The AI Job Crisis Andrew Yang Saw Coming

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So why not you? Try Odo for free at Odo.com. That's OdoO.com. Today's number, a hundred and ninety-three. That's the age of the world's oldest animal, the tortoise named Jonathan.

At Shastore I worked at a zoo for several years, where my job was circumcising elephants. The pay wasn't very good, but the tips were huge. Especially, markets are bigger than what you have here as a structure change in the world's history. Cash is trash.

Stocks look pretty attractive, something's going to break, we've got about it. How are you, Ed? I'm doing, well, hundred ninety-three. Would you want to live to a hundred ninety-three? I don't want to live to ninety-three.

I've already, I think about being serious, I think about the end a lot. I've got the drugs picked out, I know where I want to die, I know the people I want to around me, I do, I spend a lot of time curating those apple stories of my kids and friends, I'm going to live my life again, I'm going to play all of those videos on repeat. And I'm going to trip and I already know who I want to come visit me, and then I'm

going to piece out, I'm going to overdose, I'm going to go fucking crazy on heroin, which

is supposed to be amazing, by the way.

So are you being serious about the heroin? I know you're serious about all the other stuff. I do think at the end of your life, I don't, I don't see a problem with like, really I'm maxing out on Tom Petty and heroin. Ed speaking of heroin and interventions, property markets is going live.

We're already in some cities, we're already 60% sold out, and this is after four days. So if you're interested in seeing us in either New York, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, or LA, please go to propertymarkets tour.com and get a ticket. And also if you're a friend of mine, pretend you're a fucking grown up and get your own ticket.

Seriously, people are calm as they reserved me two tickets. Oh, it goes for my friends too. Reserve me two tickets, and I send them the URL, and they're like, oh, I have to buy

a ticket, so I'm like, don't you make like 7 million bucks a year, but buy a ticket

for God's six. Anyways, but I love my friends and I'm hoping to see them there.

“But anyways, we will sell out these tickets are to selling faster, I think, than the last”

tour I was on. So it's a lot of fun live podcasts, who would have thought it, they actually are a good time. We are going to have great guests. So we're super excited about that, a bunch of surprise guests, very famous iconic, interesting

people in great cities, so come out, Ed and I will likely host an after party. That's right. We will raffle off all of Claire's Quince Wardrobe in a fundraiser. So we're very excited, we're going to have all sorts of things, we're going to have magic tricks, we're going to have the rockets, we're going to do an appearance, I don't know where

I got that.

Did I take a date at a rocket when I first moved in New York Ed?

It's crazy. That's awesome. Yeah. Can go out. I've seen the Christmas spectacular like three times, I'm the only Jew that's seen the Christmas

I love that.

“Yeah, I'm very excited too, we're going to be heading to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago,”

Miami, New York, it's going to be great.

I'm shocked by how many people have been telling us and getting mad at us for not going to Denver. I did not have that on my bingo card. So we'll go to Denver next time, but those are the cities, five cities, very excited to go to ProftYMarketsTour.com to get your tickets.

Let's talk about GDP and AI, Ed. One of the biggest concerns around AI is its potential impact on the labor market. And so far, the data isn't very encouraging. Last year, companies attributed roughly 55,000 layoffs to AI, an unemployment for recent college grads rose to 5.6% that is the highest level outside the pandemic in more than a decade.

Andrew Yang has been making this case for years.

Before CHAPT was even released, he warned that automation and AI would displace millions of workers. In fact, his 2020 presidential campaign was centered on this very idea. And back then he proposed the Freedom Dividend, which would give American adults $1,000 a month as a way to soften the economic blow.

Now, as those concerns begin to actually play out, what we wanted to revisit the conversation with one of the earliest voices on this issue and ask what he thinks we should do next. So here's our conversation with Andrew Yang, entrepreneur, author, philanthropist, nonprofit leader and former 2020 presidential candidate, Andrew, great to have you on the show.

“So you ran for president, I mean, you started this campaign, I believe it was actually”

in 2017, 2018 is when it really got rolling.

