and the rhythm is so abbreviated, where The odds of you having any kind of genuine intellectual exchange are very low, and so you just end up trotting out very similar talking points over and over again. | ||
| And the interviewers are fixated on certain types of ideas and talking points, so it starts to feel very repetitive. | ||
| It's one reason why we're screwed, you know? | ||
| I'm trying man! | ||
| It's one reason I'm grateful to be here and I appreciate this format because the media institutions are confused somewhat by my campaign but they're accustomed to this very powerful gatekeeping role that is waning quite quickly and so we're in an era of institutional Collapse. | ||
| Do you see that across the board? | ||
| No, really, but I think you're right. | ||
| I mean, we see this across the board. | ||
| The media gatekeeping collapse, academia, for some of the reasons you laid out. | ||
| I mean, I think we see this across the board in many industries. | ||
| I mean, the retail industry, we can look at this, that all of these things are sort of crumbling, and the gatekeepers are sort of freaking out. | ||
| And I sympathize with them. | ||
| I don't want things to burn. | ||
| There's so many great things in this country. | ||
| Like, look at us. | ||
| Like, what an incredible experience this is, you know? | ||
| And yet, Things are changing, whether they like it or not, and because they're hanging on so hard or something, that's making it worse. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And this is one reason why I'm so passionate about universal basic income and the freedom dividend. | ||
| So we're living through an era of institutional collapse. | ||
| And the closer you get to the guts of many of these institutions, the clearer it gets to you. | ||
| Can you give me an example of that? | ||
| Maybe an academic example? | ||
| Oh, an academic example. | ||
| I mean, it's very dark where you have all of these people who get PhDs and then they wind up being permanent postdocs and adjuncts and they're never going to get paid above a certain level. | ||
| It's never going to be a tenure-track position for them. | ||
| And so they just wind up being subsistence laborers at these universities for As long as they can stand it and then eventually, you know, like many of them can't stand it or like they I mean there's even a tragic story in the Atlantic about like, you know an academic like dies early because of like the stress levels associated with that lifestyle Because basically the machine never changed along the way, right? | ||
| So years ago you would have thought I can get this job I can go here go there move up the ladder or let's say it's in the academic world There's a way to get to become a tenured professor where now there just aren't as many jobs and now Yes, but they've never come clean with that. | ||
| Like Eric Weinstein said this, where it's like the growth model is making scoundrels and liars of us all, where it's like you just bullshit incoming PhDs, being like, yeah, there'll be something for you, and there isn't. | ||
| Or a law school graduate, like the law school's being like, yeah, there'll be a law firm job for you, and there won't be, or if they join the law firm, there'll never be a partner spot because the firms aren't growing anymore. | ||
| So, there's just a lot of false promises being laid out there by institutions. | ||
| And we have to evolve as fast as possible. | ||
| That's one reason why, again, if we get this dividend done, then we can actually end up | ||
| building a whole new set of institutions that are much closer to our own values and our | ||
| own vision for our own lives and our communities and do the work that we want to do. | ||
| But because of the current erosion of institutions, we're going to wind up in a couple of extreme | ||
| scenarios over time. | ||
| And so it may seem extreme to people listening to this—everyone gets a thousand bucks a | ||
| month. | ||
| This is the most positive extreme scenario we can formulate as fast as possible. | ||
| The negative extreme scenarios are catastrophic, and they're coming faster than most people | ||
| think. | ||
| I think a lot of people do think about it, but maybe they don't know what that looks | ||
| like, like the full sort of collapse of this whole thing. | ||
| Do you think about that? | ||
| Like, I don't like thinking about it or talking about it because it's like you don't want to sort of give it air, in a way, you know? | ||
| Well, but that's one reason why a forum like this is so important, is that like a lot of the other media companies would never actually give it oxygen. | ||
| So, to me, again, I mean, like, how many Americans know that our life expectancy is getting shorter because of record suicides and drug overdoses, that our stress levels and anxiety levels and depression levels are at record highs? | ||
| This is that 40 percent of American children are born to unmarried mothers. | ||
| up from 15% when I was growing up. | ||
| And it's like, you can have different points of view about marriage, but there's a lot of clear data | ||
| about kids growing up in single-parent households and negative outcomes as a result of that. | ||
| This is where the haters are gonna say you're for enforced monogamy. | ||
| You believe in the family. | ||
| Well, I think that if you have kids and the data shows that it's better | ||
| if there are a couple of adults around as opposed to one adult around, | ||
| then we should be trying to make that more common. | ||
| So one of the things I'm proposing is like, look, lots of single moms, | ||
