Joe Rogan Experience #1245 - Andrew Yang

five four we'll talk about it yeah yes and we're live hello hey Joe welcome thank you it's great to be here thanks for having me my pleasure Sam Harris sends his regards yeah Sam's a beautiful man he is I love that guy and he's one of the reasons why you're here so universal basic income this is what this is all about yes yeah that's what my campaign for president is all about that's a an interesting like focus of a campaign and and very unusual and I mean four years ago you'd never even thought that that would have a chance at all but this is a subject that has been gaining momentum and it made it I made a big shift because I had my friend Eddie Wong on once and he was the first person to bring it up and my initial knee-jerk reaction was get the [ __ ] out here like universal basic income just gonna give people money they're just gonna be lazy nothing's ever gonna get done that's a terrible idea and then I started paying attention to the rise of AI and automation and how many jobs are gonna get taken away and then once you see the actual numbers it's pretty staggering yeah and that's how I got there Joe like I spent the last seven years running an organization that I'd started called venture for America and we helped create about 3,000 jobs in Detroit Cleveland st. Louis Birmingham New Orleans other cities around the country and I saw that we're pouring water into a bathtub that has a giant hole ripped in the bottom and that for every 5 10 50 jobs that my entrepreneurs are gonna create we're gonna lose 5 10 50,000 jobs it's not something that people intuitively suspect could be a real issue either it's it's one of the ones where you kind of have to let go shake people like hey look at this this is coming there's a cliff we're going towards this cliff it's it's darker still and that so when I was digging into the numbers I found that it's not this cliff that we're heading towards it's actually more of a curve that we're on what I've been telling people is that we're in the third inning now where one of the main reasons why Donald Trump won in 2016 is that we automated away four million manufacturing jobs that were based in Michigan Pennsylvania Ohio Wisconsin Missouri Iowa all the swing states he needed to win in the center of the country and a lot of that was just manufacturing work and if you go to a factory you'll see it says giant robot arms as far as the eye can see so it's not just that you have artificial intelligence on the horizon it's that we've been eating away at the most common jobs in the US economy for almost 20 years now and it's just now hitting a point where it's pushing more and more unskilled men in particular out of the workforce now are there other alternatives that you've considered other than just universal basic income like educating people about this being a real issue and perhaps pushing them or directing them towards other occupations yeah so that that's the recipe that most people are attracted to so I just want to unpack the numbers a little bit more so people have a sense of it I was just with a bunch of truck drivers in Iowa last week and there's a guy Dennis bagasse key that gave me a ride from Altoona to Grinnell and Iowa where I've been campaigning and the truth of it Joe is that there are three and a half million truck drivers in this country right now it's the most common job in 29 states and the average trucker is a 49 year old guy with a high school education maybe ex-military like Dennis was and they're making like fifty thousand dollars a year so then if you say hey I'm gonna retrain half a million truck drivers for what exactly is like issue number one right and then these guys didn't love school 30 years ago it's not like driving a truck has made them really excited about the idea yeah and then the new job you're training them for I looked into the data as to how good we were at retraining let's say displaced manufacturing workers in the Midwest when we started decimating their jobs and we're terrible at like according to independent studies government-funded retraining programs had a success rate of between zero and 15% in real life like this is what actually happened to the workers of Michigan and Indiana and Ohio and so if you say we're gonna retrain these people then you also have to come up with a way for us to become amazing at something that right now we're really really bad at and if you were an employer which you are would you rather employ a 50 year old former truck driver with health problems who got some certificate or would you rather hire a 25 year old kid who went to Community College is probably cheaper has lower expectations and his skills are natively going to be a little fresher I mean if you were an employer you'd probably choose number two I agree but I'm I mean I'm trying to look at this through rose-colored glasses I guess welcome to thank you if there's a way that these people can adapt you know I mean some will for sure you can retrain and rescale some people but if you look at even the conversations we're having around this where people legitimately talk about retraining coal miners to be software engineers stuff that on the face of it makes no sense but the the reason why we're stretching for that is because we're looking for some kind of retraining oriented solution when the numbers show that that's just not going to be the recipe there for actual success and this is where this whole learned to code controversies coming out online where people are actually getting banned for writing learn to code it's a really a hot subject on Twitter and it's very confusing too and I haven't really gotten an explanation for why that's such an offensive thing to say but people are getting banned or even joking around saying learn to code and it's very weird but the idea behind it is that it's kind of preposterous to ask someone who doesn't have an education to do something that's as difficult as code computer language yeah and unfortunately we're gonna get to a point where AI can do some basic coding at a certain level so if you think about the impulse to say learn to code what it's really saying is you need to do something that the market values mmm-hmm it's like hey being a truck driver the markets not going to value that much when the truck start driving themselves in the next five to ten years so what does the market value and then people are like well coding and stem and and engineering skills and so there's a drive to try and push people in those directions but if you look at the numbers about 8% of American jobs right now are in STEM fields like in technology engineering math etc so you talking about 92 percent of the population that is not in those fields and it's unrealistic to expect that 92% to somehow shift into the eight percent right in there even be places for them there yeah that's true too even if they perfectly seamlessly transition there's too many people for those jobs yeah so I've been driven to universal basic income in part because I've been looking at the numbers the five most common jobs in the United States right now are administrative and clerical work retail and sales food service and food prep truck driving and transportation and manufacturing those five jobs comprise about half of all American jobs only 32 percent of Americans graduate from college so the average American is a high school grad doing one of these five jobs and if you look at it technology is already doing a number on each of these jobs like the first administrative and clerical includes call center workers and AI is in the process of taking over that job retail and sales 30% of malls are closing in the next four years so that the danger here is to think of it as artificial intelligence is coming it's actually already eating up the most common jobs in our economy and it's driving Americans into distress in various ways in the numbers now when you're talking about universal basic income - there's two questions to come up how much money and where is it coming from yeah so first I want to say that if you look at the heritage of universal basic income it's a deeply American idea where Thomas Paine was forward at the founding of the country and then Martin Luther King was for it Milton Friedman the Godfather of conservative economists was for it and one state has had it in effect for 37 years where everyone in that state gets between one and two thousand dollars a year no questions asked this is Alaska yeah it's Alaska and they funded with oil money and what I'm going around telling people is that technology is the oil of the 21st century so I know you spoke to another guest about hey how do you get let's say approximately three trillion dollars a year to fund universal basic income and the great thing is that it's well the first thing is it's not actually three trillion and the reason why it's not three trillion is that if you look at what we're currently doing we have we're spending about 1.5 trillion right now 126 welfare programs and Social Security and so if you show up to someone's door and say hey here's a dividend of $1,000 a month but if you're already getting more than a thousand dollars and stuff we're not just gonna stack it on top you know we're gonna just gonna say you're guaranteed a thousand and if you're already getting more than this doesn't touch you you can keep your current stuff if you're getting 700 and and whatnot then you can just get 300 on top so the three trillion actually shrinks a lot very fast because of the fact that about half of Americans are already getting various income support from the government so the real price tag is closer to about 1.8 trillion if you say everyone who's 18 and up now for context the entire US economy is now 20 trillion up five trillion in the last 12 years and the federal budgets four trillion so you're looking at 1.8 trillion it's a lot of money but it's actually manageable and one of the things that I haven't heard discussed here with you is that when you put money into people's hands the money doesn't disappear like if I gave you a thousand bucks a month it probably would not make a big difference in the economy because they're just going to your account somewhere and you know nothing would happen but we all know that right now most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck 57 percent of Americans can't afford an unexpected $500 bill so you put $1,000 a month into their hands it's gonna go right back in the economy they're gonna spend it on food child care car repairs they've been putting off the occasional night out and then all of those businesses end up hiring more people and then we end up getting some of the money back as tax revenues so of the 1.8 trillion you were gonna get back let's call it 400 billion in new tax receipts because everyone's gonna be spending more money we're gonna save one to two hundred billion on things like incarceration and homelessness services and emergency room health care I was in New Hampshire last month and a prison guard said to me there's a prison guard he said we should pay people to stay out of jail because we waste so much money when they're in jail like he sees all the waste in the system so if you imagine a society where everyone's getting a thousand bucks a month that's like a it's a great incentive to try and stay out of jail because you know you stop getting hit if you wind up in jail and it reduces recidivism because when you mataji at least you have you know a thousand bucks a month waiting for you and then you're less inclined to to commit a crime and head back in how much crime do you think you'd actually prevent though by giving people a thousand dollars a month I mean think most of the people that are doing crime whether it's thief thievery or assault they're not thinking this out you know this is this is just either a way of life for them either you know they're they've got real mental issues or a pattern of behavior that they can't break I really don't think that $1,000 a month is gonna fix any of that well it's not gonna fix all of it for sure and we will still have jails it's not like you know Silver Bullet you know but at the margins would it keep like that person who's falling through the cracks and feels like they have no place in society and maybe they you know it's like the people around them are also like hey you know you don't have any value and though you get a thousand bucks a month maybe like it keeps them off at the margins and everything we're talking about is at the margins I mean everything's like this statistical curve and you're taking the people who are let's call it like the last 10 to 20 percent but if you reduce our incarcerated population by 10 to 20 percent I mean that's billions and billions of dollars so you you're saving money on a bunch of things we spend like about a trillion dollars on right now like health care incarceration homelessness services and then the the magic is that if you have a thousand bucks a month and you're a parent so you feel this that studies have shown that your kids are healthier better nourished more likely to graduate from high school and get further education mental health improves relationships improve domestic violence Goes Down hospital visits go down and your worker productivity goes up I mean you're an entrepreneur and CEO so you know when you run a company you say I'm gonna invest in my people I'm gonna like treat them well and try and train them and give them resources because you know that'll increase your productivity as an organization in the public sector we have the opposite approach where like if I can just avoid spending money on you said you know I'm gonna somehow save money when we end up spending that money in very very dark costly counter two ways in the backend because they wind up you know in our institutions and our institutions just spend a truckload of money so if you look at the cost savings and the value gains and the economic growth that actually gets you back about a trillion dollars or the 1.8 this is like the trickle up economy because none of the money disappears it goes right back into the economy and the way you get the last eight hundred billion or so is related to what we think is happening with AI and all these advanced technologies because if you look at who's gonna win with AI and self-driving cars and trucks the savings from robot trucks are estimated to be a hundred sixty eight billion dollars a year just from that one thing so the problem is that the American public is going to see very little of that money because the winners are gonna be the trillion dollar tech companies that are great it is not paying a lot of taxes they'll move it through Ireland Amazon will say didn't make any money this quarter no reason to pay taxes and so what we need to do is we need to put in a new tax that actually gets the American public a slice of every robot truck mile Amazon transaction facebook ad and every other industrialized country already has this tax it's called a value-added tax and because our economy is so vast at 20 trillion a value-added tax that even half the European level generates about 800 billion in new revenue and that gets you all the way there so this is much more achievable and affordable than most people think when they start unpacking how the numbers work out so essentially it'll be the biggest corporations the the companies that gain or that have the largest revenue they're gonna be paying most of this yeah but they're gonna get some of that money back obviously because how the things I say to the CEOs it's like if everyone in Missouri is getting a thousand bucks you know Amazon's gonna see some of that because they're just gonna buy more stuff right that's true for all of the big companies what I say to CEOs and I've spoken to groups of dozens of CEOs what's really bad for your business is when people don't have money to spend what's good your businesses when they do so they're gonna give up some money at the top and my thing just gonna end up getting it back when their consumers end up spending a bit more it has just been actually fleshed out like the the real numbers or the projections of how we're gonna get back yeah yeah like the so the Roosevelt Institute studied this plan of everyone getting a thousand bucks a month and projected it would create two million new jobs and grow the economy by eight to ten percent and then you can model out what that means to each business because in that climate they're gonna see a similar uptick in