8: Andrew Yang - The Dangerously Different Candidate The Media Wants You To Ignore 01:05:25

Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and we're here this evening, a little bit later than usual, with my friend and presidential candidate, Andrew Yang. Andrew, welcome. Thank you for keeping the portal open late for me, Eric. Oh my God, thanks for bringing the energy. You've just come fresh off this rally, MacArthur Park. You're indefatigable, the Energizer bunny. Yes, we just had a 6,000 person rally, 7,000, 8,000. I lost track. I was counting manually. No, I wasn't, but...

And I should say that your hat is Make America Think Harder. Yep. But it's math. Well, we're trying. We're trying. So we don't want to keep you up late because we want you supercharged for tomorrow. So let's just dig right into it. Andrew, I'm remembering that we were having this dinner at Zazie in San Francisco and you were –

impressing the hell out of my wife and myself and I said that guy's going places she says how can he I said it's these are different times oh thank you so am I right that this is uh this is happening oh it's happening big time I mean uh

Our campaign is growing by leaps and bounds by all of the measurements you would ordinarily measure a presidential campaign. Crowd size, fundraising. Fanaticism. The Yang Gang is absolutely fanatical. Trust me, I encounter them all the time on social media. Well, I love the Yang Gang. Thank you, Yang Gang.

Yeah, the excitement is palpable and I love it. I mean, everywhere I go now, people will just say like, I support you and give me a fist bump. And certainly when we campaign, I mean, now we draw crowds of either hundreds or thousands depending upon where we are. It's amazing. Now,

Let's just dig into it. We're in this totally bizarre situation. I don't think the institutions have faced up to just how dire our situation is. When I go outside, for the most part, the physical world is still humming along, but everywhere else you can see the signs that somehow the superstructure that undergirds

The simple physical reality has really been fraying. Am I wrong about that? No, I agree with you, you know, and, and in many ways, if you're just living life, not plugged into all of the institutional decay, then you can just go out in the sun shining and the birds are chirping. And, you know, like you said, the physical world is still more or less sound, barring the occasional heat wave and unseasonal weather pattern. So,

the way I see it effectively, what you have is a world of institutions and you have the wrong people in the institutions. In fact, what's happened is somehow that the institutions were built in an era where things were growing rapidly. The growth pattern changed a heck of a long time ago, almost 50 years ago. And so for what they've done is they, these institutions have selected for people who can continue to tell stories about growth and to kind of play games with

To keep the illusion that everything is still humming along as if it was the 50s and 60s. But that hasn't been true for a long time. How far off am I?

Well, that's what the numbers say. And I'm a numbers guy, where if you look at the economy of the 70s, you had a certain level of buying power among the middle class and certain split in terms of the gains from the economy among different parts of society. And then the lines started to diverge starting in the 70s. And now they're incredibly divergent where you have

middle class incomes essentially unchanged during that time. And then people at the very top level absorbing more of more and more of the gains in the winter take all economy. But we all pretend like it's still the seventies. Uh, and, uh,

You can see the disconnect in the lived experience of most Americans in most of the country where they're starting to catch on that things have changed. I mean, it's dark. Well, it's incredibly dark and it's worth laughing about, I think, for that reason. Because if we don't have a sense of humor about it, we're not going to be able to easily do the work. So I think whistling past the graveyard and Gallo's humor, definitely there's a place for that. Well, you know, I naturally...

I suppose people have said to me that I have a very dystopian point of view, but I tend to present it in a positive, upbeat manner. I think you're trying to get us through a bottleneck that you and I both know is coming and that,

In essence, I mean, one of the things I'm very concerned about with you is that I don't want you to promise the world that you know how to do this. I want you just to say that I'm the best person to handle whatever's coming next because nobody knows what to do. Well, certainly I would never claim omniscience or that I'm going to get everything right. I mean, I make mistakes all the time to ask my wife. She'd be like, hey, you screwed up just the other day. But

We, you and I were talking before the camera started rolling that I think it's going to be a very dark time. And the goal has to be to try and survive the darkness, um, and not have it produce existential level harm. Uh, and I believe that I can assist in that regard, but I certainly would never say that I have all the answers or that if I'm president, everything's going to work right. Because the fact is, uh,

There are two things I've thought about. There's the way the president makes you feel. Right. And then there's actually solving problems on the ground. Right.

And right now, our experience of the presidency tends to be around the feeling. Like if Donald Trump does something irrational, it really does not affect my day-to-day existence, except for the fact that I see all the news reports and I'm like, oh, that guy, what's he doing? You know, and the same is true in reverse. Like if Barack Obama did something decent and human, it made me feel good, didn't necessarily, you know, like change my commute, right?

Or anything. Sure. And so there's the way it makes us feel, which I believe I can assist with just about immediately for anyone who wants someone who seems...

solutions oriented, right. Positive and positive data, data friendly, data friendly, and genuinely wants to just try and make people's lives better. I think that that would make people feel better. But then there's the reality of trying to solve the problems from the perch at the top of the government. Yeah. And that's a very different process. I mean, I'm,

locked in on this idea of a freedom dividend in part because I think it's the most dramatically positive thing we could do that we could actually effectuate in real life that would improve people's lives that we can actually get done. Now, I am both positive and negative about it, as you probably remember.

What my belief is, is that we have two claims as Americans. We have a claim as a contributor to the economy and we have a claim as a soul because we happen to live here. And as a soul, we have certain rights as a human being, just as a member of society. The weaker of the two is as a soul.

But that claim still exists. And in some sense, what you're calling the freedom dividend or universal basic income speaks to the idea that there are these two competing claims.