And the central premise was that AI would eliminate millions of jobs and automation and robots in general would also play into that thesis as well. A lot of people said that you were being alarmist, a lot of people said that it was kind of doomerish speculation, now we're seeing that that is kind of the labor market issue of our time.

I just want to start with this, how did you predict this and why were you thinking about this, what was it, seven years ago, thanks for having me, Ed and Scott, yeah, how did the magical Asian man from the future get so much right back in 2018? I had friends at Silicon Valley as I know both of you do and they told me AI was in the pipeline and that eventually it was going to do a number on call center jobs, retail jobs,

eventually truck driving jobs and I knew that they were right, I then asked them, look, how many of you want to say this in public and back then none of them did, really.

“And so I thought, you know what, let me try and raise the alarm.”

In my view, the reason why Donald Trump became president back in 2016, which is what got me into the public realm was that we had automated away millions of manufacturing jobs that were based in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Ohio, Michigan, and to me that technological automation wave was just gathering steam and it was going to get stronger and stronger over time.

And now we're seeing the manufacturing jobs are continuing to decline. We saw net job loss in the manufacturing industry last year. You said that people in Silicon Valley didn't want to talk about it publicly and you asked them to. Why did they not want to talk about it?

Well, a lot of them were starting businesses that had very compelling projections based upon displacing workers. And no one wants to come out and say, hey, invested in my company, you'll be able to fire everybody. I mean, that makes everyone seem like a jerk.

And so when asked about it back then, they would say, we'll find new things for these people to do. It'll be a shift in roles, but they won't a result in wholesale layoffs. And that was the party line, even though the business plans said something different that was closer to the reality we're seeing.

So then, chat GPT comes out in 2022. How did you react to that development and how do you think that kind of changed this whole narrative? Well, geez. I mean, like everyone else, you tried it out and subscribed and downloaded.

And you saw all of your friends and colleagues do the same. And it was like a light bulb going off for many, many people where they saw that large language models were going to change the way a lot of people lived and worked and unfortunately dated, which Scott has talked a lot about, though I don't think chat GPT. Well, I mean, maybe chat GPT itself is a lot of people's boyfriend girlfriend at this point.

Too many.

And as flawed as that first model was, I also knew it was going to get much, much better

very quickly. So now that when we look at the data today that we're seeing, I mean, last week, Oracle laid off 30,000 workers. We've seen layoffs from companies like Block, companies like Pinterest, Amazon, and a lot of them off flat out saying, we're doing this because of AI.

I mean, there's a lot of nuance that we can get into here, but I just want to start with your reactions to some of those more recent layoffs. What do you make of those layoffs and do they make you concerned? Oh, yeah.

We should all be concerned, even though it is true that a lot of these announcements are

not entirely accurate in terms of attributing the layoffs to AI, I think the term now is called AI Washing, which got so I talked a lot about where let's say you're overhired

“or you made some mistakes and you have to lay off a few thousand people or whatever it”

is. If you blame it on AI, then you seem like you're on it in savvy and just doing what the business requires and you didn't make a mistake in the past. Now I think that there's a combination of things going on, but one of the reasons why I've been on this for so long is that I have private conversations with people all the time.

As I think you guys do, too, and one of the combos I relate to people was with CEO of a publicly traded tech company who told me flat out, we're going to fire 15% of workers this year. We're going to fire another 20% to years from now, another 20% to years later. His direct quote was, I have no idea what my kids are going to do because his kids actually see what he's doing and we're like, I don't want to try and work for that company, you know,

like that's not in the cards for them. So that CEO had no reason to lie to me over dinner, you know, I mean, there was like, not like, hey, I'm going to say this to Yang and then go do something else. I mean, he was confiding in me and he's not alone. Like, there have been maybe a dozen CEOs that have had very, very similar conversations with.