revenues did they factor in all the jobs that are going to be lost so one of the things that's a misconception about universal basic income is that it somehow will like facilitate job loss well for job losses though is the reason for universal basic income in the first place right yeah yeah which way in the midst of right now like right now is we're sitting here together the labor force participation rate in the United States is sixty-three percent which is the same levels as El Salvador in the Dominican Republic that's right now like 94 million or so Americans have left the workforce over the last number of years now a lot of that's natural demographics a lot of that's people in school but about five million of it is unskilled men who have gotten pushed out of the workforce so till again this is not like you know we're gonna solve a problem that's coming down the pike like we're actually in the middle of this problem so if you put a thousand bucks a month into people's hands it actually grows the economy and creates jobs because of more economic activity now when you say a problem that's coming down the pike what what are the projections in terms of life a timeline yes so there are a lot of the projections are actually pretty consistent with each other which means they're probably right so the so Bane says you're looking at between 20 and 30 percent of jobs subject to automation by 2030 which is pretty soon it's like 11 years from now McKenzie says about 25 percent the Obama White House literally like their last day in office they issued a report saying hey guys we're gonna automate away all the jobs and then like you know turn the lights off they said eighty-three percent of jobs that make less than twenty dollars an hour will be subject to automation by 2030 MIT is saying the same thing and so we have 11 years to try and accelerate meaningful solutions and this 11 years it's not like it all happens on thirty it's gonna happen between now and then progressively according to all of the major institutions that have looked at this now when you take a guy who's working as a truck driver and he's making $50,000 a year and you tell him that automation is gonna take away his job but good news we're gonna give you twelve thousand dollars a year that's a substantial loss in income and yeah it leaves them in yeah it also leaves them with this feeling of uselessness or hopelessness that they're not contributing you know I think one of the things that people enjoy is earning their own way you know they people don't it sounds counterintuitive people don't like free money they like a feeling of satisfaction of a job well done that they've created something they've done something yeah you're a hundred percent right it's one reason why we call this the freedom dividend we say look it's not money for nothing you're an owner and chair holder of the richest country in the history of the world just like when I buy Verizon or Microsoft they send me a dividend like I don't complain about that like you're now a shareholder in this great nation and you get a dividend but when I was with Dennis the trucker who owns his own trucking company in Iowa the the role that jobs playing in truckers lives is vital and again I'm a very data-driven guy where men deal with joblessness very very poorly yeah by the numbers we spend between forty and seventy five percent of our time on the computer playing video games or doing other things our substance abuse goes up our volunteering and the community goes down even though we have more time hmm and we generally spiral into antisocial and self-destructive behaviors now this is not something that's experienced by women in the same levels like women and joblessness women actually a more adaptable they're more likely to go back to school and volunteer they don't spend all their time on the computers the way that we do so there's a real problem and the purpose of universal basic income is not meant to be a job replacement for those truckers because right now those truckers and when I talked to the truck driver so I've been campaigning for president now for a number of months so I spent a lot of time in Iowa which is a really huge trucking hub and you go to them and say hey guys you worried about robot trucks taking your jobs they're like there's no way a robot could take my job like that that's you know that's like totally matter-of-fact there like that like this is not something that they worry about their attitude has transitioned from that somewhat - we should make robot trucks illegal or we should make it so that a robot truck cannot displace me so that's been a big shift because a year ago they were like it's impossible the idea that a American would say we should make a robot job illegal like it's we should have some laws that keep you from being free to use robots for your business instead of person like you should be forced to highly mandatory unionization or something that sounds pretty ridiculous well that's where a lot of them are Joe so only 13% of truckers are unionized so 87% are like Dennis where there are small independent firms mhm and a lot of them actually bought or leased their own trucks so they took out tens of thousands of dollars in the equivalent of a mortgage to get this truck and so if they have to compete against a robot truck that doesn't stop that's like you know that's existential level stuff yeah and right now truck drivers have time use regulations where they cannot drive more than 14 hours a day so you can't you literally cannot compete right because the robot trucks just gonna keep going our 15 16 17 yeah etc so these guys make some of them make really good money like some of them make 70 75 80 thousand dollars it's one of the higher paying jobs for men without a you know college degree and so if you look at what they're facing it's not so crazy that they're like hey you need to make the robots illegal because for them what is the next best economic alternative if the robot trucks take over that job like what they go from yeah it's not crazy for them but it's a crazy idea to tell a company that they can't do something that's more efficient safer than probably economically more viable oh yeah again the savings from automating truck driving are estimated to be a hundred sixty eight billion dollars per year and not just labor savings but also equipment utilization because the trucks never stop fuel efficiency because the trucks can daisy-chain together so there's less wind resistance mhm fewer accidents because right now truck accidents kill about four thousand people a year so you probably save lives there's a very very powerful argument for the fact that we should be trying to automate this stuff yeah but on the other side you have literally three and a half million truckers who rely upon this for their livelihoods to support their family and there's gonna be a lot of passion a lot of resistance to this anyone who thinks that truck drivers are just gonna shrug and be like alright I guess I had a good run I'm just gonna go home and figure it out that's not gonna be their response right it's gonna be much more likely that they say you need to make these robot trucks illegal or they're just gonna park their trucks across the highway get their guns out because a lot of these guys are ex-military and just be like hey like I'm not moving my truck until you know I get my job back and there'll be a lot of truckers in the same situation you really think that would happen well I think we blocked the highway for their job back that's less efficient kills more people so I was with these truckers in the truck stop in Altoona Iowa and Joe they have really really difficult jobs I mean I don't know if you knew truckers where you were but they're they have this 14 hour window where they're allowed to drive their truck and they drive most of that so they have these other ten hours and they sleep in their truck the trucks have a bed they go into the truck stop they take a shower and there's a laundry and they're like plugged into this machine of this truck of an end the industry you know they spend days sometimes weeks on the road a lot of them listen to podcasts probably a lot of them listening right now a lot of them listen to podcasts and they're doing it primarily because it's a more lucrative opportunity than the other jobs that are available to them a lot of them have families that like you know like supporting their families and so if you say hey guys like you know times up for this way of life most of them I think will not like like I look at how much they frankly they like injurer there's so much endurance baked into that job yeah that I think most of them will be like some of the guys you and I know where they're much more likely to like implode or like you know do something where where it's self-destructive than they would be to take their truck in you know park it across the highway hmm but you're talking about a population of hundreds of thousands including many small business owners and small business owners have a different mentality very often like I've been an entrepreneur I'm a serial entrepreneur for like last 20 years like you're an entrepreneur and if you saw this happen you might say hey I'm adaptable I'll figure it out or you might say hey I think I can do something about this like if I park my truck this way like that's going to cause such havoc that it's you know it's like hundreds of millions of dollars worth of economic harm very very fast and if you look at the Industrial Revolution which people cite as the precursor to what we're going through there were mass riots in the industrial revolution that killed dozens of people caused billions of dollars worth of damage Labor Day is a holiday today because of those riots and then we implemented universal high school in nineteen eleven in part as a response to these riots so according to the estimates this is called the fourth Industrial Revolution and we're going to displace jobs at three to four times the rate of that Industrial Revolution and that Industrial Revolution included mass riots so thinking that this one will not strikes me as really really optimistic and perhaps unrealistic mmm what do you see coming when when you when you think that these jobs are going to be automated and then universal basic income is going to supplement their in it's gonna give them some money $1,000 a month but where do they go from there I mean how do people exist on twelve thousand dollars a year like what do they do like how do they adapt to this new world right so the first thing you have to do is you have to look at what lies ahead if we do nothing right so the the way it's going to play out is that self-driving trucks are slowly going to start Hina waise amazon's testing them out right now and the first stage is going to be that there is a human driver just sitting there as a fail-safe and the trucks going to drive itself now my friends in Silicon Valley are working on tella operators which is so the trucks have right now like a 98% accuracy level which is not very high because you can't have 2% semi trucks like running into things so the way they're trying to get the last percent or so is they're equipping trucks with tella operating software which means that a trucker a tella operator in Nevada or Arizona will beam into the truck and just be able to see out the front like a video game like let you know it's like drone operating but instead is a truck and right you beam in and then you just steer the truck and tell the computers like I got it from here and then you beam out that's what they're working on to try and get catch that last bit of uncertainty so the innovations are having it again Joe we're talking about one hundred sixty eight billion dollars a year like everything becomes possible when you're looking at that much money so in the absence of anyone doing anything the robot trucks will start reducing shifts of various truckers I would say six to ten years from now and so then there'll be a bunch of reactions now trucking firms already have massive shortages they can't find enough people that's one reason why they're trying to automate this job as fast as they are because they're literally like you know they're short like a couple hundred thousand truckers right now and people don't want to go into this field for a variety of reasons the main thing being it's like extraordinarily brutal on you physically very very bad for your family life - because you're away all the time yeah something like 88% of truckers have an early marker for chronic disease like oh you know like substance abuse diabetes obesity high blood pressure so along those lines and now people think that the jobs going to disappear in the next five to ten years you can't get people in so if you play out what happens when the robot trucks start reducing shifts then there'll be people trying to flee the field of trucking and then if it becomes really dramatic where the robots start driving let's say between western yeah and Nevada and then human beings get in in those states and then take it the rest of the way because the robots won't be reliable enough to drive in urban areas they'll be reliable enough to drive on an interstate but they just have to make a few decisions then there'll be a massive depletion of truck driving opportunities and then in my mind a lot of suicides a lot of self destruction and I don't say that lightly I say that based upon the fact that that's what happened the manufacturing workers where if you unpack what happened to the manufacturing workers of Michigan Ohio Indiana suicide rates spiked to a point where now our life expectancy as a country has declined for the last three years because of suicides and drug overdoses it's the first time that's happened since the great flu pandemic of 1918 like we are actually coming apart as a country by the numbers so what happened to the manufacturing workers will then happen to the trucker's but at a even more dramatic scale so you'll see truckers going home and drinking themselves to death or doing drugs and overdosing or killing themselves and then eventually there'll be an outbreak of violence because some truckers will say instead of killing myself how about I go bust up a robot truck and there are already truckers that are doing things like blocking Tesla recharging stations and electronic vehicle battery stations because they don't like electronic trucks sword those are pickup trucks though those are [ __ ] I mean this is not like people doing it because they they think that these tesla recharge stations are taking jobs away they're just being [ __ ] exactly Jo so if you're gonna be a [ __ ] even though it really has nothing to do with you right imagine when you actually think your livelihood is being threatened then you can see it getting revved up you know to like a much higher level yeah so so I'm running for president in large part because I think we need to get in front of this set of problems we have to say look if we're gonna save a hundred sixty eight billion dollars a year maybe some of that should go to the truckers and give them a soft landing maybe we should have this universal basic income where everyone feels like they're getting a thousand bucks a month which is out-of-work replacement it's not gonna make their lives easy they still need to work but at least it takes the edge off it takes like the existential threat off and also their kids getting it so they feel like okay my kid actually has some kind of path to the future and it's not like if I lose this trucking job not only am I going to you know struggle and suffer but my kid will too so my plan as president is to install a trucker transitions are and say look it is your job to try and manage this transition for the three and a half million truckers in Joe we haven't even talked about the five million Americans who work at truckstops motels diners retail establishments all the places where the truckers stop every day just to get out eat a meal and you know like live a life I mean if you imagine those communities when the trucks don't stop there's gonna be a drying up of economic vitality on a level that's unprecedented in many of these communities this is something that I I'm just becoming aware of over the last year or two how when when you are out on the campaign trail and you know you're talking to media and you're discussing this with people how many people have no idea that this is coming well what I say to people Joe is I say have you noticed