And you don't want to get rid of the incentive structure that allows people to take a dream and turn it into something. I love the dream. I love work. I love entrepreneurship. Yeah. I love people doing great stuff. So I think that there's a theory, that there's sort of a series of economic theories that haven't actually been developed. And I think one of the things that's really important to me is

is that we retake the institutions because what we've done is we've selected for people who've used very simplistic models that have had a huge effect on transferring wealth but have not actually mirrored our problems. We've selected for the people who really don't tell the truth. And I'm very worried how – let's talk about your first term in office, which is going to happen.

Who are you? 2021. Who are you? Inauguration day. It's going to be a blast. You're going to be there. Pia's going to be there. Yang Yang's going to be there. We're going to have a giant party. Wait, wait, wait, wait a second. Getting ahead of us. Who are you going to staff your government with if you're going to have the same problem that everybody has, which once you've caught, once the dog catches the car.

Then what? You've got all of these institutions which have selected for economists who don't tell the truth, who've selected for sociologists who are friendly to the institutions and hostile to our people. What do we do? My team is going to be a blend of different people with different experience sets from different industries, even different ideologies. And

I think you need some people who are DC insiders, who have relationships on Capitol Hill, if you really want to get things done, because you're talking about possibly the most institutionalized town in our society. And so if you get there and just like, I'm going to staff it with outsiders, then no one's going to get anything done. This was Trump's problem. Yeah. Like you're not going to get anything done. You're just, you're just going to be fighting with the system all the time that they're going to be like these antibodies that treat you like,

this hostile agent. And then they're going to just make your life miserable at every turn. I mean, that's just the way organizations work. It's what cultures work. And so you need to have a blend of people that are like, look, hey, I get it.

uh i'm a new figure and you're concerned um and one of my principles is that i don't fault people for the incentives that have formed them and by this what i mean is like if you show up in dc and there's someone who's been part of the fabric of dc for 20 plus years and they are um

Someone who've been through administrations right and left to sort of survive the whole thing and their goal is to just keep that function going and make sure they get to retirement and whatnot. You can't blame that person for being part of that system because that's what their incentives have been for years and years.

And so what you don't want to do is you don't want to get there and be like, I'm going to like turn everything upside down. I'm like attack everyone. Well, the immune system will just actually, you know, the macrophages will descend on you. Yeah. And then you'll never get anything done. You'll never get anything done. So that was one of the answers that I was dying to hear, which is I'm going to have to work with the infrastructure that's already there. But then there's the second part of it.

Which is that I actually need to see some people permanently ejected, called out, chastised, who have been this class of people misadvising our government throughout the 80s, 90s, early part of this century. Well, and that's the dark part for all of us, that we sense that there's really limited accountability in D.C. Like you can give bad advice and screw something up.

And you keep your job, you know, your think tank's still there. Like no one goes back and says, hey, your white paper turns out it was completely mistaken. Like that's not the way that town works or that, you know, many government institutions work.

So that's the challenge is that you have to try and make changes within this incredibly institutionalized environment. And so you need a combination of people that are well-intended. You bring them in and say, look, this is going to feel like brain damage. You're going to come in and you're going to be like, especially if you can't come in with a background like you and I might have from technologically

or entrepreneurship where you look up and you'd be like, wait, you have how many people doing what? And you're not allowed to do what? You know, it's like the story of like healthcare.gov where like the website didn't work in part because they hired a giant consulting firm and they had all these bureaucratic processes. And then when the website didn't work, you know what they did? They hired a bunch of maverick types and threw the red tape out the window and then did a repair job.

So the goal has to be to bring in patriots who understand that they're not going to have like an enjoyable time trying to turn the battleship, but that if they turn the battleship three degrees to the right, they can do more good than if they were in another environment where they turned it, you know, like. Andrew, I think we're in a much more revolutionary situation and in part to energize people.

I mean, what we're talking about is a revenge of competency, a revenge of genius, a revenge of people who actually know how to do things and care enough to

who are ready and want to be mobilized and want to be called up, who've been sitting with major league skills in the minors or worse. And the fact is that what the institutions have done have inverted the competency hierarchy. I mean, there's a guy that I don't understand named Brad DeLong, who was part of the group that brought in NAFTA

And they helped to sell this idea that free trade was good for everybody. And then years later, I hear, oh, you know what free trade actually is? There was an esoteric version, an exoteric version. The exoteric version we put on display for everybody. We always knew that in the esoteric version that was shared in the seminar rooms, that it was a social Darwinist welfare function that rewarded you by the cube of your wealth. And I just sit there with my jaw on the floor thinking, wow.

what did you just say? And then he says, like, I don't understand. Maybe we hurt people in Ohio, but we helped a lot of Mexican peasants. And I'm thinking, so you think that the American voters who you've called jingoistic and, you know, ultra nationalists are going to be very happy that you've, you've denigrated their patriotism. And now what they have to show for it is, is that there are Mexican peasants who are significantly better off, which I mean, who doesn't want Mexican peasants to be better off, but for,

sake i mean this is this is a class of people that needs to lose yeah and a lot of them are going to lose in my administration like i'm not a generally vindictive person no it's not you know so i hope he has a happy wonderful life yeah exactly it's the kind of thing where it's like hey guess what um you had a lot of influence and authority uh in one era it's over now like no you know not

going to unduly try and make your life miserable or anything, but, you know, like where we're... There's nothing vindictive. It's just, I don't want to watch...

the Alan Greenspan show or the Larry Summers show or the Paul Krugman show. I don't really need, there's no reason that these people get to be in every scene in every decade ad infinitum. Yeah. Again, like I said, there's really no accountability for being wrong. And so if someone presided over an era where, you know, there was epic mismanagement, you know, we still are asking them what the heck they think.