So on that basis, you can see where this is heading, even if some of the current announcements aren't exactly accurate. I find that clarification so helpful, because I feel as though the AI washing story while it may be true, it does seem relevant that at the very least these companies are trying to get rid of their workers. I mean, even if they're even if this exact round of layoffs that those people haven't

been directly replaced by AI, what is very clear is that from an executive perspective, the goal is to do that. So they're doing it now and they're going to figure out whatever they can

“to continue to do that moving forward. For exactly the reasons you just described, which I think is”

a very relevant piece of, I guess anecdotal data, I'll have more questions, but I'm going to pause it to sculpt. If I didn't know about AI, I wouldn't know anything unusual is happening in the labor market. So now I would take, for the purpose of the discussion, I'll take the other side of this, and that is with every technological revolution, there's a fear of job destruction,

and there's sometimes this, some short-term job destruction, but ultimately adds more jobs.

And I don't see if you didn't have the narrative of AI washing as you're talking about. I think tackling our people is somewhat about productivity gains with AI and other things, but mostly just about over hiring during the pandemic. But we haven't really seen unemployment spike. It's at about 4%, which is historically low. If, in fact, AI was replacing workers to anything resembling the narrative, you'd have rising unemployment, falling job openings,

what you see right now is sort of a no-higher, no-fire, and hiring is slowing, but it's definitely not collapsing. And then we're seeing productivity gains from AI, but it looks like it's the biggest once for junior workers and routine knowledge workers, but it looks so far like it's being used to augment workers' productivity, which ideally would lend itself to higher wages, and we're still seeing the health care, construction, education, and services sector adding jobs. So

I guess what I'm just to be blunt, I'm calling bullshit on this narrative, that it's interesting,

“it gives cloud cover for layoffs, but where is the actual evidence that AI is destroying jobs?”

Well, there are a couple of data points I would home in on. Number one is that the labor force participation rate keeps on dropping, where you've had at least a couple hundred thousand Americans, raise their hands and say I'm not even going to look anymore. And so the unemployment rate misses that group, placement rates have collapsed for particular populations, particularly computer science

94% at high salaries, and those have flipped. Now you have computer science grads out, but by the way, I ran into a computer science grad out of UCLA Scott, which is an awesome institution, and he was not able to find a job and was doing odd jobs and Uber to make ends meet, which would have been unthinkable. I mean, that's a great program, very, very bright kid, and he was looking for six months and was probably getting AI fuel responses. I mean, like at this point, applying

for a job often can be like bought to bought sort of thing. So you're seeing a couple of populations that are getting very, very adversely impacted, and what CEOs say to me as they say to you, I'm sure, is the easiest people to fire the people you haven't hired yet. So when you talk about this slow to hire, slow to fire, there's like a ladder being pulled up, I suppose,

“for a lot of entry-level workers that would have shown up. I think I saw one stat about the”

number of recent college graduates that are getting hired into various tech companies, where it used to be double digits, and now it's dropped to single digits. So there's to be that population is the canary in the coal mine. And if you play out what happens that population over time, unfortunately, their school loans don't get forgiven. They get sent home. I met some of these kids. I'm sure some of them reach out to you all the time. And the question is, what happens for

that generation? Meanwhile, you have the middle managers who are all freaking out and stressed, and you can argue, look, some of them are getting laid off because of various excesses. But the 30,000 Oracle workers that Ed talked about got laid off, maybe they didn't get replaced by AI,

but Oracle is making a $50 billion bit on AI, and it needed the money. Like it looked up and

said, you know what, if we cut these workers, we're going to save $8 billion, and we're just going to plow that into data centers. The amount of money that we're spending on building data centers, just surpass the amount of money we're spending on office buildings for the first time. So you can see very literally that the compute infrastructure is the new human being. You tend to be more right than wrong on stuff like this, and you were definitely ahead of the curve. So let's assume that

we do start to see this type of labor destruction. Kind of as jump, it's got, do you disagree? I mean, where do you stand now that Andrew has said what he said here? Do you disagree that this is a problem

“for young people? Yeah, I disagree. I think that it's at every major technical revolution, whether”

it's automation, it was supposed to be going to decimate the global auto industry employment,

or the PC. There's always a reconfiguration, there's always labor destruction. It's terrible

for the people who are affected. I don't mean to diminish it, but I graduated into a recession and more than half of us didn't have jobs. And now the unemployment rate among youth is at four and a half is at 10%, which is high, but it's about average historically. And I see all sorts of new startups and interesting jobs from AI. So I'll absolutely take the over-under on this that there's a V and then it rips back and mode every other technical revolution. So I'm on the other side of this argument.