store is closing on your Main Street and then they say yes and I asked them why is that and then they reflect for a minute and then they say Amazon and I'm like yeah that's right it was getting twenty billion dollars of commerce every year and it's now tipping your malls and Main Street stories into oblivion you know and like is that gonna get better or worse because so some people say it's like hobb the robots like the robots are yours away and then you're like no it's not robots actually like walking around your neighborhood I mean of course that's unlikely but Amazon soaking up the business that used to go to your mall if you go to their fulfillment center it's robots as far as the eye can see if you go to their their warehouse you know it's also robots as far as far as the eye can see so when you ask how aware are people that this is happening it's one of those truths that as soon as you pointed out they're like oh yeah like I I knew that was what was up it's just for whatever reason I'm like the only person just laying out the facts and being like guys it's not your imagination like we actually are getting rid of the most common jobs in the US economy filled by high school graduates and then replacing them with a handful of jobs for higher skilled people in different places and then we're pretending that the first population is somehow gonna access the new opportunities when the odds of them getting up and like moving to Seattle or whatnot and becoming a web designer or like logistics manager or a big data scientist or something like essentially near zero and so this is what gave rise to a lot of the anger that got Donald Trump elected because they looked around their communities and we're like hey I used to work in this manufacturing plant this manufacturing plant no longer exists for whatever reason like I'm being told that it's somehow like my fault that I wasn't adaptable enough like I did you know I didn't somehow become a coders or something ridiculous then I have to say Joanne this is like something that I've picked up from Dennis in part so I'm with this trucker in Iowa and he says to me he says like I don't think that Democrats care about people like me and he says that to me while I'm in his truck and I'm just like I can understand why he feels that way but that's incredibly destructive because there's a point at which Democratic Party used to be very very heavily aligned with working-class Americans and there's now some kind of pathology that if the person who's suffering is a white man of a certain background than the suffering somehow is like somehow like diminished it doesn't count as much if they're a trucker and that's something that I find really destructive it's like we have to start acknowledging the source of the problems one thing I'm saying to people is like look it's not immigrants that are taking these jobs away like just facts it is not immigrants it is the fact that technology is pushing our economy in a direction that makes it harder and harder for many Americans to get by based upon this current I trade my time for money model now truckers seem to be the big one right yeah cashiers are another one yeah what are the other job that jobs that are going to be killed by automation so the the next obvious one is call center workers of course where there are two and a half million call center workers still in the United States generally high school graduates that make about $14 an hour now when you and I call a company we're like pounding Keys trying to get a human because the AI is so annoying yeah you know it's like hey but you know just like give me give me a person yeah but over the next number of months AI is going to become industry indistinguishable from a person yeah like the new Google answering service yeah that comes with the pixel phone so it's amazing yes and so that two and a half million call center population is gonna shrink a ton because after you get AI software that's better than one of them you know it can be most all of them you know it's not like 5,000 jobs that's potentially 500,000 jobs right I was at a conference of CEOs and I asked how many of them are looking at having AI replaced back office workers like various clerical functions every single hand went up there's going to be a lot of clerical work having systems talk to each other that's going to disappear and one CIO type of like a major bank said that his estimate was that's about 30 percent of the bank's workers fall into that category so you're looking at call center workers you're looking at back office workers you're looking at insurance brokers insurance is a very highly automated industry because it's a lot of information getting passed back and forth cashiers as you said truck drivers delivery drivers uber drivers I heard that it goes even as far as medical procedures there was a recent automated medical procedure where they did surgery on a grape yes yeah I see that yeah I saw that and China has already had just a complete automated dental implant ation because China actually has a real shortage of surgeons and so their incentives to try and automate this are very very high now the interesting thing here Joe is that let's say I made a robot surgeon tomorrow that was awesome could do better work than a lot of people mm-hmm right now the economic incentive still are not necessarily for everyone to use my robot surgeon because the regulations aren't there yet in the US and so healthcare is a really interesting one another one that's very clearly going to get taken up by AI is radiology and looking at tumors on a film because it turns out that a I can see shades of grey that a human eye cannot mmm and it can reference millions of films where the most experienced doctor can probably reference thousands and so radiology I'll tell you medical students are running from radiology as fast they can because they know that's gonna get taken up by AI man this is it's such a bleak forecast it's very strange when we stop and think about all the different things that human beings find value in as far as their occupation like hey imma this AMA that is what I do and the idea that these things are all gonna go away it's very it's kind of disturbing oh and when I was digging into the research show it's been happening and it's tearing us apart I mean I referenced the fact that so here are some things that are all tied halt all time are multi decade highs right now in the United States of America suicide drug overdoses anxiety and depression mental problems financial and security people being unable to pay their bills all of these things are at record highs and one thing III know you've talked about in the past that I think you'd really find fascinating so there's been there have been studies as to what happens to your mind when you can't pay your bills and and when you can't pay your bills you're like stressing out it's like if I pay this I can't pay that and there's like always the time money trade-off it's like oh if I spend extra time commuting maybe I can save a couple bucks and so what it does is it actually constrains your bandwidth to a point that your functional IQ goes down by 13 points or one standard deviation so just if you say to someone hey here's a bill you can't pay and then you give them IQ test it their score actually goes down by 13 points along that's like a really huge if now and so what we're doing right now Joe is we're actually making our population less rational less reasonable more impulsive more subject to bad ideas nastier more subject to things like racism and misogyny too because it turns out what happens with most of us is you need executive functioning to resist like racist and massage massage mystic impulses and so if I make you cash-strapped and make it so you can't pay your bills you're actually more likely to be like yeah like yeah like blame them so what what we're talking about again it's not this speculative future it's that we've been doing this for years and it's actually pushing our population into a mindset of scarcity of nastiness and that's why universal basic income is so crucial because it gets the boot off of people's throats and it replaces the mindset of scarcity with a mindset of abundance and rationality and optimism and capacity like I'm an entrepreneur you're an entrepreneur I'll tell you very very few entrepreneurs start businesses at a scarcity where they're like oh I can't pay my bills I guess I'm not like start a new company like most of them but $1,000 a month is even enough money for most people to pay for their rent well the great thing is again this thousand dollars is yours no matter what so right now let's say you're you're doing a normal job so if you make a million dollars a year you still get a thousand dollars a month yes yes you do I mean it's opt-in so you could opt in and take it which most Americans would because it still a thousand bucks a month yeah people get greedy yeah sure yeah thousand dollars to get my nails done yes yeah or give it away if they were you know they felt like it yeah yeah but that the this so those are the things that are at like all-time highs is like all these negative social indicators here things that are at all-time lows getting married starting a business having a kid moving for a new job all of those things are at historic lows in the United States of America having children really yeah we're at record low birth rates right now and it's largely because people feel too strapped to have kids I mean that's literally where we are when you say record low by like what percentage you can look up right now Jamie I know if you want to look this up but stories have come out over this last year saying that Americans are now at the lowest rate of child birth that has been the case and decades or ever yeah that's a conversation that I have with people whenever they say that they're worried about population but the population is growing so fast and over popular here goes one point eight-zero births per woman 2016 what does that mean so stropping yeah just from 1970 at a high - yeah what seems fairly fairly similar from 1980 to today that still love if it goes from 1.8 tell like if it goes from even something like 1.9 to 1.8 is like a pretty significant drop there it wasn't us birth dip to 30 or low hmm fertility rates sink further below replacement level and so you think so but the thought is that this is because of Education and that this is because if people are waiting longer to have children and that this is a byproduct of industrialization and modern world and that the more educated and affluent people get the less likely they are to have children then it's not the sign as far as what everything I've read about it is that that it's not a symptom of people doing poorly it's a symptom of people doing well you know there there are definitely cases where richer countries just have fewer kids yeah that's cool cuz they concentrate on their careers right not the idea but the the darker part of this Jo is that right now if you're a non college educated person in the United States the odds of you are ever getting married less than 50% no for the first time ever and then people are having fewer kids to play devil's advocate though the the marriage thing might be people looking at it and go god my parents got divorced my brother got divorced everybody else got divorced what the [ __ ] am i doing there are a lot of good reasons for it you know as a happily married man you know me as well I was talking don't do it I tell people don't do it it's just it's too risky yeah so so you could look at to me certainly to me getting married and having kids like an act of like prosperity or optimism there are reasons why it's going down otherwise but if you look at things like starting a new business I mean that being at multi-decade lows there's like no positive spin on that right people moving between states is now at multi-decade lows people moving for a new job multi-decade lows like I think this is the product of automation or it's the product of a bunch of different factors like internet but purchasing and marketing and think people buying most of their goods and it's a range of factors but one of the big problems and keep in mind I spent seven years helping entrepreneurs grow businesses in 18 cities around the country between 2011 2017 that was actually my job my job was to be the job creator guy hmm and so when you go out to these places you see that the dynamism is getting sucked up by certain markets to a level that's unprecedented in our history like that that the disparities between Cleveland and San Francisco or st. Louis in LA are much much higher than they've been at any other historical period both by the numbers and like after you actually go to the places you're like wow like this is not flourishing the way that you'd hope do you feel like an economic Paul Revere in a certain sense like the robots are coming the robots are coming I do it's weird man what the comparison I make is that if the United States economy is like an elephant you know the parable of like the people like you know blind people you know touching the elephant mm-hmm so I'm an entrepreneur I sold a company to a public company that was a national education company is based in New York what is the parable of blind people touching an elephant so what happens is they're they're like seven blind men and they they get asked like what is the what does an elephant look like and then one of them is touching the trunk and is like an elephant looks like a snake and another one's touching its leg and it's like an elephant looks like a tree trunk so that's the way most people experience the economy is that they're like touching a part of the economy and they're like this is what it looks like I mean like so I've had this really strange set of experiences where I sold a national education company to a public company I lived bicoastal II between New York and San Francisco for the last five years I've operated in 18 cities around the country I was a I was an appointee in the Obama administration in DC so I've actually seen the elephant if you know what I mean hmm like a whole elephant yeah like I'm like hanging out with the tech wizards in Silicon Valley and I'm like hey you know we can automate these jobs and they're like oh yeah we're not I mean you know so it's not a mystery and then bad people it's like hey it's my job to like matter and if you gave me a choice between making things work better and creating abundant opportunities for the other people I would choose that but I do not have that choice I have a job to do you know this is my job and what I tell people is like who's responsibility then is it to go tell the people look it's technology it's transforming the economy in fundamental ways and we need to make it so that everyone benefits and it's not just that this like hyper concentrated set of winners and then it's like huge army of relative losers and it's the government's job but at this point we've given up on our government as anything like it can't really do anything and so now it's no-one's job and so somehow Joe it has become my job and it blows my mind to sometimes now coming from a place of being a serial entrepreneur to this presidential candidate he's kind of warning people about the upcoming technological apocalypse as it were how did you make that transition and what was your motivation to get involved in this to the point we were actually running for president on this platform yeah so so sell a company in 2009 and that was the financial crisis like Wall Street it crashed the economy and I had personally taught these kids who'd worked at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and and McKenzie and I was like man we need smart kids to do something other than just head to Wall Street in Silicon Valley we need to have them go to Detroit st. Louis Baltimore and awhile and start businesses so I quit my job I donated low six figures to start this new organization and then we trained hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped create several thousand jobs so that was like my wholesome give back I was like hey I'm like you know the guy who just believes in entrepreneurship because just like you I freaking love entrepreneurs and I was like so here's the joke I used to tell I went to law school I was an unhappy lawyer for five months and so what I tell people is like if you're a clueless ambitious 22 year old who came out of college and you say to your parents hey I'm gonna go to law