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So first call your parents to say, I'm sorry, and then download the Instacart app to get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes all school year long. Get a $0 delivery fee for your first three orders while supplies last. Minimum $10 per order. Additional terms apply. Can I hit you with another one that's really comical for me? Sure. I watch the graphics that have your name in relationship to the other competitors, and I know who the networks are afraid of, and they're afraid of you.

They'll do a linear perspective graphic and you'll be the guy on the very far end and then the presenter will stand in front. I haven't noticed that. That does seem to be something of a... Well, I don't think you should be bringing it up. I think the job is for people like me to be bringing this up because they've been playing this game with like Ron Paul, with Bernie Sanders. And I don't know if you're familiar in magic with the concept of magician's choice.

No, I'm not. So a magician engages in a trick with magician's choice. Let's say that I want you to choose C out of A, B, and C. So I give you the option, pick two. You pick A and B. And I say, okay, I'll take those away, so now we'll look at C. Or if you pick A and C, I'll say, okay, we'll take one of those two and we'll throw B away. Now, which one do you... So eventually, you think you've made a decision. But in fact, the whole game was that the magician was pushing you

Without your knowledge. It's like media company's choice. This is what I think. It's media company's choice. And we've got a situation where my feeling is that the more the Yang gang can find, and this goes for Tulsi Gabbard or whoever else might be sidelined by this game.

My feeling is, is that what you're on right now is the equivalent of pirate radio. This is some is dot for the American people. And we should be, it's one reason I'm here, man. Well, and it's one of the reasons that we need to make sure that these channels are opened to the very people that the DNC doesn't want running or the networks don't want running. And the thing that I hate is, is that we're in this William tell situation where we've got to run against our own party.

Yeah, well, you know, again... You may not want to say that, and I understand why, but I'll be damned if I'm going to listen to a situation in which you're shut out of airtime and you're pushed off to the side of the graphic. Thank you, Eric. And I can say that this man is the head of pirate radio for the 21st century. Certainly one of the high chiefs of it. And to me...

Again, you have these institutions with certain incentives and certain relationships, and they're going to be naturally protective of the folks that they think are on the inside and be naturally very leery of the people that they think are on the outside. But one of the themes of this era is that there are more of us on the outside that are catching on and that the stranglehold that media companies had on our

attention has weakened significantly. It's one reason why someone like me can do so well in this environment or that someone like you can become this independent intellectual voice that doesn't need to, you know, like get a CNN contributor contract or whatever. Well, it's very funny. One of the members of the Washington Post, which is,

you know, says that democracy dies in darkness, that their tagline. But one of them said that everything you, Eric, you have to say that's new, isn't true. And everything you say that's true, isn't new. So it was like, remarkably, there's nothing I can possibly contribute to the conversation. It's just unlikely. I mean, statistically, it's pretty hard to imagine that it's a perfect, everything's been said, Eric. Yeah. And the only stuff that hasn't is wrong. So,

What I'd love to do is to talk about some sort of new ideas to undergird some of the economic things that you and I have traditionally talked about more before your meteoric rise. So let's dig into it. Yeah, please. Okay. So one of the things that... Also, I want to say that I quote this man all the time. I've learned a great deal from him and his wife. And that...

He's one of the most profound economic thinkers that I've encountered and I met a lot of fucking people. You're very kind, sir. And one of the things that I would say is that even when I disagree with you, even on your signature stuff,

that the way I really view you is that you're the candidate who is most open to new ideas and you're always up for a good discussion, a good argument, and you'll go with whatever's best. And I find that you are as close to non-egoic as anyone I've met running. I mean, you really seem to be running out of compulsion. Yeah. You know, I don't have any native desire to be

I didn't feel that you ever did. And it was one of the reasons I love the fact that you're running. Yeah. I think one of my main qualifications to be president is that I just don't socialize that much in the sense of like, if you had me around a bunch of fancy stuff, like it really doesn't do anything for me. Like, you know, as president, I would love to do away with a lot of the, you do like geeking, like the ceremony. Like it seems like, like it's counterproductive.

And no, I happen to think that might help me do a better job. So let's try to geek out on a couple of ideas that Pia and I have been playing with, see what you think. Yeah, I love it. Okay. So one of the things that we've been thinking about is some people start talking about the difference between the shareholder economy of the past and the stakeholder economy of the future. There are other issues about the dignity of work.

And, um, what happens when machines replace you? You can't necessarily defend yourself economically, but you still have a reason to get up in the morning and do something. Well, we hope you have a reason to get up and do something. Amen. Now, the thing is, uh, we've been thinking about this paradigm from object oriented programming, which is the difference between is a versus has a. So is,

If a Lamborghini can play an FM broadcast through its speaker, you could technically find out that by some definition, the Lamborghini is a radio. But that seems absurd. It's much more sane to say that it has a radio just the way it has a transmission. We make this error, I think, when we talk about workers. We say that person is a worker. They are a bricklayer or something.

Or a Teamster, you know? Completely. And that what we need to do is to readjust our model of an economic agent to a has a model. And so the idea is that you may have a breadwinner and you also have a contributor and you also have a consumer. And therefore, what it is that we do all day long in the face of the automation that may or may not get here in dribs and drabs or come as a wave, we don't know.

that we need to have a model of humans that recognizes a need to be active in the economy, whether or not the marginal product of our labor is sufficient to take care of our family. Yeah, I love it so much and I couldn't agree more. Okay, so that would be the kind of a research program that we would love to try to see undergirding a new economy that recognizes a much richer concept of an agent

But without it, I'm worried that, you know, the sort of the power of that Chicago style thinking pushes us back into humans as widgets. Well, humans as widgets is predominant. And you can see it at every turn, where even if you ask a kid, what do you want to be when you grow up? It's, you know, they'll say, I want to be a fireman, astronaut, baker, scientist, whatever it happens to be. And by the numbers, we are more work obsessed now than we perhaps have ever been.