Andrew, can I get, can I sit here if you have a response to that position? Well, the thing I like about Scott is he's open-minded to what the evidence brings. Yeah, I might be wrong. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like this is something we're very clearly, we're going to see it play out. I'm, by the way, very confident on my side of the argument. But obviously, Scott's a smart guy who will just see what the fact's bring. And I'm like 1,000% comfortable with that. I mean, that's a lot better

than the dogmatic version where some people, including folks who are in AI, who in my opinion are trying to provide air cover for themselves, but also some economists that I feel like aren't super honed in on whatever the signals are. Don't talk to industry very much. Where they tend to make arguments that I, you know, have a much more negative reaction to because it's like, you know, they'll harken back to literally century old fact patterns and examples. And it's like, wait a minute,

like, are you really comparing AI to, you know, the industrial version of that? Yeah, of course,

it buggy. It's like, that sort of thing that never makes sense to me. My favorite is elevator operators.

“Yeah, we used to have those. Yeah. But just to, to Andrew, the overlap here and where I think we”

both agree when we want to work together is regardless of, we know, I'm, I think most people would

on information workers at a junior level, services workers. So we can have empathy for them.

In regardless of whether how severe it is and we're all in anyocracy on our couch, just watching Netflix all day and we need to distribute money to everybody or those revolution. Or this is just another cycle that plays out similarly with different nuances, other technical revolutions. The question is, it would make sense. For example, I don't want to use this to lead into hearing your policy solutions to do what Denmark or Norway does and spend more money on worker retraining regardless

of the industry that's under pressure, right? We're not good at that. We're really bad at letting the market recalibrate and letting winners be winners and losers be losers. But what we're a terrible

“at is taking care of the workers on the wrong side of the trade, similar to, and I think other”

nations do a better job of this. So worker retraining, what are some of the policies? Let's assume

that it's somewhere between what I think and what you think, just for shits and giggles. What would the policy recommendations to prepare for a scenario that might be somewhere between what we're talking about in a worst case scenario that you would want to recommend? Yeah, so Scott, eight years ago, if you asked a political figure that question, they would 100% say, we have to train Americans for the jobs of the future. And then you pointed out we're terrible at that.

You know, when I looked up the studies as to how effective government funded retraining programs were, and the efficacy range I found was zero to 15%, with 15% on the high side. What happened in

Michigan was that an enterprise and sole started a school to certify all these laid off manufacturing

workers and business skills collected the government money and then shut down and everyone had

“these valueless certificates and it didn't do shit. I mean, that's what we did in the past.”

So that was a talking point. I think they literally might have said, learn to code back eight years ago and now that's obviously or learn Mandarin. Yeah. Yeah, really stupid. And I think that the retraining aspect is chasing moving goal posts and my joke is that I'm now passed 50. So if I don't get Dummer or slower in a given month, it's a good month whereas AI is going to double in power and efficacy in that month. So trying to train workers who've been laid off in various

jobs to compete against AI strikes me as a loser. It strikes me as like the next generation learned to code or we're going to retrain the laid off manufacturing workers. So that's not great news, obviously. One thing I think you could argue for that most people would accept is some kind of subsidy or incentive to hire a young person out of school where you could have