school they're gonna say that's great it's really easy to find the law school because they're just apply to it and the government will give you a hundred thousand dollar loan no quest and then if you say to your parents hey I want to be an entrepreneur your parents will think that's stupid it's hard to find and no one's gonna give you a hundred thousand dollar loan so we have this huge oversupply of indebted Law School graduates and a huge under supply of entrepreneurs was my thinking and so I was like okay how do you fix that so I started this organization venture for America to try and fix that and so imagine being this guy getting medals and awards for helping create jobs around the country and then realizing that automation is coming like a tidal wave and that your efforts that you're getting applauded for are really not gonna do the trick and then Donald Trump wins the election in 2016 and for whatever reason in my opinion the media is not being honest about all the economic drivers they're blaming racism Russia Facebook the FBI and if you look at the voter district data on a district-by-district basis there's a straight line up between the adoption of industrial robots in that voting district and the movement towards Trump mmm like it's a straight economic story where we blasted away four million manufacturing jobs in the swing states and Donald Trump is our president so imagine being me and then seeing that and being like okay I get it this is an economic technological story and then I went to people in Washington DC I was like hey guys what are we gonna do we're in the third inning of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country and the third inning has brought us Donald Trump the fourth fifth six things are going to be horrific what are we gonna do and then the answers I got were somewhere between disappointing and horrifying where if you go to mainstream politicians and you're like what are we gonna do the answers I got were literally number one we cannot talk about that number two we should study that we cannot talk about that was that's verbatim really yeah and why were they saying that because it seems alarmist like anti-progress or like you know you're like you know throwing stones at like like big tech companies and it's like I'm not throwing stones at anyone I'm just pointing out the fact so number one is so number one was can't talk about it number two was need to study it number three was the point you made originally which was we must educate and retrain Americans for the jobs of the future and then when I was like hey we're terrible at that by the numbers yeah then they'd literally be like well I guess we'll learn to get better at it then and then I so I came back to my home in New York City and I was like oh my gosh like we are so backward and far gone as certainly as a government and so then I was grappling with it and I'm a parent like you are and I looked at my kids and I was like am I really gonna bring them up in this [ __ ] show like and so then I was like okay how would you actually solve this problem if you if you had to do so and so then I said okay universal basic income rebranded the freedom dividend after we did a bunch of tests cuz it tests much better as the freedom dividend the universal basic income and and then try and make the rules of the economy work better for more people as fast as we can before this automation wave really crescendos what do you mean by that well to me like you know what I'm saying is like retail and truck driving are the two major major obvious sectors that are going to get displaced being a retail worker is the most common job in the United States right now the average retail worker is a 39 year old woman with a high school education making between 11 and 12 dollars an hour so what do those workers do when 30% of the malls and stores close in the next five years you know and then truckers are next in line you know by the five to ten year mark so I was like we have to get our acts together before these populations end up getting displaced and we know Americans don't have a ton of savings to fall back on it's not like they'll be like oh like you know let me take a month off to like think about it but that's not the real life situation most Americans live in experience so so this is all 2017 where I'm like doing the data research and saying like okay like what's the plan and then when I went to various politicians I was like there is no appetite for making this case there's no appetite for anyone even talking about this so the only thing I can see that would have a realistic chance of accelerating meaningful solutions to this automation wave in a five to ten year time frame is if I run for president and I either win which is very doable I can win or I mainstream this set of considerations to a point where other politicians are willing to tackle something like universal basic income and make it a reality in that timeframe anyone can win right I mean it is possible I mean there are voters people are voting but do you really believe that you can win well Joe I wouldn't be running if you wouldn't right I believe that but but if you were not you know I I appreciate the question and I've been very upfront the whole time is that if my ideas and policies become front and center and we get this done then if I'm not pres the United States like I'm perfectly happy with that like I'm on the record just being like I'm just trying to solve problems I'm an entrepreneur trying to solve a problem that said I'm already pulling at one percent nationally I'm tied with Kirsten Gillibrand and other national politicians right now as we're sitting here I have no idea Kirsti you Kirsten Gillibrand she's a senator from New York national politician normal morons like myself are not aware of that like I wouldn't have known that you were running if it wasn't for Sam yeah I appreciate that man but now happily everyone who's a fan of yours which is apparently everybody knows of Ruddick but so you're you're right that most people have never heard of Andrew yang and I'm already pulling at 1% enough for me to make the debates are you running as an independent I'm running as a Democrat because the mechanics make it such that that is necessary for you to be able to actually succeed and win hmm but I can go through with you the mechanics and you might enjoy this because I know you you and Sam and others sometimes talk politics and presidential politics so I'm an operator I'm an entrepreneur and so you get to and be like okay what does it take to be president so there are two rules to run for president one is you have to be 35 years or older check and then the second is natural-born citizen check only rules that's it so then you get into the process and you say okay the first two states to vote are Iowa and New Hampshire now they're gonna be about 20 people running for president as a Democrat this cycle you probably knew that right mm-hmm so you look at the Iowa caucus Iowa has a population of 3.1 million but only one hundred seventy-one thousand Iowans participated in the caucus in 2016 because it's a very high investment now they change the rules so this year it's going to be closer to like let's call it 250,000 but if you have 20 candidates to finish top three in a field at twenty you probably need about 40 to 50,000 Iowans to get on board so you say hey do do I think I can be present United States the threshold question is this can I get 40 to 50,000 Iowans on board with the idea that them and their family members getting $1,000 a month is a good idea that that would actually help improve their lives well I'm sure it would help improve their lives and I'm sure they would agree with you the question is what are the other thing you know see I don't think most people are aware that this is coming and I think you people and explaining all these statistics and seeing the forecast particularly from your position as a serial entrepreneur who has a deep background in business and you have a deep understanding of this you're helping in a tremendous way by educating people but I think most people have it maybe logically but they have different concerns so how do you address these other concerns like I bet if you polled people what are the issues what are the issues in this upcoming 2020 presidential race that you know who's going to beat Donald Trump how do you do it this is like on the Democratic side the idea is like anyone but Trump right yeah this is I mean they would be so happy if filming blank Tulsi Gabbard you whoever on the Republican side obviously it's Trump unless someone comes along or he goes to jail those are the two possibilities yeah what are the other issues and that you feel that people are really concerned about that you can perhaps shed some unique light on sure so the the three big policy as I'm running on are one the freedom dividend because a lot of Americans are seeing their paychecks not keep up with their expenses number two is we need to get health care off the backs of businesses and families and move towards a single-payer system medicare-for-all because as an entrepreneur it makes it harder to hire people when you do hire people you want to make them contractors and not full-time employees it makes it harder for people to start businesses because they're concerned about keeping their health care for their families so we got to get health care off the backs of businesses and families and trying to make the economy more dynamic and we spend twice as much on health care as other countries do to worst results like it's right now we're in like the worst of all worlds and the third thing is and I referenced my wife when I talk about this my wife is at home with our two boys six and three one of whom is autistic and when I say is like what is her work value that in GDP and then people think about and I like I don't know and I'm like zero GDP like doesn't consider that actual economic contribution and then I say we have to do is we have to actually evolve from GDP as a measuring stick because it actually doesn't work for us it's almost a hundred years old we made it up during the Great Depression self-driving trucks are gonna drive GDP way up but it's gonna be very very bad for many people and communities so we have to actually change the measuring sticks to something that would actually make our economy work for us make it so that the market serves us instead of all us being inputs to the market because if we're all inputs to the market we lose to robots in AI hands down and it's not like it doesn't matter if you were like a really conscientious hard-working truck driver like a really lazy sloppy it doesn't matter like you know doesn't matter if you were like a really diligent radiologist or like it doesn't matter so we have to shift the markets emphasis to actually fuel our well-being and change from GDP which is again this archaic measurement we made up to to things that would actually correspond to how we're doing things like health how childhood success rates environmental how do you quantify that how do you how would you quantify that in a way that would be translatable to the average voter yeah so we have measurements for most of these things and and again if you look at our numbers right now you'd see it's like what like how many people listen with this know that America's life expectancy has declined for the last three years you know that to me would be like a pretty important measurement but you think that's because of is it because the suicide is it because of drug overdoses because of obesity diet what is it the the two causes that people point to the most are that drug overdoses and suicides have overtaken vehicular deaths as as the most frequent deaths in the United States I didn't know that suicide was Lois I knew that drug overdose had taken obesity but suicides of overtaking obesity as well suicides have overtaken car accidents I'm not sure about it I'm sorry I meant I meant car accidents I misspoke so car accidents used to be number one yeah suicides are higher than car accidents now yeah so suicides drug overdoses and then car accidents like or suicides and drug overdoses like I think drug overdose is number one number one and then suicides number two Wow and so that's why life expectancy has declined for all and you think that the Tsuen very much likely there's at least some of the number of the suicides are related to economic disparity oh yeah I mean if you look at the suicide rate in it's particularly pronounced in 50 to 50 year old 50 to 54 year old white Americans which are the population I mean you resemble that that's me yeah that's you which resembles the population that right now is just reaching a point where they're like hey my job skills don't have any you know like utility in the marketplace and then they go home and they just like you know start looking around and being like what am i doing I mean it's it's really dark it's punitive it's punishing and we've put our citizens in the situation where we all see ourselves as economic inputs what the market says we're worth is what we're worth and if we're worth less then it's our fault and so the next move is to say okay I guess you know this place there's no place for me here I don't mean it sounds skeptical but I just don't believe that a thousand dollars in a month is gonna fix that it seems like that would be a good thing certainly not moving in the wrong direction certainly moving in the right direction but it seems that there needs to be some sort of a massive rethinking of civilization itself if you're gonna have that many things that are going to be automated and that many people are going to be out of and feeling that the world that they prepared for no longer exists yes it seems like we need a step further another move a hundred percent brother and that's one reason why the freedom dividends not like us like a that doesn't solve the problem right the problem is fundamentally one of reconstituting means of structure purpose and fulfillment in people's lives particularly in men's lives right how do we do that right so one important aspect of that is to actually start measuring how we are doing as a society and saying that's actually where we're trying to go so instead of using GDP using some sort of other quantifiable method of measuring health and happiness and fulfillment yes levels of engagement with work hmm in mental health I mean you can we have measurements for that we are sophisticated enough to do that and then if we say then as president I'm gonna be up there in 2021 being like oh here's the state of the union here's like the data and then we're gonna say you don't want to try and do we're actually going to try and move those measurements in the right direction so let's try and get drug overdoses down by 50% in two years let's try and get our mental health up a little bit like in in these ways and then make it so that that person who's at home being like okay like you know like there's not a job for me I'm getting a thousand bucks a month that does not solve all my problems it takes the edge off but then we can hopefully start reconstituting what that person's purpose is in their community in their neighborhood and so one of the things that I'm going to point out is that if you pump a thousand bucks a month into that neighborhood it ends up creating a whole new rung of opportunities for the people in that community like some of that money goes to you know like youth leagues and churches and nonprofits and creates jobs right there in that community one of the examples I use is like if you're in a town in Missouri with 50,000 people and let's say you really like to bake but starting a bakery is a dumb idea because people just do not have money in that town to buy your baked goods but then I pump see ten million dollars a year into that economy and a lot of that just circulates right there in that town then if I start a bakery it's a good idea and I know if my bakery fails I'm not going to die I can at least go home and get my dividend and then if I go to other people and say hey you want to like help me out with this then they also think it's a better idea than they would have so the money is not the solution the money helps set the stage for the solutions and so does the measurements so does if you because right now if like you don't even know that your life expectancy is declining that's kind of hard to solve that problem so if you say look this is actually how we measure how we're doing and then you