Um, and trying to break up our identities into several aspects where you take a trucker who's on the road away from his family four days a week and say, you know, you're a dad, you're like a consumer of, uh, hunting gear or, you know, like you, um, there's more to you than being a trucker when they have shaped their life, uh,

around being a trucker because you know it's literally you're behind the wheel for 14 hours a day you get out you sleep at a rest stop i mean these are all consuming types of existences that are filled by hundreds of thousands of american men and you know 94 of them are men so you know it's not like oh just things are all men it's like come on 94 percent of them

And so if you were to go to that person and try and have them adopt a more holistic identity when they have essentially shaped their entire existence around their role in this real life, like almost circulatory system where it's like they're piloting this blood vessel that has a bunch of Home Depot crap in the back or whatever the heck they're transporting on like a daily basis. Yeah.

having them have other aspects of their identity that they value to a point where you could remove the work component and they would, you know, be cool with going home and spending time with their, their families is pretty much the opposite of the way our civilization functions right now. Well, we saw these deaths of despair discussed by economists in the,

you know the heartland of america we saw this demographic crisis that happened when the soviet union fell apart with um you know the mortality crisis uh all sorts of people were dying of alcoholism heart attacks and stress so this is a really serious thing we have to figure out about the restoration of

human meaning and dignity as different from employment. You had something like a dozen disenfranchised taxi cab drivers and limo drivers kill themselves, you know, last year, like one of whom killed himself in front of city hall.

I mean, like, did his self-destruction cause meaningful ripples in our society? No. Most people watching this or listening to this right now, it's like, oh, that shit happened? Like, you know, but this sort of self-destruction is happening all the time. And most of them are just men quietly drinking themselves to death in their homes. Right. And, you know, they're dead. But...

Well, I love the idea that you're talking about compassion for men because one of the things that I'm finding is that it's very tough to talk in a world that is currently exploring this idea of toxic masculinity from some place that it might have been reasonably defined and blowing it up past that point. It's a very dangerous thing to see a world that sort of thinks that all men

straight white guys are okay when in fact many of them are very vulnerable and by the numbers by the numbers right you know yeah it's so uh the and this is one of the the themes that when you talk about trying to define people um by different aspects of their life that might have work as one of them but have like others the fact is i think men struggle more with breaking up our identities and

than women do. Because if you were to say to a woman, hey, you're a parent, you're a sister, you're a nurse, you're like all of these things, I think they would be more ready to embrace some of the non-work aspects of their identity in part because of the cultural load that is placed on different types of people in our society. Yeah, but I think they're facing a big one coming up, which is that you're going to have a huge cohort of millennial females who

who pretty much would, would love to be in a situation with meaningful work, but also with a family raising children of their own. And there's, first of all, it isn't necessarily a supply of guys who can rise to the, I mean, you know, it doesn't have to be traditional households, but a lot of it is going to be male, female breadwinner. Somebody stays at home. It might be the woman who's in the workforce might be the guy staying home, whatever the fact is,

a lot of these families aren't going to form because we're not in a position to say, I can afford a 30-year mortgage. I can see enough stability in my future. And that's part of the thing is that these challenges face us all in different ways. And it's really, to me...

counterproductive to disastrous to single out a particular subset of us and be like, hey, you've got it rough. You're okay. That's a legitimate thing to be upset about. That is not... If someone is struggling, it ends up reaching different groups in different ways. And you can't say it's like, oh, your struggles are somehow more valid

than others. So just to, to, to wrap around this thought. So I think that the division of our identities into like work and non-work, right. Uh, it's one of the greatest things we have to overcome. And by the numbers, if you lose your job and you're a man, um, you tend to have relatively, uh,

self-destructive patterns of behavior manifest relatively consistently and quickly where unemployed men volunteer less than employed men despite having much more free time as an example substance abuse tends to go up in very self-destructive behaviors a lot of time spent on the computer goes up which so that's a combination of

gaming and some other things. And porn, I'm sure, is, you know, I didn't, I mean, I kind of implied it, but was thinking it. No, no, no. Look, this is a free radio station, effectively, and we're going to be able to say that that's one of the things that may be deranging us. We don't know what its effects are. Yeah. So, and that women...

have struggles, obviously, but the struggles take a different form in terms of... And the numbers show that women are more adaptable to non-work idleness, and that they will not show the same patterns of self-destructive behavior that men do. Now, of course, women obviously hate to be unemployed, but the thing that I joke about that's sort of true is that women, however, are never truly idle in the sense that they always find...

like ways to be productive contributors in a way that men struggle with. So kin work, for example, where you're working for your family, taking care of elderly parents, your kids, somebody else's kids, you know,

these things are part of the fabric of civil society. One of the questions I have is, should we talk about coming up with some new financial products that get women the money they need during the period of their life when they might need extra help in the house, when they, when the, the binds that come from caring for elderly parents or children are starting to knock them out of the workforce and trying to figure out how to make some kind of creative structure that

to help shift the burdens to times of their life when they can better afford it. What do you think about that? Yeah. So just to sort of show the other side of the coin. So men volunteer less if they're unemployed than employed, even though that doesn't make any sense in terms of their free time.