| let's have places where lots of single moms can live together and then they can just cook one meal | ||
| a week and then feed each other's kids and not have it so that the kid's always alone. | ||
| I mean, that to me would be a very reasonable... | ||
| Um... | ||
| Like, things that you would try to streamline and make easier? | ||
| But the way the collapse looks is disintegration. | ||
| And I learned this by living and working in a place like Detroit for a period of time, where Detroit had a peak population of 1.8 million, and now it's population 670,000. | ||
| So you go there and there are tens of thousands of derelict buildings. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| I mean, people really can't believe what it looks like in some of those areas. | ||
| Yeah, and so you have 30% of American malls that are going to close in the next four years. | ||
| Have you been to a ghost mall? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because they are also eerie as... Yeah, that's got to be seriously like walking dead. | |
| Yeah, it's like zombie movie type stuff. | ||
| You can't just wander in, right? | ||
| I mean, you've probably been privileged enough to just wander in, you know, because you've got to fix the repair, you know. | ||
| I mean, I've been, or even if you've been to a mall that's like mostly... Yeah, I've been to those, or like a dying mall. | ||
| Dying mall, sure. | ||
| I mean, I've been in, you know, like ghost malls too. | ||
| I mean, like, so... | ||
| This—to me, like, the rubber hits the road when we start automating away the trucker jobs. | ||
| And I'm on the record talking about the fact that, look, if you have 3.5 million 49-year-old men who didn't think their jobs are at stake, what are the odds that at least a few thousand of them decide to park their truck someplace it's not supposed to be? | ||
| I mean, dozens of truckers protested in Indiana a few months ago by doing something called a slow roll. | ||
| So they started driving their trucks slow. | ||
| On the highway there, but behind them was like, why are we all going so slow? | ||
| They were protesting the digital monitoring of their driving time. | ||
| They were mad about that. | ||
| How mad do you think they're gonna be when it's their livelihood on the line, their life savings they put into their, like, mini fleet of trucks on the line? | ||
| Do you think if we would have thought about these issues differently, or if the right set of people would have thought about the technological issues and the speed with which everything's changing, if we would have thought about this differently in a public way, say 10 or 15 years ago, We might've put up some barriers to some of this stuff. | ||
| I don't believe that those barriers can actually be, because I am a believer that once the cat's out of the bag, once progress exists, once technology exists, you can't stop it. | ||
| I don't think there's any evidence in human history that you can. | ||
| But do you think that if we would've, and maybe some people were, really thinking these through 10 years ago, that it would've not led us here, or that maybe the boundaries of the sort of craziness might've been a little different? | ||
| There are things we could've done, for sure. | ||
| And it starts with a belief in our people, where the countermeasure for the lost manufacturing jobs was shitty retraining programs that didn't work. | ||
| The better countermeasure would have been like, hey, certain companies and certain parts of our society are going to benefit to the tune of billions of dollars from this globalization. | ||
| You're going to lose your job. | ||
| Most of it was automation. | ||
| It wasn't globalization. | ||
| So it's 80% automation. | ||
| You're going to lose your job. | ||
| We're going to start spreading the bounty to you as quickly as possible and give you a path forward. | ||
| Same thing with trucking. | ||
| $168 billion in potential cost savings per year by automating truck driving jobs. | ||
| How much of that right now are the truckers going to receive? | ||
| Probably zero. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So Elon's basically going to put these Tesla trucks out there. | ||
| I don't blame him for it. | ||
| It's freaking amazing technology. | ||
| A lot of people are going to go out of work because of it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And, right, the guys that are losing their job, well, they're going to get on the government dole then, because they'll get unemployment. | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Wait, why only perhaps? | ||
| Well, you know, it's true that they could file for unemployment, but right now unemployment benefits aren't permanent. | ||
| Oh, but at least in the stopgap you then have more government expense. | ||
| And then they filed for disability, because about half of the manufacturing workers that lost their jobs ended up on disability in various states. | ||
| And the two major conditions that they filed for were mood disorders and musculoskeletal problems, which is generally a bad back. | ||
| How many truck drivers do you think have a bad back? | ||
| Pretty much every year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or they will. | |
| If they don't right now, they will. | ||
| In a year. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, 80% of truckers have a marker for, like, a chronic health problem. | ||
| So obesity, disease, high blood pressure, like, diabetes, high blood pressure, like | ||
| some condition. | ||
| So they'll wind up on the government expense line in a very dark, punitive, dehumanizing | ||
| way that's going to be debilitating. | ||