go in and say okay like local government NGO entrepreneur because right now like our entrepreneurs none of our entrepreneurs are working on trying to make that dudes life better you know it's like that's not only do so much most entrepreneurs are just trying to succeed I mean it's very difficult to start a business right and actually have it work out well the the idea that they're gonna look out for truck drivers yeah it's not realistic but it at least we can start moving ourselves in that general direction if we start because as a CEO you know this you make what you measure mm you're not measuring it you have no chance right if you start measuring it you at least start to open up the chance but what you're saying is the most profound which is like we need to reconstitute meaning for many many Americans yeah and that's what to me the most destructive aspect of that you know again like the mental health indicators and like the suicides and the rest of it is like there's a real loss of meaning for many many people here in this country well obviously we're talking about a large scale but if you go back to the time before trucks and truck drivers that was not a viable occupation it wasn't something people did but yet they still found a way to occupy their time do you think that there needs to be some sort of an education and some some sort of a method of explaining to young people in particular that you have to think of something to do because most of the things that you think you can do won't exist so we have to think of what are the other possibilities and be creative and do something with your life that only a human being can do which is a really weird way to think about it because most of the things you used to be able to think that a human being could do for a living are now going to be done by robots but I don't think I think there's a giant gap between the understanding that you have and the understanding that the average person has and this could be a real problem and trying to expand this platform well we have to inform I gotta tell you though Joe when I say this to people they're like that makes perfect yeah it does make perfect sense that's scary about it but I'm not I'm not disagreeing with you in any way shape or form I'm just thinking man for young kids for young kids and you know you're a parent I'm a parent but what so our education system has a lot to be desired and one of the things I'm saying is like is it's making all these kids think that college is the end-all be-all and it is not you know and so that's one issue is that we need to try and prepare kids for different kinds of paths instead of saying college college college yeah because they're going to college they're getting loaded up with record levels of debt college has gotten two-and-a-half times more expensive even though it has not gotten two-and-a-half times better and the reason why it's gotten so expensive is because they've just like gotten really bloated administrative Lea and what would you do about that like you know Bernie Sanders wants to have some sort of a free college Free University yeah who wants to do it across the board have education to be a hundred percent free yeah I mean look I love that on paper I one of the things that I hate is talking to my friends about college debt you know friends that are in their 30s and 40s around yeah it just it just stays with them like a wet blanket that you can never get out of I used to call my school loans my mistress because I was writing a check to like another family in another town I was like I hope they're enjoying themselves like nine hundred dollars about to buy loans and what's crazy is that if something devastating happens to you in any other form you can file for bankruptcy but you never escape your student loans no matter what happens to you that was just some lobbying on the part of the financial companies man there's a lot to her is dirty that's really dirty when you think about how many people that run corporations that have racked up I mean just think about what happened with the savings and loan crisis just lately man and those guys skated whoo you know the vast majority have they're carrying around zero zero burden from that yes vast majority no one went to jail set a few people not really anybody real criminals like Bernie Madoff went to jail you know a few people have but that's about it you know you'd have to be a real [ __ ] thief to go to jail and these people that just they did this and got away with it and profited and redistributed all this money into their own personal accounts and economy sideways yeah but heaven forbid you take out a bunch of school loans and things go south like you can't get out of it I mean I know a guy who's in his 50s who's an ophthalmologist who's deeply in debt still so raising yeah it is crazy and if you look at it just economically it's a massive burden YES on people starting businesses starting families buying homes with their parents it's possible to fix for sure so the the first thing you do is you go to the people that are currently in debt and say look we're gonna give you a path out and there are ways to do it you know you can have a payment plan one of the things I'm proposing is like a 10 by 10 where if you commit 10% your wages for 10 years and you're debt-free and that means like if you're not making a lot of money then you can save a whole lot and the schools at this point have long since forgotten about this these loans because they got paid off already this is just these financial companies that are holding the loans that's important for people to understand because people think well you don't pay them the colleges are gonna go away no no so if you're the government you can be like hey loan loan company guess what like good news we're gonna like take this off it's a stimulus because like you said we've done a lot of things that were supposed to be a stimulus like give four trillion dollars to the banks and be like that will stimulate the economy nothing's gonna stimulate the economy better than getting student loans off the backs of freaking young people they'll actually do what they're supposed to do which is actually you know spend money in the economy take chance to take chances our businesses and the rest of it I mean one of the reasons why our business formation rates are at multi-decade lows that we are up to 1.5 trillion dollars in school debt it's like 38 K ahead that was like a hundred billion in like 1999 so we've like gone up 15 X since then and it's crippling us it's like insane anyone who thinks that that's not burning the economy I mean it's got a so president yang will be like hey guys it's a stimulus but this time to stimulus at people we're gonna forgive some of the student loan debt because half that stuff was generated in morally anyway a lot of uses schools you know lying about just to get people in the door that the second thing you do is you go to the schools and say hey guys why are you two-and-a-half times more expensive than you used to be that's kind of weird because like as far as I can tell there's been no massive quality change and the reason is that they've hired a lot of administrators it has not gone to faculty it has not gone to facilities it has gone to just administrative excess and bloat and then say okay you can do whatever you want but if you want access to federal loans which they all rely upon for their life's blood like without it they die if you want your students have access to federal loans you have to bring your administrator to student ratio in line with what it was like in the 1990s and then the schools would scream bloody murder they'd be like I can't do that that's impossible you're like well I have a feeling you're gonna figure it out start bringing it down and you would realize it doesn't impact the student experience at all like and I understand it because I've run a large nonprofit organization that it started and you're very natural tendency is to hire excellent people and then before you know it you're like have excellent people like you know vice deans of everything but then over time that ends up building a very large cost structure that gets passed along to the public so you'd bring the costs down now you said before Bernie's like free college for everyone the problem with that solution is it pretends that college solves the employment problems of young people and anyone who's coming out of college knows that that's not real the underemployment rate for recent college graduates today is 44 percent so you have like a 50/50 shot if you come out of college you're doing a job it doesn't really require a degree and 94% of new jobs created right now our gig temporary or contractor jobs that don't have real path forward or healthcare benefits of the rest of it yeah I was reading something about people actually it might have been in that uh just telling you about you've all know re yeah 21st century yeah it was I always say that guy's name wrong it's a tricky day you've all know a herati yeah 21 lessons for 21st century I think he was talking about how many people plan on not being in the same job in ten years because that job won't exist anymore versus what it used to be used to be the people would think that they were going to get a job and they would stick with job you know and now they're planning that they're going to have to move that they're not going to be able to keep the same job and has automation kicks in this is obviously gonna bottleneck it's gonna get even it's gonna give him worse yeah yeah completely so the ideal is that you end up training young people to be really really adaptable and and have low cost structures and just be able to you know become entrepreneurs and I spent seven years trying to train young people to do just that but one of the things I've discovered is that we're over emphasizing college and what we're under emphasizing is technical vocational and apprenticeship work because a lot of that work believe it or not it's actually really hard to automate like you know we're not gonna automate an air conditioning repair person I'm a mom or anytime soon and for sure craftsmen people who build things and and it's good for your mental health you know and a bunch of other things so right now only six percent of American high school students are in technical or vocational training in Germany that's fifty nine percent give you a sense of what the gap can mean so what we're doing is we're over prescribing college we're saying college college college for everyone it's not really working that well and then we're still treating people who are working in trades and everything is somehow you know like not in great careers when a lot of those careers are actually really awesome and they pay great and they people enjoy them they're persistent so right now we're gonna automate away it's a lot easier to automate all away a lot of repetitive cognitive work than it is a non repetitive manual work mmm because like actual robot digits you know it's like because if you can imagine what it would take to ever robot plumber like come in your house that stuff's really really tricky yeah there's a lot of fine motor work they have to like unscrew pipes and like stuff that stuff's not gonna get automated for a long time you know what is gonna get automated a lot of like entry-level cognitive tasks a lot of journalism tasks a lot of bookkeeping a lot of stuff that college graduates think they're gonna get a job in and then those jobs are gonna disappear I was a corporate attorney for those five unhappy months and my friends are working on AI that can automate away a lot of basic legal work you know so these college these college grads like oh snap don't know what to do me I'll go to law school didn't like load up with another 120k and debt and then like the the legal jobs are not going to be there for him it's often the problem of their parents giving them pressure to go into college as well because they didn't want the kid to become a loser and if the kid you know like where I grew up in Boston if you went into the trades if you abandoned like the idea of higher learning and going to college and just went right into like learning to be a carpenter or something that people look at you like oh you sold yourself short but there's so many people that I know that went to school that just got university degrees and then they got out and they were [ __ ] yeah I mean it's it's so common it's so common that they thought there was going to be this path and this path just didn't exist once they got out or it was far far more difficult than was then they were led to believe yeah if you look at it about 32 percent of Americans graduated from college right now and that level has been more or less constant for a long time it's not like hey I've got another 20 percent I could get into college like right now the college completion rate in six years is about 59 percent so like four out of ten people who start college or not graduating in six years and a lot of them are just not going to finish ever so like they're the people that have other paths available and we have to build those paths up and this is one reason why I'm so into the freedom dividend instead of something like free college because why would you subsidize something that only the top third of the population is gonna use you know and end it's a highly inefficient costly system anyway like money into that you're much better off putting a thousand bucks a month into every 18 year olds hands then if they go to college great colleges partially paid for they go to trade school great trade schools partially paid for they start their own business they do something career like they want to do something to help that's great too like you can actually start building more varied paths and make it so that people don't feel like I need to get into this institution or else my life is going to be over now what are the primary concerns that people have outside of what you're talking about so far with automation taking away jobs and and you know student loan debt and these things what are the other things you think you're gonna have to talk about in order to get people to take you really seriously you know I mean the hot-button issues you know what they all are it's like immigration and climate change is a really big one and you know I mean I can talk about those at length so my father and mother met as immigrants from Taiwan at UC Berkeley my father is a PhD in physics he generated 69 US patents for GE and IBM over his career so I'd like immigrants are awesome immigrants come in and you know it's like big stuff happened for big American companies so I'm very Pro immigrant and I think people would expect that just to look at me and so what I say is first it makes no sense to educate international students and US universities and then send them home to compete against us that makes no sense like if they're gonna come to the u.s. and study we should just staple a green card to their diploma and be like hey you got a diploma great news you can stay here and work mmm as I personally know tons of awesome internationals who would definitely help make the u.s. more dynamic and competitive that go home and start the companies there and you're like oh no like how that happens right that's great for people who come from a privileged background yeah the opportunity to come here and become educated but what about people who are poor or trying to make it here from South America yah Tamala so school there are three paths available to you for the approximately 12 million people who are here undocumented many of whom from Mexico and Latin America would not like that you know frankly like they're not the profile I just described for the most part so there are three approaches number one is you can pretend to deport them because it's completely unfeasible to deport 12 million people I mean like whole regional economies would collapse like you can't do matically like it doesn't make any sense right number two is you do nothing which is our current path and then you have massive problems - because there constantly interacting with your schools and your hospitals and getting into car accidents and like you know it's like just not knowing who the heck is who is an untenable situation for any advanced society so number three is you create a pathway to citizenship and then you integrate them into society but it's like a long-term path that takes a number of years and you need to keep your nose clean and