“entry-level workers get a tax break or some kind of matching credit or incentive to take on a”

young person. And the great thing there is that after the young person's in your organization, then they can become awesome and you might not have hired them initially, but maybe the government can assist you on that level. That to me is a sensible policy and I've actually advised various policy makers on that. They haven't done anything with it. One of the reasons why I was so pro universal basic income and still am is that it will catch the it will fill in the gaps. Like

we're bad at retraining. We're going to be bad at targeted policy. Political figures are great at talking about and not doing it. Like no one will actually see what happened to the displaced workers. So if you were to take an AI dividend and at this point there are a lot of folks in AI who are arguing for a version of this and just start distributing it to workers of any age and stage, it would 100% facilitate with successful transitions with people being able to

switch fields or switch jobs or switch regions or whatever it takes. And so I'm still Mr. Let's distribute the money as quickly as we can, especially now that AI has minted or is in the process of minting several trillion dollar companies and there hasn't been meaningful tax on any of it. I'm not surprised that you're still in advocate for UBI and that's where this sort of these roads ended up to, but I want to go back to the notion of worker retraining. I

don't think it's fair to say that those efforts have failed and to give up on it. My sense is if you look at the economy, the number of data centers, nuclear power plants, healthcare, aging population that specialty certification and everything from nursing to if installation of energy efficient age fact computers that only 3% of the U.S. linked in profile say apprentice and it's

could have real ROI. And also I worry Andrew that having a tax credit for for youth, I would

prefer just have a lower tax, lower taxation on lower incomes which is the same as taxing youth lower. I worry that what he said at the 35 year old single mother who wasn't in the workforce and is essentially going into the workforce entry level at 35. I worry that age-based tax basis is just not politically palatable or realistic. So can you respond to those two things? The worker retraining when done accurately actually might in my view be really beneficial and we don't have enough of it

in two my sense of any sort of age-based discrimination around taxation. Although I would argue we do discriminate in terms of giving old people money, but I worry that that would just not be politically palatable to start subsidizing at Elson versus say a 35 year old who's entering

the workforce for the first time. Yeah so 100% agree with you on the need for technical training,

“apprenticeships, vocational and revving that up. I think Germany is a role model. In this”

dimension we have a massive shortage of electricians and plumbers and age-back repair. Those are resilient jobs. I say all the time that you're not going to have a robot plumber for the foreseeable because like sending a robot to your home and like that's just not a thing. I mean so there's some of my people might disagree with me. And so to the extent we can channel real life human beings to those roles and industries, a thousand percent we should be destigmatizing the trades. We have

made them seem like somehow second class citizens relative to college grads and that was that's

been a fiasco. As you can tell I think that college grads are going to really take it on the

chin on this one. So I'm so with you on the trades and I'm also, you know, I'm a little bit surprised because obviously like I was in the green moon when you when I did your TED talk about

“how young people are getting shafted and it's like thought that maybe some kind of policy in that”

direction. No I'm not like I'm not disagreeing with you on the politics of it. It's one reason why I like universal benefits so much because everyone can see themselves in it and it's not as zero some. We'll be right back after the break and if you're enjoying the show so far send it to a friend and please follow us on YouTube, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Support for the show comes from VCX the public ticker for private tech for generations American

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surprised me with urgent land tickets to London. So tell us all about it. It was pretty incredible

“from the moment I entered that upper-class cabin. I have to tell you I felt like a VIP.”

Anything I needed a drink snack assistance with the seat flat seats flat seats exactly had the four-course meal got my champagne very delicious and joined the food and the journey home. The journey home was great. I went to the version Atlantic LHR Clubhouse that's the Heathrow Clubhouse. HeathR Clubhouse was awesome got myself a coffee headed over to the meditation pod that they called the soma dome kind of felt like a sort of spaceship where you relax and think nice thoughts.

So I did that for a little bit and we went over to the wing which of these acoustically sealed boots where you could do some work. You could even record a podcast. I didn't do that but maybe I should have. It was a very enjoyable experience. So Ed they could real question here is what do you plan to get me from my birthday? See the world differently with virgin Atlantic flying should be more than just transport it is part of the adventure with version Atlantic.com to learn more.

