Andrew Yang details his "Freedom Dividend," a $1,000 monthly UBI funded by taxing tech giants to counter automation's threat to 92% of non-STEM jobs. He contrasts this direct cash transfer with Democratic job guarantees, arguing the latter creates bureaucracy while his plan avoids incentivizing automation or harming small businesses. Yang advocates for Medicare for All, school choice, and immigration reform, warning that without addressing inequality and polarization, the U.S. risks catastrophic social disintegration. Ultimately, he envisions a prosperous future where GDP yields to metrics like well-being, urging a shift from identity politics to consensus-building before confirming his campaign plans for Iowa. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.