pay taxes and work hard and do that seems to me the most feasible yeah and so that's where we should go and some Republicans were on board with that until they like you know paid a political price and then they ran the other direction so that is really the right path for people who are here undocumented but I say to people a lot that the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian guy who likes math so Donald Trump's like build a wall and I'm like look like I mean I'm we ought to enforce a strong border like especially in a world where everyone every citizens getting a thousand bucks a month like you got enforce it strong border right at the same time you know like people who are here they're making our communities a lot more entrepreneurial dynamic many of them mean at the high end half of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or other immigrants or children of immigrants and that's true in a different way in terms of like the dynamism of these immigrant communities so what I say to people is like if I'm president people will see that you come to this country and you work hard your son or daughter can become president United States now what do you do though in this scenario that you just subscribed if someone comes here and they don't work hard and they don't keep their nose clean and they are still here and they're not a citizen yet yeah so you know so then then they operate in the informal economy in the way that they have and that the truth is that even if we have this pathway there gonna be a significant proportion of people who just do not trust us enough say hey I'm here and I'm gonna like get in the pipeline there's gonna be a lot of there gonna be a lot of people that don't subscribe but that's where it is right now we're not making the situation actively worse you know we can at least improve the situation for a really significant proportion of them yeah for a significant proportion of them and you know the other situation would be tax revenue how many people that are here illegally you're not paying taxes I would imagine it's a enormous number yeah there'd be a real economic boost if we can integrate them into the formal economy because there's a lot of just cash going back and forth right thing is it a lot of people might decide hey you know what I don't even want to be a citizen because if I'm a citizen I have to pay taxes or I could work as a laborer or work as a you know on construction sites or whatever whoever's willing to hire them and work for free yes work rather with free taxes yeah and yeah and so I mean that would still be going on like that there are limits to you know like what sort of appeal you can have in terms of having people right blether can have a path to real prosperity have a real path to citizenship would be very nice and it'd be enormous for them cuz lot of them have kids yes no no are their life but but here so another issue I think you'll like that comes up on the campaign trail is what to do about marijuana and I'm for full legalization remove it from the federal controlled substance list and I would go a step further and pardon everyone who's in jail for a low-level nonviolent drug offense because it makes no sense to me to have people behind bars for things that are legal in parts of the country so my plan as president is on April 20th of 2021 I'm going to mass pardon everyone who's in jail for a non-violent drug-related offense I'm gonna high-five them on the way out I'm gonna be very popular man that day we're gonna be a lot of traveling to high-five all those folks I know I'm gonna have to go to a lot of places and high-five but I really want to high five them Jerry Lee yeah I mean that would be the funnest freakin occasion so you know that's something that comes up that to me Mina it's obvious that marijuana you know is an important remedy for many people who are like in in various struggling with various like health problems and everything else I have friends who are in that situation and that it's certainly much less dangerous than for example some of like the opiates that have been getting prescribed for the same the same things yeah what do you do about that that's a question that I have because I was just reading something about some new approved drug that's more powerful than fentanyl which seems to me to be completely insane like we already have fentanyl and you just you you make a mistake on whether you know one of the things that happens with people that overdose is especially old people that are in pain when they're using fentanyl or using any opiate on a regular basis they sometimes forget if they took it and you know look it's a [ __ ] opiate I mean those they're very powerful and if you're high on that stuff and you forget whether or not you took it and you go and take it again you're dead yes and that that's a giant issue they're too damn powerful and the idea that you need something that's more powerful than that seems to be insane I agree with you it's it's irresponsible the entire opiate crisis was generated in part by the fact that the feds let Purdue Pharma just go crazy prescribing hundreds of thousands of oxycontin prescriptions and that company man that company got fine six hundred thirty five million which sounds like a lot until you realize they made like 16 billion yeah so and those drop in the bucket yeah so those those people are now some of the richest people in the country on the backs of American communities and it just keeps morphing because I went from oxy to heroin to fentanyl and then you have people who are struggling with with this addiction so to me to me it was federal negligence that unleash this plague I mean you got to hold the sackler 's and Purdue Pharma accountable because literally now they're profiting from one of the treatment drugs it's really obscene what they doing they're just like hey my non-addictive wonder drug turns out it caused a super plague of lethal addiction for yeah hundreds of thousands of Americans but now I'm gonna sell you a new drug and you know try and make money on the back end too so you gotta get as much money as we possibly can from that family in particular but then you have to make resources available and try and get people to depend on these drugs less like I'm a front end from the doctor end this is like look why are you prescribing like these opiates when like there's a doctor I quoted in my book where he's like you have never seen a lethality rate for something prescribed for like a non life-threatening condition yeah it's like literally like non-trivial percentage of people you prescribe an opiate to will be dead in five years yeah and the thing they came to you you know for in the hospital wasn't like crazy so so we have to make treatment resource available but this is a very human problem it's not a money problem like you know you can throw money at some problems and it works this thing we should throw money at to try and give people a fighting chance but then you have to support the people coming out because it's a brutal brutal process trying to become whole and healthy if you're an addict it is an unbelievably brutal process and it's I have family members that are affected by it and people with hurt backs that got on these pills and next thing you know they can't get off of them and it's just it's devastating and it's so common it's it's just all everywhere country and they'll be well prescribed and II for nothing I had my nose fixed I had a deviated septum and the doctor prescribed me two different kinds of opiates and I said I'm not in any pain and he said yeah but you could be so here and I'm like but I don't think this is a good idea I'm like I don't even want anything he goes we'll just take these just in case I want to tell you I'm not playing tough guy just didn't hurt yeah there's a little annoying it was like my nose feels weird but it would I didn't need [ __ ] opiates seriously man they're just willing like here you go come on what are you pain here you go come on a little this take a little of that yeah and I have a guarantee for you that their incentives drive them more towards dispensing those dragons and they're not yes those drugs yes and it's in large part because the incentive structure of our healthcare system is so revenue oriented yes it's like if I do more stuff if I give you more stuff I make more money yeah if I decide you don't need it I make less money and that is one of the things that's driving us all into this this unhealth is that if you went to a doctor who the Gimli was like you know I don't think you need this stuff like that that would be the way many of them would see the problem if their paycheck was unrelated to the amount of activity that they were doing yeah when you look at all the issues that plague this country and you think about the possibility of you were actually winning and becoming president and then you look at what happens to presidents when they win and the amount of just aging to them do you worry about that well first of all Asians age very well yes got that going for you that you know and I'm married and you know we've got two kids so I don't think she's going anywhere they could be like kind of tough for her to start over at this point you know I mean one of my my nightmare scenarios is I win and then like I can't get stuff done the way that because that's the forces you've talked about this to where good people go in a government they get stuck like flies and amber because the system is just designed to keep you from getting anything done but one thing I will say is that if you imagine a scenario where the Asian man who wants to give everyone a thousand bucks a month becomes president United States in 2021 everyone's gonna know what how I want it'll be like all right guys it's dividend time and then Democrats will be like yeah I like money for families that's great and here's the the great thing Joe is that then Republicans will look at and be like wait a minute this is a net transfer for rural areas for red states on the interior am I really gonna stand in the way of my constituents right getting this dividend and you can imagine me being like hey what state wants to pass this first week in every state yeah it would be into it we can actually get this done this is a bipartisan thing it's it's not left or right it's forward and keep in mind the state that has been demonstrated to love this dividend is Alaska which is a deep red conservative state here's a Republican governor that passed the plan in the first place he said who would you rather get the oil money the government who's just gonna screw it up or you the people of Alaska and then people will ask what like us please wasn't that to incentivize people to support their idea of drilling in some controversial areas though there there was probably you know a whole basket of motivations but now that thing's been in effect for 37 years is wildly popular so I'm what I'm suggesting when you say like hey you become president you can't get anything done it's like I can get one big thing done because I think it's gonna be really popular among not just progressives but also independents libertarians like Milton Friedman is the patron saint of libertarian economists loved this plan because what libertarians and conservatives hate is government making people's decisions what they like is economic freedom and autonomy I just spoke at a libertarian conference like Liberty Khan and was like guys like the freedom dividend would help people enjoy actual freedom because you get a thousand bucks a month like you know that makes you more free to do all sorts of things like you can like you know so you can like make better choices and as long as the government is completely like you know it's like what you do is your business so this can actually become something we can get done the freedom dividend is a great name to is like the Patriot Act excited freedom we're all about freedom who can be no pain vote against that yeah who could be against the freedom dividend come on what kind of you know [ __ ] do you have to beat this has gotta be taking up a tremendous amount of your time like woody if are you doing anything else in addition to doing this are you setting aside everything else in your life other than your family obligations I have two jobs man one help accelerate society to try and deal with this historic transition we're in and to stay married those only things I'm about wow that's a it's a powerful path now when when you're looking at the opposition and you look into all the other people that are running for president and wonder whether or not they're gonna be there by the time the elections were all around what it what are you saying that's it's really interesting Joe holy cow that one of the funnest things about running for president is you run into all the other candidates on the trail in Iowa in New Hampshire so I'm like just hanging out backstage with like the gang Brian it's so interesting and fun it is weird sometimes but I've really liked most of them and so sometimes people ask me like hey who do you want your running mate to be and I'm just like it really depends upon who I just click with best because we're just gonna be on the trail all the time together so having met a bunch of them I gotta say most of the candidates are really genuine patriots you just want to try and do something positive and they see the country's heading in the wrong direction I could work with most all of them terms of who I think is gonna be there in the end man it's really interesting I mean one reason I like I will say that apparently the mainstream press had it out for Bernie last time where they were just gonna like I have a friend who worked in the media and they were like just you know kneecap Bernie no it's like like there's definitely something going on we're like certain corporate media companies have certain candidates they kind of want to tip the scales for a little ride people don't want to like tip it against well they thought that Bernie was gonna get in the way of Hillary winning is that the idea yeah yeah I mean they were in the Hillary camp for sure yeah and so that wasn't just the media that was also the DNC which is now on the record so now happily certainly the DNC has turned a totally different leaf where the DNC is like we're not gonna do anything that like here's with Eddie woods prospects well what they did was a disaster yeah in terms of public image - yeah yeah I was both substantively and like perception-wise disaster for them so this time I got to say and and that that team has turned over almost entirely like it's almost totally different people right and then the media I we have the sense that you know they're they're still feeling out who they're gonna try and put the thumb on the scale for so we're gonna bernie is still running though right um it looks like he's running yeah you want to know something that's really stupid but it changed my opinion of him he was being grilled by someone at the airport with a camera and he was pretending to talk on the phone but you could tell he wasn't really on the phone plate and I saw that I was like yo you can't do that you can't do that you could say I'm not giving impromptu interviews thank you very much and keep walking like if you want to interview me do it through the correct channels but he didn't do that he pretended to be on the phone it's a weird thing cuz if you're willing to do that like that's just that's just deceptive especially if you can actually see the deception which you can see the video the [ __ ] phone is not on it's like he's it's like you could see his text messages he's like and the guy saying to him you're not on the phone the phone is like and he keeps walking it's like I know that's a stupid thing to but it's like huh we all you know we all suss out details about different people and yeah is you know and like you know it's like I think one reason I'm so grateful for this opportunity is it's like you know like you actually can get a sense of different people in different environments and it does end up impacting your your perception so I mean people made decisions on much lesser data points than that that's it that way remember what the [ __ ] his name from Vermont who Howard Dean the Dean scream man the free captures I what he's from he was from Vermont was Vermont yeah that scream killed him sank him do you remember the Chappelle's Show parody the supposed to a parody of that but the fact that it was just because it