| And so, what we have to do is we have to start owning, saying, OK, if this transitions on, then we should be taking at least some proportion of this $168 billion and trying to create a more active runway. | ||
| We should have done that with the automation of manufacturing jobs, too. | ||
| That's why, again, Donald Trump is our president today, is that no one was actually speaking to that. | ||
| All right, so let's just knock out. | ||
| You got a little more time for me? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Oh wait, no. | ||
| So education is pay teachers more, but here's the thing about education I want to hit, is that so many of the Dems are talking about free college, free college, free college. | ||
| College is way too expensive. | ||
| We need to bring the cost down. | ||
| But only 33 percent of Americans will attend college. | ||
| Sixty-seven percent will either not go to college or they'll attend like a two-year | ||
| associates or community college. | ||
| So what we have to do is we have to dramatically invest in vocational, technical training and | ||
| apprenticeship programs. | ||
| Right now, only 6 percent of American high school students are in technical training. | ||
| In Germany, that's 59 percent. | ||
| So think of that gulf. | ||
| And then we have to destigmatize trade jobs. | ||
| We have to get Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs and me, as president, in the White House, being like, these are great jobs. | ||
| And then we have to get all these high school kids to say, like, look, college is not for everyone. | ||
| Right now, we're trumpeting this fantasy that college is the end-all, be-all. | ||
| College has gone up in price 250 percent, which is its own set of problems. | ||
| But the six-year graduation rate from a four-year college right now is only 59 percent. | ||
| Four out of 10 kids who are starting college are not finishing within six years, because they probably should not have been there. | ||
| Are you ready to have that blowout fight with Bernie on the debate stage? | ||
| Because when he says college for everybody, free college for everybody, and again, it sounds good, and I get why he's saying it, and then you say, well, actually, college isn't for everybody, and we need more trade jobs and things like that, people are gonna say, oh, somehow, oddly, they're gonna say you're the elitist, like, you know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, but that's what they're going to say is, oh, you think only a certain set of people from a certain way of life deserve to go to college, and other people are just going to have to suck it up with their crappy trade jobs. | ||
| I think that's actually a more honest answer, but just the way the media frames things. | ||
| I mean, that's something to me that will really come to loggerheads if the debates ever get good and get really about substance. | ||
| You may see that exchange on June 26th on the debate stage, because it could be just me next to Bernie. | ||
| I'll give you a birthday present. | ||
| I want a shout-out on that one. | ||
| I mean, I'm not, and again, it's like the minimum wage. | ||
| It's like, am I for bringing down the cost of college? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Am I for pretending that's going to be the cure-all for our current economic ills? | ||
| No, because it's not. | ||
| And again, the underemployment rate for recent college grads is 44%. | ||
| That does not change if I make it free. | ||
| It's like, is it better for them to be underemployed and not have giant debt loads? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But like, is that going to be necessarily the path forward for everyone? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Right. | ||
| And plus the amount of money we would have had to put in to do that for them to then not have the path to the job. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So what we have to do is we have to go to the colleges and say, why the heck did you get so expensive? | ||
| And the reason they're so expensive is that the ratio of administrators to students, non-faculty, non-teaching administrators, has gone up 150% over the last number of years. | ||
| So we have to try and get the administrator to student ratio under control. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So I want to do a couple more on policy, but just one on sort of the idea, on the idea side. | ||
| Identity politics, which seemingly has become The cultural issue, and I think almost every one of the policy issues is now rooted in identity politics. | ||
| So I think you can argue that the way we talk about free college is somehow rooted in identity politics. | ||
| Certainly immigration is rooted in identity politics. | ||
| We're sadly whittling everyone down to, you're an Asian man, and I must have some judgment on you because of that, and this person's white, and this person's black, and this person's Muslim, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| I've heard you talk about it a little bit actually, but do you view identity politics as positive, as dangerous, as a tool for something? | ||
| It's like a lot of the other things we've been talking about. | ||
| I understand the sentiment and ideas around identity politics. | ||
| I don't think it's a great way to Try and build consensus or bring people together or get big policies across the finish line. | ||
| And I think it's a kind of stupid way to try and win elections. | ||
| And so I think the Democratic Party needs to try and gravitate away from identity politics and towards things that would actually bridge the gap. | ||