Women show higher rates of volunteerism and going back to school when they have more time. So it's just that the numbers show clear patterns of like different responses to non-work related time or idleness. But I'm with you on the fact that right now trying to map everyone's economic prospects to the market is,

valuation of our wages has all sorts of distorting effects. And Tim, what you're suggesting that we should just start putting money into people's hands at various points in their lives. I mean, that's really one of the

underpinnings of the freedom dividend, you know, my universal basic income. Yeah. It's like you put a thousand bucks a month into people's hands and then that would allow us all to make different types of decisions really from almost day one of our adulthood. Let's try a few other things that I think might be interesting. One thing that wins presidential campaigns that we don't talk much about is demographers. Demographers are sometimes asked questions.

Tell me some group of people that we don't know about as a voting block that nobody's figured out how to speak to. And I think I have a couple of these that are candidates. I'd like to. Oh, please. Yeah, I'd like this. Maybe I'll find a new audience to. Well, OK. So the first one that I have.

So these are things like soccer moms was one from years past or exurbs between rural and suburbs where people didn't realize that there were intermediate places. So here's one that I think is huge that hasn't been identified. Parents of super smart kids that have some kind of a learning difference that causes them to wildly underperform in school.

This is something that makes me crazy because I think it's all over. Once you start seeing it, you see it everywhere. Parents are tearing their hair out. Teachers can't handle the kids. And there's just this maddening loss of human brilliance that is flushed down the toilet. Have you come up with a name for this group? Well, yeah.

I often refer to these as kids with learning superpowers. And I like, I talk about teaching disabilities, which is the more dangerous version of this, that because people don't fit into the notion of what can be educated by one teacher, teaching a room of 30 people to make the economics work. Um,

My belief is that and I'll come up with a name for it for you. But I want to talk to all of the parents who are leading lives of despair saying, why is my kid wildly underperforming? I know how smart this kid is. Why are we doing this to ourselves and why will no one speak to it?

This is, by the way, this is me and it's been in my family for four or five generations. Really? Well, yeah, I'm very public about the fact that my older son is autistic. I know that. And that when we put him in various environments, I mean, there were very, very sharp struggles. And to me, atypical is the new normal, like neurologically atypical. And you're right that as soon as you start seeing it, you see it everywhere. And that the

Facts show that it's incredibly commonplace. And at this point, I think most American families have someone other in the family or someone in their social circles that resembles the description that you just put out there of this group. To me, a lot of it is that our institutions just aren't

aren't well designed for people with different learning profiles or different approaches to the world. And yet these are very often the people who are going to found new fields, who are going to find new drugs for us, who are going to think in such different, uncorrelated fashions, that these are very often the people that I value the most. And you never know whether the thing is going to work out because the kid every year is sustaining more and more trauma

Whereas these other kids, it's like, you know, I remember looking at the neurotypicals as if I was... AI may be the most important new computer technology ever, but AI needs a lot of processing speed, and that gets expensive fast. Upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI. OCI is the single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Do more and spend less, like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic.

Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash insightful. Oracle.com slash insightful. If I was like Cinderella watching all the other sisters go to the ball and I was sitting there scrubbing dishes, like, you know, every conference was Eric is underperforming. Eric can't meet his potential. Eric was there.

At some point, it's just like you don't realize how much damage you're doing to maybe as much as a fifth of the country. Well, someone described it as like you're getting regular low-grade psychic beating. It's pretty good. And that's something that you obviously wouldn't wish upon anyone, much less little kids. Yeah.

And by the way, the autism thing, you know, I don't know whether your child is high functioning or not, but it's certainly the case that a lot of us have the idea that we almost don't want to deal with people who aren't in some sense on the spectrum or having some kind of ability to focus and to focus.

um work with abstractions very often i think of you know i i'm on top of this i'm colorblind and i always make the point that i see camouflage did you know that you're wearing bright purple right now stop it that used to happen i used to dress myself before i let my my girlfriend now wife uh make these decisions i would make terrible decisions you look great thank you yeah he looks great i'm sure i have something to do with it

So that would be one group. Here's another one that I think is really important. Now, I know that you are the child of immigrants and that I'm, of course, married to an immigrant. The temptation is for us to sort of be very defensive of our immigrants because we have some forces at the moment that have become very jingoistic.

And I think that that's right. But I also think that we have to recognize that there is a story about immigration that's very unpleasant and ugly, which is how Americans have used immigration to redistribute wealth amongst ourselves. And effectively, the immigrant is used as a tool of redistribution. Then people get angry or protective of the tool. And one of the things that I think

It's very important. This is a huge chunk of America is highly xenophobic, xenophilic. They like foreigners. They like traveling abroad. They like food, music. You probably read a righteous mind by Jonathan hate. You're probably friends with John, right? Yeah. Yeah. I figured I could continue cause it's what it reminds me of. Okay.

The thing is, is that xenophilic restrictionists are a good chunk of this country. If you do a poll and you allow for all four boxes, xenophilic, xenophobic, restrictionist, expansionist, xenophilic restrictionism is a giant cohort. Nobody speaks to it because if you say anything about restrictionism, the media will instantaneously label you as xenophobe.

Can we at least distinguish the idea of the immigrants as souls like ourselves who have been an important part of our national tapestry together with the fact that very often they are used as instruments of transfers of wealth?

And that we should be angry at our fellow Americans who cynically use immigration and hide behind the immigrant to take money from one sector and put it into their own pockets. Or you should not be angry at someone who's angry about the, the, uh, immigrants. This is the thing because, because there's something like you said, it's like, you know, in some ways someone can have a very legitimate grievance about the fact that there have been these, uh,

instruments of wealth transfer that have been imported into our midst. So I call these the Americans who redistribute our wealth, uh, immigrant entrepreneurs, right? And the idea is that if they could use puppy dogs to redistribute our wealth, they'd use puppy dogs because nobody can be against puppies. Right. And so it's a very cynical use of the statue of Liberty. It's something that's very difficult to talk about, but it's something that I've been talking about for a while because I think that I'm,

I'm so far in the xenophilic category, it would be comical if somebody decided I actually had a problem. So I've been bold and I haven't really had the problem. But most Americans feel very uncomfortable talking about immigration because they have two different feelings. They, one, have a really good feeling about the person that they know who happened to come from Uganda or India. And they have the sense that something is wrong with the story. We're going to have to disentangle it and restore something that makes us feel good about it rather than uncomfortable.