was allowed like a as a person who works in front of audiences a lot when you're yelling into a microphone like the the you hear like especially if you don't have monitors in front of you what you hear is like everything you hear the crowd screaming you hear everything and if you're yelling into that microphone you're not realizing what it sounds like as a recording but with him is like yeah and that was it one scream imagine imagine that one scream literally changed the course of that man's life one impulsive you might have changed the course of the nation's history my crazy I don't know if that would happen today I think especially post Trump one thing that has happened is we're willing to forgive so much more you know in some ways and some ways no man I mean I feel like you know like some some people more forgiving than are those four different things I for sure yeah there's certainly yeah it varies but it would be interesting to imagine what uh what the Dean scream would result in today hopefully I'm not the person that tested out yeah scream please don't scream so what's next now you you you're trying to elevate your profile you're trying to make people aware of your platform and what you're how you're running what what is next it's good fun man I'm enjoying running for president more that's funny I would that's a great thing here yeah like it's so one thing is that when you talk to Americans and you know like rural Iowa or Manchester New Hampshire it's like they're really good people like you know it's like the stuff that you might imagine is like ah people know it's like really good honest genuine people just trying to make their lives better people I really love hanging out with our Union guys like hi and the trucker's was fun hanging out I hung all these Union metal workers the other day in New Hampshire I was like hey any like you know BOTS going on fly here in your field so that one of them was like yeah actually like we used to take five to eight guys to bend this rebar dive reinforce a bridge now they bring in a robot it does it overnight and then they're like they're like hey good for you guys you don't have to do this and then we're like we just lost a freaking day so then when I go in I talk to them about what's going on in the economy they're like oh man yeah like yeah that's like a real problem and unions have been losing for years like they don't know it like you know memberships gone in half so just on the campaign trail making the case to different people I was on The Daily Show last week and that's gonna film pretty soon the next big benchmark for the campaign is the Democratic primary debates in June where they're gonna bring all the candidates up and this is something the DNC happily seems like they're being really really open about mmm which they it's not like hey you need to you know like like have particular things so I'm very confident that we'll be on that debate stage and then we can just keep on making the case the American people when you're gonna do something like done how do you prepare do you do have someone throw fake questions at you and you practice them and practice the answers do you work with a coach like how does that how you're gonna do that for that given the enormity of the occasion I'm sure we will have something like that but I want to double back in a conversation you had recently with the guy named Lawrence Lessig about campaign finance reform and like they're all these interrelated problems in our society and in my opinion the automation wave is like driving a lot of them because it's making people less functional making people less able to focus on the big problems in the future and then part of it is that our political systems held captive by rich corporations and billion like mega wealthy individuals and like the average voter feels like my vote doesn't matter and so you know I was talking to Lawrence Lessig is like hey how do we fix it and I heard your conversation with him and so a solution would be we give every American adult $100 democracy dollars that can only be contributed to a political campaign and then you end up counterbalancing and washing out a lot of the corporate money because all of a sudden if I get 10,000 people on board with me that's like a freakin million bucks no that's very interesting that's an interesting idea I like that a lot because that the problem Joe is that a lot of our regulatory approaches right now are like the negative approach it's like don't do this don't do that and the fact is a lot of the time it's really hard to like actually like regulate away a lot of this stuff and so Lawrence was like you know what let's just put money into people's hands I can only go into the political system and then it makes it so if someone like me appeals to humans then I get money as opposed to making it so that the people and the money are like two different sides of the equation and I gotta say we were talking as a team about being here and like you have like the biggest audience of just about any media platform in the country right now like bigger than cable news bigger than anything how [ __ ] did that happen you know I mean Ted to me you're like a you're the primary voice of reason right now in our society man that's ridiculous no I mean someone step up and take that please I think it's you for the time being brother Brooks well what I was saying was that like if if people that listen to this conversation donate 10 20 bucks to my campaign they're like 10 million people are gonna listen to this that's like a hundred to two hundred million dollars and that's enough for me to go in and break the the moneyed system I can go in there and just say all right let's get money out of politics and the way we're gonna do it is we're gonna actually just give people money to be able to restore democracy in a real way do you have a patreon page or anything like that my website's yang 2020 calm and so our average donation is only $19 so we joke that my fans are even cheaper than Bernie's is it the thing with people is you got to make it easy make it easy like have an Amazon one-click button oh we were taking been mode for a while yeah you know we were like working on it it was a bit of a pain in the neck administrative Lee hmm I also want to say one other thing I did I think will entertain the heck out of you I'm giving a thousand bucks a month to a family in New Hampshire and a family of Iowa does that in my own pocket just to illustrate you know what a thousand dollars a month all actually like do you and your household good and these people we had a bunch of submissions online for New Hampshire and Iowa we're still taking submissions so if you know people in Iowa they could use a thousand bucks a month just go to young 2020 come nominate them and then we'll pick someone and there's no obligation so it's out of my own pocket and there's no obligation so the FEC was like well you know no problem it's just a like act of philanthropy or like you know a gift right and then a family in South in Georgia was so touched by my campaign that there now is applying a thousand bucks a month to a family in South Carolina in honor of Martin Luther King who was for basic income so we're really inverting this mindset of like scarcity and take take take and being like look there's like plenty to go around with like the richest and most advanced society in the history of the world and we can make lives better just by coming together as a people there is nothing stopping the majority of citizens in a democracy from voting ourselves a dividend I love the idea man I really do and I love the idea of trying to find solutions to this obvious issue that's impending and that just seems like we're not gonna escape I mean it seems like automation is coming there's no way to get around it no way there's no way around it for sure I mean it's here with us already it's inevitable and the danger we're in right now is that if we don't respond to it then there's going to be a lot of a lot of anger about the changes that are coming our way and so a bunch of techies are actually supporting my campaign because a lot of techies are not jerks they're just like I'm doing my job I'm just like you know my job actually just tends to result in other people losing their jobs right and so what I say to them and they agree it's like this is enlightened self-interest for us all it's like progress should be something we're excited about there is a world where we're celebrating the fact that the trucker's are getting liberated from their trucks Brian because that's a really difficult punishing job especially in their backs yes and so that the goal is to try and make it so that people are actually able to be happy about the inevitable mm-hmm you know it's as I quote in my book Bismarck was like if we're gonna go through a revolution you'd rather undertake it than undergo it you know it's like like if the revolution is coming then we need to get in front of it and start making it work for us instead of just waiting for it to tear us apart well I love the idea and it would be amazing if you want I mean it really would be fascinating and I said I've done a complete 180 on the idea of universal basic income particularly once I start talking to you on about it when and he was saying that it's inevitable that you're gonna need something like that that it's coming yeah and it closed on this man it's like okay so if you accept what Ilan said that it's inevitable which I hundred percent agree with let's say you go to early what is the downside well let's see you alleviate untold pointless human misery and you have more time to build the institutions and help us adapt yeah that's the downside of you go too early what's the downside of you go too late the downside if you go too late is literal disintegration and catastrophe because it's not like society will magically reorder itself if you're like okay guys we're a little bit late to this but like now we're gonna start you know like putting checks into people's hands yeah like so the incentives to go early are pretty much all the incentives it's like going too late is literally society ending so if you accept what Elon says which I agree with that look this is inevitable then there's no point in trying to like time it particularly if you accept the fact that all of the signs you would expect if we were displacing labor are already there men leaving the workforce like drug overdoses video games like I like it's all right there in front of us if you just like take the rock and like flip it over yeah and and the thing I'm gonna say I you know a friend of mine Andy Stern said is that our government is terrible at most things but it is excellent at sending large numbers of checks to large numbers of people properly and reliably yeah we have to lean into one of the only core competencies our government has that we can trust and then it will let us make our own decisions like this is very much about human empowerment and the alternative is too terrible to contemplate last question because I guess no discussion of presidential policy and the possibility of someone like you running this country's how how do you feel about International Relations and you know the the obvious issues of dealing with other countries and what's going on with China and Russia and the interference of our democracy and all the different various issues that we've experienced over the last particularly over the last couple of years with Russia yeah sure so about Russian you and I were talking about this before we went on air when I'm president I will say look Russia I get it we have tampered with other people's elections for years and decades like we America I've done that you've done it to us for the last number of years it is going to stop right now and if we have any credible evidence that you are tampering with our information in our democracy we will take that as an act of hostility and aggression and we will retaliate in some way that will make your life very very painful and inconvenient and you know and the people of United States will support me on this and so here is your drop-dead date like turn off the bots and if we find that your bots are still going after this date I will just bring the evidence the American people and then we will act and you will not like it one bit now if if I mean I'm thinking 80 90 percent of Americans would get behind that it'd be like how are we just like looking at it being like what are we gonna do what are we gonna do and then this one I actually feel a little bit for the tech companies because it's very difficult for the tech companies to to prevent this almost impossible almost impossible to identify and if you go back to Sam Harris's podcast that we were discussing which is called the war of information I think that's what's called information war or war of information a recent podcast from the last couple of weeks they detail how there's essentially just giant groups of people that work for the Russian government that pretend to be people that are involved in black lives matter or pretend to be people that are involved in Texas culture southern culture and they're just sowing seeds of argument and dissent and they are laughing their asses laughing and making funny memes like some of their memes are really hilarious but but to them this is the greatest ROI they've ever seen they didn't really like return on investment okay he's such an entrepreneur YouTuber man I don't have a man hanger I have a normal freaking house so like they invested not even that much money mm-hmm like but they found like this underbelly that you can slice into mm-hmm and so they've spent best estimates like low tens of millions of dollars and it's caused us how much damage how much harm a real impact you know like you know I mean you couldn't even put a dollar figure on it so you have to just say like look I get the tech companies are gonna try but they're not gonna be able to pull it off so just like go on and just say like the world and say hey this is to Russia but anyone else same thing like if you tamper with our democracy we're gonna come down on you like a ton of bricks and if we're not quite sure we're still gonna come down on you like a ton of bricks like I don't need like a hundred percent certainty on this I need like you know like a legal standard I need like eighty eighty-five percent and the American people would be like about time because you know that if we can't trust ourselves or each other or what we're seeing and this is before deep fakes and the rest of it starts hitting like yeah like if you're actually gonna believe in democracy then you have to start protecting our information as fast as possible and you also in my mind have to start and this is a local issue but I'm in New Hampshire in Iowa talking about this stuff they're local newspapers are all dying it's like thousands of local papers it's winking out of existence because they used to rely on classified ads there are no classified ads anymore it's all Craigslist and so they all die and if you believe in democracy how the heck can anyone vote on anything if they have no idea what's going on so so there are a lot of interrelated issues and one thing I'm saying is like look we had a happy time where local newspapers were supported by classified ads it's over now but we're still a democracy you still need some information to vote so we need to try and find new ways for you to get quality information like that those throwing our hands up and being like yes the Russians are gonna you know like in like just miss inform us with BOTS and I guess all the local newspapers are gonna die like you said like these are problems and we have to start solving them if you still believe that democracy is the best form of government and that's what we're going to carry forward with would you obviously have to believe like you have to go with that as your model and so it's all interrelated but we have to start thinking much much bigger about what we can get done because things are slipping away things are trending in a terrible terrible direction well Andrew good luck to you you're a good man I wish you well thank you for being here I think your message is excellent and I hope you really make an impact Thank You Jose really appreciate it man president yang man if I if I win if I win you can do a special JRE from the White House and that would be a blast let's do it thank you sir appreciate it man [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 6,167,216