Take it's a lounge access provided by Virgin Atlantic. We're back with property markets. We're having these policy discussions and it seems that I still feel as though in order to figure out what the correct policy is we need to be an agreement or at least

some semblance of agreement on diagnosing what the problem is and so I just go back to whether AI

“is indeed having a significant impact on the labor market and I think one thing that I just want”

to point out and see if Andrew maybe I thought so on is the fact that what we're really talking about here is the college graduate employment situation where college grads the unemployment rate for for for recent college grads is historically very very high and perhaps even more interestingly the unemployment rate for college grads is now higher than for non college grads and that never used to be the case and I feel like that is relevant because I mean we say the young people are

the canary in the coal mine when it comes to AI I feel like the more relevant thing to say is that young college grads are the canary in the coal mine because that's the area of work where AI can actually have an impact it's not really having an impact in terms of blue collar jobs yet but it is having a level of impact in the white collar workforce we are seeing that in the college grad unemployment data and then when we look at actual tech companies whether or not AI washing we are seeing data

that suggests that jobs are being lost in that realm and so I guess I just I mean it seems as though yes we haven't had a clear picture of data that tells us that yes AI has come in and completely transformed the the labor market but it seems like to the extent that AI is quite a nascent technology it's doing all the things that you would expect if it were to do that in the future and so I'm sort of waiting for someone to show me data that like no AI isn't doing all of the

things that Andrew Yang had predicted it would do in the over the long time point being we're not in the long time yet I just want to see if you have thoughts on that. I certainly I'm totally with

“it Ed it's like I mean I think it's going to be a shit show and the thing that I liken it to is that”

when the robots started showing up on the factory floor in the Midwest first before the robot

arm showed up a lot of manufacturing workers said there's no way a robot could do what I do because I turned the screw just the way I turned it or whatever the heck the argument was and then they got decimated I think there were some arguments around the local journalists who you know there's been a wipe out there of tens of thousands of local journalists when Craigslist and the rest of it came on and some people said oh it'll be fine and it wasn't fine and on this one AI is to white collar

work and the cubicles and the office parks what the robot arms were the factory floors you just don't need as many wipper snappers making your PowerPoint decks and your Excel spreadsheets and like you know learning corporate lingo you know like when and when you go into some of these large corporates I mean I'm a serial entrepreneur scottes serial entrepreneur Ed you're on your way you can sense that there are a lot of people whose jobs are not super vital to the the operations and growth of

that that business I mean like if you set foot on like a large corporate campus you know like

what the robots were to factory work just looking at like there's those other previous examples

“I feel like when this conversation happens usually we look at previous technologies and we say well”

it was it ultimately ended up being a good thing like I feel like when people talk about robots

being used in the factories there's often like an implicit assumption that like oh it ended up being good for everyone we created prosperity like it was a good thing overall but I just wonder if we've kind of rewriting history a little bit oh yeah man I'm gonna make this case so I had breakfast with a major company CEO who said his revenues have gone up threefold and he has cut 30% of his staff and it's gonna get much much worse he says the more people I cut the better we're going

to do publicly traded company riches balls like again no reason to lie to me actually he came to me because he's starting to freak out saying if I keep doing what I'm doing and every other CEO in my situation does what we're doing where fucked chaos in the streets you know my kids don't have anything to do like pitchforks are gonna come out so he came to me saying we have to try and keep this from happening I get those incoming calls from sane CEOs and like this guy in my opinion is

remarkable because he actually gave enough a shit to reach out to me and buy me breakfast

it was I always got it's like you know someone you probably buddies with Scott but but when

when people approach me about this stuff you know I don't spill the tea I mean I like I then I tell them what I'm working on and then we try and save the world but but like I get incoming context like that you know every other day now and when we look at what happened let's say like let's use like the information economy as just as an example like transitioning into an into the information age which again I think a lot of people look at as oh that was a good thing like here we are

things are good we have a prosperous society it's gonna be great for the top line it like you know that's gonna go for the top line but exactly and I look at what happened and I'm like well that's pretty much where the K-shaped started that's where we saw this massive divergence between the richest in America versus the poorest in America that's where the wealth and equality things started to get really out of control and so I almost look at our transition to that period

is like I don't I mean people seem to think we got it right I'm not sure that we did get it right and it seems like the AI equivalent of that the story is going to be the same thing except