I agree. Great. Yeah. And, you know, I think I may be able to help in this regard. I think you're perfectly positioned for this. You know, I'm the son of immigrants who loves this country, loves that immigrants have been an incredible source of dynamism. But, you know, you can't have...

and unrestricted immigration, I understand the sentiment where people are struggling with the fact that our country has brought many people in either intentionally or unintentionally in ways that are changing our economy and society in ways that in like some people have in legitimate ways.

I think we need to be able to have an open conversation about difficult topics around this and pull them apart and

the fact is we need we need people to feel comfortable that it's okay to feel uncomfortable as long as you're trying to explore but the current president for my money gets way too close to jingoistic sentiment yeah and and that's one of the natural reactions is that if the current president says one thing then you know the right thing to do is say the exact opposite but then the nuance gets lost and then unfortunately we end up falling into that's why these polarized camps we have we

It's so important not only to defeat the current president, but also to defeat the kleptocratic center of our own party, as well as the regressive left that poses as the progressive left, and then to take care of the constituents that are currently –

all over the spectrum in a new world. And this is one of the things I love about your slogan, which is not left or right, but forward, right? Yes, that's the slogan. Yeah, and that thing is that it's a question. It also happens to be the truth. It's not just a guess. I know, but that's the thing. It's moving out of flatland. Like we've been given this

smorgasbord of bad options and just say hey i don't think i want to dine from there i think these things are available off menu do you mind if i if i you know like for example starbucks i think will sell you a short cup of coffee but they won't put it on the menu you have to know that to ask for it so i like to think of you as the guy who somehow knows that there are things that aren't on the menu i am animal style at in and out i am andrew yang is animal style uh

let me give you, I agree that I can change the political conversation in a way that many Americans find very exciting and productive because 25% of Americans are politically disengaged, including I'm sure some people watching this. And I believe it's up to 48% self identify as independent, which is almost twice what identify as other Democrats. I'm so close to identifying as independent. I can't stand my own party, but my feeling is I have to stay there and,

and say, Hey, we're out of control in order to save the structure. Because I, I,

Well, the two-party system, I mean, I agree. That's why I'm running as a Democrat in part. It's like, well, you have these two parties. Maybe you can turn one of them into like a highly functioning party with great ideas and the rest of it. I mean, that's like an easier solution than...

to start retaking our institutions. We always had heterodox people of high caliber who are, you know, effectively heretics housed inside the Harvard's and MIT's and Caltech's. And I think we've gotten rid of that kind of, or if they are there, then they're scared shitless to like say the wrong thing or else they'll get, do you remember the time you remember that situation where MIT turned over Aaron Schwartz? I shouldn't laugh. Cause I mean, it's dark.

but we should laugh. No, no. I mean, I'm, I'm for laughing at the dark. Yeah. I laugh at the dark. It's like, you know, it's a, it's like everybody knows that, but you're not allowed to do it in public. So screw that. You know, we had the situation with this guy, Aaron Schwartz. Did you know Aaron? No. Did you? I've, you know, he's a friend of friends. Yeah. You know, and this guy almost certainly was a pretty pure hearted human being who was fighting a good fight. MIT is supposed to shelter those people. Yeah.

And instead they cooperate, you know, in turning them over. As soon as you get the institutional incentives in a particular direction, then like, I mean, this is not near, and this is just like recent because in recent memory, but you know, I stuck up for Shane Gillis, this comedian that,

I saw that and the idea that you were in a position to say, look, I'm the candidate person to be offended. He personally actually, yeah. And so if anyone should be offended, it's me. And so I think he shouldn't lose his job over it. Well, this is the thing. The quality of mercy or forgiveness or just recognition...

That there should be space for remorse and redemption. This is what makes so much of the intolerant left feel cult-like. And I thought what you were doing was you were showing the best aspects of a truly compassionate left. I was trying to be a human being, you know? Like, you looked at him being like, well, is that a job-losing offense? But then the fact that NBC ended up firing him was entirely...

with our corporate incentives because if you look at it, say like, well, is this person that we've invested a lot in that's a revenue generator for us? No, because he hadn't even worked for one day. It's like our corporate incentives to can him and thus like, you know, put an end to any

or advertisers or whatnot that would be troubled by it. Yeah. So it's like, so if you'd asked me, it's like, Hey, do you think he's going to be fired? I'd be like, yeah, he's almost certainly going to be fired because that's what the corporate incentives. Well, I understand that. So one of the things that I'm really interested in doing, but it still made me sad. Like I was like, Hey, this would be unusually human and forgiving if they decided to, they lost a teachable moment because one of the things that's going on is that so much of the

The information economy is very, very marginal in the sense that you're almost producing a public good. So for example, I slap ads on my podcasts. Buy stuff from his sponsors. Well, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to do two new models, one of which I'm calling reverse sponsorship, where I shout out some great company, which doesn't know that I'm going to say something positive. And maybe they become sponsors. Maybe they don't. But the other one is riskvertisers.

where people get to know me over long periods of time. And the hope is that you're going to say, look, you're not going to catch me being horrible and bigoted and all of these things, but I might say something dangerous, like something that I just said about immigration. And will you make sure that you will not run away from me

During the period where the mob descends and the frenzy is that it's worse. Right. Because if we don't fix the economic models, we can't have deeper discussions because everybody's going to run away at the first sight of trouble. And so part of what we're trying to do ultimately with the advertising. Look at this pirate radio pre-advertising. What do you think? I mean, I love it. It's like, leave it to you to try and solve it.

that kind of problem. All right. I got some other things that I want to talk about is demographics. Oh yeah, please. Okay. So, so, so let me first say, um,

I am a parent of a neurologically atypical young person. I agree with you that I think that many people have a different perspective are going to end up being contributors in highly distinctive ways. I will say that even kids who are not going to be contributors in highly distinctive ways still deserve schools that can support and accommodate them. And that to me, these kids are like the shorthand I use is that they're spiky.