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, Joe Rogan, JRE #1245, 1245, Andrew Yang, 2020 Election, UBI, universal basic income, comedy, comedian, jokes, stand up, mma, UFC, Ultimate Fighting Championship

Id: cTsEzmFamZ8

Length: 112min 3sec (6723 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 12 2019

Reddit Comments

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[u/memepolizia]

Obligatory heads up that this interview is a bit older and the Freedom Dividend now goes from 18 until death.

Which is a huge deal as that extra $1,000 a month for seniors would be the largest expansion to Social Security ever, and matter a great deal to those on fixed incomes.

[u/El_Miyagi]

That's where I first learned of Yang and have been with him ever since

[u/slayer91790]

I'm half way through the Freakomoics Podcast with Yang and I feel this one is amazing to refer to people. Especially the people who feel that $1k a month is not possible or need a better understanding.

[u/khantaloupe]

At this point, we should just sticky this and ask people to start here. Would be great if we gave links to the JRE clips as well. I think it will be a great starting point for the Yang-curious

[u/oldboy99]

My pitch to people who are put off by Joe Rogan is this.

If you don't like him thats fine. Just listen to it because his questions to Andrew Yang is everything a republican will ask. You will be amazed how much this man knows and how everything just makes sense.

[u/Dimenus]

For the left, the NPR interview is also excellent (and more recent): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Wr7lDI-Hg

[u/cabudolc]

To those new to the Yang Gang, don't also forget that we will be having another H3 Podcast with Yang included very soon. So in the meantime, here's the first podcast!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otEbT0l_Hbg&t=4507s

[u/tics51615]

AM I GOING TO WATCH THIS ONE FOR THE 4TH TIME? YOU BET I AM.