“times a thousand yeah my argument would be that we totally did not get it right and that's how”

you wind up with a Donald Trump presidency twice not to betray my politics but that's not going to shock anyone who's like that kept up with me like we we have fumbled it royally a time or two we're about to fumble it royally again but this time it's going to do a number on entire generation and it does upset me that you know I mean I you know I get I get these private conversations and we should be doing much much more we should be taking very big

ways I mean I think that my campaign in 2020 some say I was ahead of the curve I think I was pretty much right on time because if you can imagine us doing things differently from 2020 to now we might be in position but this is going to grow the revenues the top line the market cap of a bunch of these companies very very significantly and the CEO I had breakfast with who's freaking out he said three words summarizes situation capital displaces labor and then he

put in parentheses with the help of AI but he's like now it's clear to him that ever because his company is roaring in terms of performance and stock market price and he's cutting people right in left and it seems that that is now becoming kind of consensus among the leaders in AI the

example first example would be directly on a day CEO of anthropic who's literally been saying

as he's been saying it's going to wipe out half of entry level white color jobs in five years again some people would say that he's he's being a doomer he's this is AI washing to sort of increase

“the value but he he also raises hand in said you should tax us right which is not something”

you ordinarily hear from CEOs and he proposed a 3% token tax which in my opinion would be too low but it's a start you know like he raises hand it's that hey please tax us and if you were to apply that across the AI companies you might actually be getting somewhere and open AI just did the same thing they published this what they're calling the new deal where they proposed an increase

wealth inequality and figure out ways to redistribute the wealth I guess the point being like

now the leaders in AI are kind of proponents of what you were arguing for in 2018 the same things that they you said that they were not willing to speak publicly about they used to be like no no let's not talk about this that sort of keep it under wraps but now it seems like they're coming out and saying actually we're afraid of the pitchforks we want to do something about this we obviously just saw these attacks on some Altman last week which we can get into as well but CEO's

in AI in Silicon Valley a subset of them are increasingly saying like this is going to be a problem

“and we should you should tax us yeah I mean they saw the numbers they're approval ratings down”

to 26% which is lower than anyone else's it's lower than ice and and so they see the

writing on the wall saying wow people really hate us what would make them hate us less at a minimum we should put forward some policy proposals as to how we can help people manage this time now are they sincere about actually implementing all those policies you know now I trust your intentions I'm going to try and be delicate about this you're talking about a group of people that would fuck their sister for a nickel and we fall this we fall for this shit literally every couple

years we have a new hero who says regulate me and hush tones and a t-shirt Sam Aldman or we should be worried about the future and come in a quality Jeff Bezos UBI and then they deploy thousands of lawyers to get in the way of any regulation if we're waiting on fucking Dario Amade to figure this out good luck to us we need people like Andrew Yang we need public policy that actually has sane economic tax policies we keep falling for this notion that some Jesus like figure from

the technology sector is going to tax himself it's never happened it's never going to your thoughts

Andrew I don't disagree at all again Scott I mean it's very easy for them to say tax me knowing it full well it's not going to happen and by the way there's a congressional candidate named Alex Boris right now that the AI industry is spending millions some remaining because he proposed some very sensible AI guidelines as a state legislator in New York and they don't want to see that in Congress so don't disagree one bit that they can say something and then count on

the money to keep anything from happening in Congress and sometimes they'll do it on the same day so I know a lot of these guys reach out to you in addition to and I'm there's like 80% over