| So that's one of my missions during this campaign is to make that case to say, look, I understand people have different experiences. | ||
| I've had different experiences. | ||
| But if we're going to solve some of these problems, we have to emphasize the things that will bring us together and not the things that are going to make us seem like we're living different lives. | ||
| So that must be pretty sad for you to see how far the Democratic Party has gone in on this, or at least some of the other candidates that you're going to be standing on stage with have gone with this. | ||
| Yeah, it's been really interesting for me because, like, I was, you know, it's like, I've been, like, a, you know, Democrat, and, like, I thought, it's like, hey, it's like, I'm just like you guys, like. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who cares? | |
| Who cares? | ||
| But the odd thing is, I don't mean the people on stage necessarily, but they, the people that buy into these ideas, would look at you and go, okay, well, he's Asian, and because of the way Asians are socioeconomically successful and families stay together and all these things, your markers of identity are the ones that get punished. | ||
| I mean, obviously, I'm sure I don't have to tell you about what happened with Harvard and the Asian students that they wanted to deflate the numbers on, and it's like, no one gave your parents from Taiwan anything when they got here, but they want you to be punished because they worked hard and now you work hard. | ||
| Well, you know, it's like the Asian American identity, certainly it's got like its own distinct place in like the sort of like, you know, identity hierarchy, I suppose. | ||
| I would say a very precarious place, unfortunately. | ||
| But, like, the case I'm making is, like, look, my parents came here to have a better life for me and my brother, and it's worked. | ||
| And now I'm trying to give back. | ||
| And that's, you know, been my experience as an American. | ||
| I'm a very proud American. | ||
| And I want to try and make this country stronger so that my kids and, you know, other people's kids grow up in a country that we're all still excited about. | ||
| And we do not have that much time to make that happen, because things are coming apart very quickly. | ||
| All right, so let's knock out a few more. | ||
| How about immigration? | ||
| That's not controversial. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Talk to me. | |
| I'm for a path to citizenship for people who are here and undocumented. | ||
| We have over 12 million people who are here. | ||
| Trying to deport that many people is impossible. | ||
| It would collapse regional economies. | ||
| It would be completely inhumane. | ||
| And so the choices are one of three things. | ||
| One, pretend you can deport them even though it would be like a complete catastrophe on multiple levels. | ||
| Yeah, and nobody really wants to do that. | ||
| I mean, I guess someone does, but when you really say, all right, we have all these people and what it would really take Yeah. | ||
| In government force to rip people out of homes and all that stuff. | ||
| Yeah, it would be, it would just be like the worst chapter in American history to like even try. | ||
| And we'd fail at it. | ||
| So what is a pathway? | ||
| So I get path, you want an opportunity to do that. | ||
| So what does that actually mean? | ||
| They have to first say, I'm here, right? | ||
| Yeah, and we all know that whatever path you create, a lot of people are never going to opt into it because they just don't trust us, the government, whatever. | ||
| But if you opted in, pay your taxes, no criminal record, and then you abide by these requirements and keep a clean record for a number of years, I'm thinking like, or the official proposal we have is 18 years. | ||
| And at the end of that time, then you would become a citizen if you pass certain requirements. | ||
| And then in this, during this period, then you have this new class of citizenship that's essentially like a legal resident. | ||
| Right, and is there anything they don't get in that time? | ||
| Because I think a lot of people that are legal immigrants, let's say a legal immigrant two years into the country, looks at the illegal immigrant, I mean, we're seeing this weird tension now, and I think in a lot of the Hispanic communities where they're going, wait a minute, I did what I had to do, I followed the rules, I did all of those things, and now you're gonna suddenly let people who snuck in or used family trickery or whatever it is to get in, they're gonna somehow jump ahead or get benefits that I didn't get, Well, that's one reason why the waiting period would need to be really substantial. | ||
| But we also do need to try and rationalize our process for people who are here and have green cards, for people who study at American universities. | ||
| We should be fighting to keep those people instead of kicking them out of the country. | ||
| Like, if you come here and get a degree from one of our universities, we don't want you to go home and compete against us. | ||
| Like, stick around! | ||
| You know, it's like, it's a great place to Yeah. | ||
| To build a life. | ||
| We do need to enforce the border. | ||
| I'm not someone who thinks that open borders are realistic. | ||
| So what does that mean, though, actually enforcing the border? | ||
| Well, we need to actually put the resources to work. | ||
| So if you dig into what's going on in the border, right now we have hundreds of open positions that we can't even hire for because no one wants to live down there. | ||