It's like you have very high capacities in some respects or a different point of view and then real challenges in other respects. And so if I send you into a social environment where there are 30 kids for one teacher, you're going to have a terrible, terrible time. And that's 100% predictable. And so if then you have a critical mass of people that resemble this, then you should try and design an institution that takes that into account.

And I feel so deeply for families that struggle with this. Like you struggle with it. Sounds like you've experienced it. I have struggled with it. And you and Pia, you know, and me and Evelyn, like we have an unusual level of ability to try and, you know, manage situation. And I meet single moms around the country who have,

you know, autistic or neurologically atypical kids that don't have the means and they live in a part of the country that does not have like a lot of resources in place for kids that are different. And it breaks my heart. Like the fact that there are all of these kids that are heading into these schools that are getting, um,

you know, more than low grade psychic beatings. Oh my God. This is what I leave my, my DMS open on Twitter. And this is one of the number one things I do it for is people write to me and they say, I know you're really busy, but I just want to tell you nobody had ever spoken to my situation. You're proud of something I'm always ashamed of. And I guarantee you, I'm not the first presidential candidate with autism in the family. And the fact that I'm the first talking about it is to me long overdue and ridiculous. Um,

And, you know, and I get some of the same messages that you get. But, you know, like I want to actually try and solve the problem for those families. I mean, it makes me feel glad that they feel spoken to and that they realize not the only one's going through it. I want to see more money going to figure out how do we diversify the classroom of the future. Yeah.

So that the load isn't borne by people who don't fit the economics of the teaching model. Yes. And part of it is that we regard the education of our kids as a cost. And so then the city then is like, well, I can't afford to have like a teacher for your neurologically atypical kid. And so what we have to do is talk about inverting the model is you have to look at the –

of our children as an investment and then you say, what's that? Like these kids require, you know, like X and Y, then we should make that investment with the certainty. And I share your confidence in this, that you have a couple of those kids do something highly atypical and remarkable, then that pays for whatever support or teachers or infrastructure. I mean, I just had a, a,

A very well-known professor revealed to me that he couldn't read papers in his field. He just can't read. And he has to figure out what the paper is likely to be saying. There is such a weird world of unexpected achievement in

And this is the demon. This is the demon that we have to slay in many ways. Is that the negative externalities are not being encompassed within the budgets of various institutions. Very well said. But then also we're foregoing all the potential positive value creation or generation from...

proper investment in our human capital and another dimension too. And this is like another here and there, but I was just with Dean came in and in New Hampshire and he was talking about how the FDA, like all their incentives are just to like regulate the shit out of anything. And then I said to him, I was like, you know what they should start measuring is the foregone utility of keeping something away from

from people. Like if you had something... What is the opportunity cost of the regulation? Yeah. So he had like this prosthetic limb that he was trying to give to vets and the FDA was making it really hard for him to do so. And he was like, are you kidding me? I'm trying to give...

to vets who had amputated. And so by your making it hard for me to do so, like you multiply like all of the limbless vets who aren't getting a limb. Like, you know, it's like, so if you had that as like an actual measurement for the FDA, it's like you need to have these companies internalize the negative externalities of things like pollution and the rest of it. But you almost need like our institutions, like our schools, you know,

And our regulatory agencies to start trying to somehow capture the potential gains from investing in our kids or allowing a certain innovation into the market. Like the big problems are that our measurements are really primitive and it ends up and you end up with binary incentives where you're

uh you lose a lot of the value and so you end up being like hey don't have a teacher for your kid so your kid's gonna you know just end up um sidelined what one you know and sidelined is like a euphemistic way for saying destroyed

I know. One of the things I wanted to do at some point, I actually ended up talking to the Heritage Foundation of all people about this, was the idea of national interest waivers so that we could have a skunk works with very light regulation hanging off the side of every large...

And the idea is that you would put some portion of a company, you could put some portion of a company outside where the rules were effectively different because you needed people to take massive risks to be able to move super fast, to be,

dealing with highly non-neurotypical people. And this is one of the things that drives me nuts about the political conversation is like you get like, they get like yelled at for a particular, it's like, oh, you made a mistake. It's like you kind of need to have an environment where you're going to accept a certain level of mistakes, particularly when you're talking about

um, large scale society wide investments where like, of course you can't get that stuff right. Uh, you know, it's like, and the problem is that the political incentives are for everyone to try and avoid like a negative headline, um, or something that that's look, a lot of us are very disagreeable, very difficult to deal with. And, you know, I saw you pick up, uh, endorsements, uh, from people like Elon Musk, you know, which is, is,

Then I hear his personal life being criticized. I was like, I don't really care. This guy is responsible for how much innovation. If he's got a few foibles, let's give him some privacy. Let him be in peace and just recognize that we're getting an unbelievable deal. And yet this desire to somehow stamp out outliers. I mean, outliers are essential to the American project.