| And the turnover is really high. | ||
| And that service pays less than just about any other service. | ||
| So it's like, huh, let me see, am I going to go live on the southern border and get paid less and have very little room for advancement and be away from my family and civilization? | ||
| It got so bad that that service hired a big consulting firm, I think Accenture, and paid them millions of dollars to figure out how to hire people better. | ||
| Just how to get somebody down there. | ||
| Yeah, and I think it ended up getting them 12 applicants or something. | ||
| It was like $12 million later, they got 12 applicants. | ||
| So we have actual execution problems. | ||
| on the southern border. | ||
| It's one reason why the wait periods are so long. | ||
| It's like you show up and, you know, we're just understaffed there. | ||
| And then you end up with sometimes very tragic results. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Do you think there's technological answers to some of this? | ||
| Some, yes. | ||
| Most of it, no. | ||
| Like, I dug into it and was trying to figure out how technology could help. | ||
| And most of it is old school, unfortunately, for now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you can sort of have surveillance, but you actually have to have sort of people there, basically. | ||
| Yeah, most of it, yes. | ||
| Let's talk about abortion. | ||
| So I told you right before we started, so I am pro-choice, I've been pro-choice my entire life. | ||
| I can treat people who are pro-life respectfully, and I've had many of them on here and have had interesting conversations. | ||
| I think that the abortion one brings out something in the national dialogue that sort of gets to the heart of all of the anger, where it's like, you know, if you're on the right, you say that the left hates babies, and if you're on the left, you say that the right hates women. | ||
| That's just an absolutely false choice, but that's really what we're being thrown at all the time. | ||
| You are pro-choice, but you wanna explain that a little bit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I agree with you that right now it's getting culturally freighted, but I think that women should have the ability to make their own determination. | ||
| It's a deeply personal decision. | ||
| I mean, in an ideal society, whenever a woman is getting pregnant, she should be excited to, like, you know, like, bring that baby into the world. | ||
| But, like, that's not the world we live in. | ||
| And so, I want to protect women's reproductive rights in any way I can. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you have a cutoff point? | |
| Is there a set amount of weeks or months at that point? | ||
| Well, certainly, I find late-term abortions to be, like, you know, really problematic. | ||
| But my understanding is that those are extraordinarily rare, unless there's some sort of medical circumstance. | ||
| And so I would be reluctant to have some sort of date cut off, because, again, in my view, it should be up to the woman what to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So six months. | ||
| A woman has a perfectly viable fetus at six months, and you would still give her that choice? | ||
| I would. | ||
| Yeah, it's really tough. | ||
| I mean, I've heard a lot of good arguments against it, but I respect your position. | ||
| All right, I got two more for you. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Non-policy. | ||
| Let's just talk about the future. | ||
| And I'm gonna try to end on a positive note. | ||
| I actually have that rule, too. | ||
| It's like, I'm gonna try to sort of end on a positive note. | ||
| Yeah, well, let's end on, I don't wanna end in scorchery, right? | ||
| Because I tend to be a little bit depressing. | ||
| Not really, though. | ||
| You know, it's weird because I think people think if you talk about serious issues that somehow you're depressing or you're like, you know, too much of a realist or something like that. | ||
| But it's like, without this, this is the only thing that can give us hope. | ||
| It's not just the slogans that are gonna give us hope. | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| So thank you for not calling me depressing. | ||
| Let me see what you have. | ||
| I may need you to dump the water on your head either way at the end of this. | ||
| Let's see how this goes. | ||
| So I want you to just paint two futures. | ||
| These are the last two things I'm going to ask you. | ||
| I want you to paint one future. | ||
| If things really go that meltdown route and continue to destabilize and we don't heed the warnings and we don't bring in leaders that can honestly fix these things, And then, obviously, the positive one is, okay, we start getting a handle on these issues. | ||
| How does some of what seemingly feels like it's spinning out of control, how does some of that actually come back? | ||
| Like, how do we reconstitute? | ||
| Yeah, so give me the version if we just screw this thing up. | ||
| In my view, the greatest experiment ever is the United States. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And give me the vision of if we really just don't fix these problems, what this looks like in 20 years, and then the reverse of that. | ||
| So in 20 years, if we don't... | ||
| Change our ways. | ||
| You're going to wind up with the most unequal society in the history of the world, economically. | ||
| Like a winner-take-all economy on a scale that we can barely imagine. | ||
| And we're already at one of the most extreme points in our history right now. | ||
| Maybe the most extreme point. | ||
| But this is before technology and capital converge to really create wealth at a scale | ||
| that right now most of us can barely fathom. | ||
| And unfortunately, that wealth right now is going to get concentrated in the hands of | ||
| a smaller and smaller group of companies and individuals. | ||
| And the reverse will be true at the bottom, where people will be looking around, and their | ||
| paths forward and their livelihoods are going to disappear more and more. | ||
| So one of the stats that I find most depressing is that the rates of interstate migration | ||
| right now are at multi-decade lows in the United States. | ||
| So people aren't moving for new opportunities, they're hunkering down. | ||
| So think about what that means, that if you keep having the opportunities diminish in | ||
| these places, but people just hunker down and stay, that you wind up with a real degradation | ||
| of your way of life, of your culture, of your society. | ||
| That's how you see these massive drug problems. | ||
| And then you pile some climate change on top of that, where a lot of these towns, you know, | ||
| are going to unfortunately bear the brunt of a change in climate. | ||
| And then our government will not be able to ever come to any sort of meaningful agreement | ||
| and solutions. | ||
| You'll have polarization ideologically around the country. | ||
| You'll have these left and right factions that really are just talking past each other, watching different media channels, getting completely different news from social media feeds and fragmented media. | ||
| The average American's way of life will start to suffer and our faith in institutions, which has already collapsed, will just stay low and decline even further. | ||
| That's, to me, the path of least resistance right now. | ||
| Yeah, you didn't throw in zombies or alien invasion or any of that stuff. | ||
| Riding truckers and self-driving pizza delivery cars, which we'll find both delightful and mildly dystopian. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Skynet takes over the whole thing. | ||
| OK, so that's the negative one. | ||
| Now give me the one if we start getting a handle on some of these issues. | ||
| So the positive vision of the future is that we realize that we're in an age of unprecedented prosperity and wealth and resources. | ||
| And we start recalibrating the way we measure our economy. | ||
| Instead of GDP, which is a measurement we made up almost 100 years ago, we start aiming towards our own health and mental health. | ||
| and childhood success rates and environmental quality and freedom from substance abuse, | ||
| and things that we're actually excited about, and say, these are actually going to be the | ||
| new measurements of economic progress. | ||
| We start distributing some of this $20 trillion bounty as fast as possible, and then get Americans | ||
| around the country oriented towards actually trying to figure out what kind of work that | ||
| they want to do, what kind of work that we want to do. | ||
| We build new institutions to provide new pathways of structure, purpose, fulfillment and meaning. | ||
| We start holding more of these institutions that right now are bloated and inefficient. | ||
| We start trying to bring them back into line with the rest of society in terms of like | ||
| their mission and resources and alignment. | ||
| And we have this opportunity. | ||
| All right. | ||
| identity that stands the test of time, and we're able to look up and say, | ||
| we're excited about our shared progress, and that when that person wins, | ||
| even if that person's different from me, or that person lives in another part of the country, | ||
| like I'm benefiting from that, because I'm a shareholder of this country, | ||
| and when that person wins, then my dividend goes up a tiny, tiny bit. | ||
| All right, since we did two plus hours, and I didn't try to get ya, | ||
| I just wanted to hear your ideas, which I have, can you do me a favor? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Can you just tell me? | ||
| Can I win the whole thing? | ||
| You got it, Dave! | ||
| Can you become President of the United States? | ||
| So I said I'd talk to the President of the United States. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| Can you tell Mayor Pete that I'm not such a bad guy? | ||
| Really, in the scheme of how silly this whole thing is. | ||
| Okay, here we go. | ||
| I'm literally going to see him this weekend in Iowa, and I will say to him, hey, I had this incredible two-hour-plus conversation with Dave Rubin, and you should really talk to Tim about going on. | ||
| I will do that. | ||
| Least I could do. | ||
| This has been an absolute pleasure. | ||
| I think this is what can fix some of this craziness. | ||
| And hopefully you get to the 130. | ||
| Well, I have no doubt you're getting to the 130. | ||
| So I look forward to tracking this. | ||
| And how about we do this again? | ||
| Well, maybe before you're president, but if you become president, then I'm certainly coming to knock on the door. | ||
| This has been a lot of fun. | ||
| So I'll tell you what. | ||
| One, after I'm in the White House, we'll do a special Rubin Report from the White House. | ||
| Love it. | ||
| But two, I'd be happy to come back even before then. | ||
| Yeah, let's do it, my friend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| And you guys can check out at Andrew Yang on Twitter and hashtag Yang Gang. | ||
| And it's Yang2020.com, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's right. |
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