Yes, I could not agree more. And, you know, I consider myself it's pretty funny, Eric, because I, you know, I think I had in many ways like a highly competitive

conventional upbringing that helped. Like, I feel like I'm sort of a hybrid where to the extent that I was highly contrarian or dissimilar, you know, it's like I, you know, I came up through a series of institutions in an era where, you know, I think I learned to adapt. But then I look at my boys and I think to myself, well,

that, um, you know, that, that their way of life is going to be very, very different than mine. I'm sure yours too, because we came of age in a different era. Well, this is true. I mean, I was just talking about this actually with Brett Easton Ellis sitting in that chair that, um, you know, I grew up as part of this free range, uh, world largely before Eitan Patz got kidnapped and the milk carton kids changed everything. Uh, I worry about the sort of

We were too free range and these kids are too sheltered that we have to find some new mix. But I want to get to another issue. Give me one more demographic. Okay. Yes. Let's do it. And then we'll close it out. I want to talk about something which really...

makes me angry and excited. I think that America has without question, some of the finest sources, um, educationally for brilliance in STEM subjects. And we've pretended for a very long time that Americans are not good at STEM, that we are disinterested in STEM, that STEM careers are fantastic when many of them are pretty shitty. Um,

And that we don't recognize that the entire STEM complex is suffused with bullshit because the model, the economic model for investing in basic research went belly up because the universities were built on a growth model that was unsustainable. And I want to stop lying. So one, I want to start recognizing that we have high schools that have more Nobel Prizes than all of China.

that we are using Chinese labor and other Asian countries, not just because we are exporting education as a good, but because we have a cryptic labor market in basic research where we pretend people are students when they're actually workers.

We pretend that we're importing them to educate them, but actually what we're trying to do is use a poverty differential. We have our own people who are really fantastic because they're not very obedient. And instead, people prefer obedient people coming in who are...

aren't here on temporary visas, therefore they have to follow orders. The entire National Science Foundation, National Academy of Science complex is bizarrely suffused with nonsense. And because of this, we can't actually have the National Academies adjudicate what's true because they are the prime offender of this. How do we get back to a situation which we can recognize that we have a Stuyvesant or a Bronx Science Foundation

or Far Rockaway or any of these unbelievable high schools that are turning out people who desperately want to do STEM subjects. They're not being paid when they finally get their degrees at appropriate levels. They've been secretly studied by our science complex because these career paths are known to be crappy. And we have completely suffused this with a misdescription so that nobody can actually fix any problems.

That's an incredible description. And to me, the lack of proper resources for basic research for things that ended up being foundational for many of our current industries. It's the biggest bargain in the world. It's just the future you're investing in. It's just right now we're so...

brainwashed by market-driven thinking that if there's not some short-term profitability tied to it or there's no drug company funding it or something along those lines. And this is something that the government historically has been...

the leader in where it said, you know what, we can lay the foundation and create paths for people to be able to do basic research, the benefits of which will be unclear. They may not exist. They may not materialize for decades, but it's similar to what we're talking about with the neurologically atypical kids is that like a few of them pay off and then the payoff can be

unfathomably significant. Well, we call this long vol investing in hedge fund land, where most things don't work out, but a few that do pay for all of the losers. Yep. Yeah. And right now, to me, this is a role where historically the government has led and you need a government willing to make long-term sustained investments that may only pay off

way down the road and may not pay off, but you still need to be able to make them. Well, I also, you know, the other weird part of this is that by using our own people and letting in particular China know that it can't operate a relatively totalitarian government over there and have the benefit of freedom over here with a pipeline for all of our innovations to immediately go back over there.

China needs to be induced in some sense to understand that they can't get by without giving their people freedom. And what they're right now doing is that they're using our freedom and a periscope by which they can see everything that we're doing. And if we actually cut that off, I know that the universities are going to scream bloody murder. But what's going to happen is China is going to have to start investing in its own.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, this reminds me of a joke that they told in artificial intelligence, which is how far behind is China than the U.S. in AI? And the answer is 12 hours. Yeah.

It means they, you know, obviously they wake up and then they see what we did. I can't tell you how fantastic it is to have you come into the studio. You're coming off of this big rally in MacArthur Park. I know that it's late for both of us. You're welcome any time to come back. I'd love to continue the conversation. I would love this too, man. This feels to me like half a conversation. We're going to have to have the second half at some other time. So if you enjoyed this convo,

let Eric know and then hopefully he'll have me back. And if you'd like to join the Yang gang, you should know we are a very, very cheap gang to join. Is that right? Well, our average donation is only $25. So our fans are even cheaper than Bernie's, which no one even knew could be a thing in politics. But here it is. But you get $25 times enough people and you wind up putting up

very, very big numbers and you'll see like we're already into the eight digits as a campaign. And we can take this whole thing. We can contend because a lot of people watching this right now, you're ignoring politics as usual. We can actually have a different sort of politics that takes real thinking, real ideas, real solutions.

and brings them to the highest levels of our government. It just needs enough Erics and Pias and you all watching at home to say, uh, I prefer this, um, to the stuff I'm getting through the, the cable TV network. Well, Andrew, one of the things I think that's been great about watching your meteoric rise is that you are outside of control without being out of control and that having a kind of a mature person who's not easily bought or swayed, who's, uh,

speaking in a way that nobody knows what he's going to say next has been hugely positive for the entire process. Thank you. You know, the, the only, uh, um, the only currency I answer to is, is, uh,

ideas and humanity. Like you, you know, you put a good idea in front of me or a good person. I listen. Well, you've been that way since before all the success. So we wish you continued success. And we'll have you back here the next time you're in L.A. with a little bit of time. Would love that, brother. All right. Thanks. You've been through the portal with Andrew Yang, presidential candidate for 2020 and telling us to make America think harder. Yes. This man is going to make you think harder all the time.

All right. Be well, everybody.

Thank you.