“lap with what you you you you did normalize the notion and I think this is I think you have more impact”

than people people acknowledge or aware of because people just got used to the idea you normalize the idea well why wouldn't you just give people money why wouldn't you just lift people up and that would be good for the economy the multiplier effect reduce anxiety in the country the happiness and fortunately in this nation is directly correlated to economic sustainability before it was like oh no that's not American and people are coming to grips with that and I think you had a lot of

I don't know I think a lot of that was driven by you so quite frankly I just don't think UBI is politically tentable but what might be politically tentable is universal safety net that everyone has certain rights to health care access to child care you know I just don't think Ed Nelson should be getting income I don't think any I don't think anyone on this call should be getting it's the universal part that bothered me about your branding that basic income works for me what if you

are advising the next presidential candidate on a specific policy to try and level up I don't wouldn't even say young people I think it should just be people who are economically strange because

“I think that's what you were trying to do is to make a healthier happier more prosperous nation”

the kind of nation that where the values should reflect our prosperity I'm not trying to put words in your mouth but I know you fairly well and I think you would agree with that if you were advising anyone you may be of these you know the 40 Democrats who claim they're not running for president but will come on my our podcast if I text them within five seconds what what would you suggest in terms of an economic policy that likely could could could pass that the American public would embrace because

my sense of UBI is it conceptually works but I just don't think practically it's feasible so just for a moment if you had to calibrate UBI and advise a democratic presidential campaign on what type of policies you would propose what would those look like well we called it the freedom dividend

not surprising that while I was championing universal basic income and still do and believe in it

“if we wound up with a negative income tax I would be pumped because that would alleviate poverty at”

scale. It's a great idea yes great idea I guess my more about that would what is a negative income tax it's that you have a certain certain threshold let's call it 35 thousand dollars of the poverty level or wherever you want to set it and if you make less than that then we true you up to that level and if you make more than that then you know it's it's as it was and so that's the sort of thing that I'd be thrilled with I'd be thrilled with a higher child tax credit I'm thrilled with anything

that'll leave you it's poverty now I enjoy the universal basic income universal anchoring because this country is so us versus them and divided and it's like oh if you get it then I'm mad about it so if you say look I don't give a shit about any of that like you're an American here human being like let's let's just go you know like it's we're trying to transition from scarcity to abundance but if we landed on something like a negative income tax pumped have you done any numbers

somewhat that let's take that 35 thousand dollars if you're household income 35 thousand dollars maybe every kid another five thousand so two kids 45 thousand yeah yeah yeah I was saying 35 thousand per like adult individual yeah and then we true you up I absolutely love that have you done if you run the math on what that would cost a negative income tax depending upon where you said it tends to cost in the hundreds of billions like the middle hundreds of billions around that

order of magnitude but you would be getting a lot of that money back because you'd be putting it into the hands of the poorest Americans they'd spend every dollar multiply effect yeah yeah you would improve health care outcomes educational outcomes lower criminality homelessness etc etc the thing that is sort of on my mind when we think about what to do about all of this I mean I just love to get your reactions to what happened last week with these attacks on Sandmontman

it seems to be indicative of quite a dark place and it seems that that might it seems based on what you're saying about what's the years of telling you that that might actually

“be the impetus to create some of these more creative solutions and tax policies I think people”

used to say like no that's that's ridiculous no one will buy that that seems crazy whenever you come up with these more creative policy ideas such as UBI but it seems that now that there is

this sort of lingering threat of violence basically that people are more amenable

to more creative solutions I guess because the stakes are a lot higher I wonder if you agree with that it's enlightening self interest ed it's one of the things I'd say to the masters of the universe is that even if you're successful you're less happy in a very unequal society and I used to joke with people it's like no one wants armed guards around their kids no one wants bulletproof limos no one wants the Venezuelan experience like look like this this doesn't

have to be about you being an awesome human being it can just be that you'd rather not live in the bunker so we're nearing that point I mean we also with the United Health CEO being killed on the streets of New York like the anger is rising the dysfunction is rising the polarization higher than it's ever been and so even if you don't think these are tremendous human beings who

“just love other people and want to provide for them I think a lot of folks see that this can be”

a way to make the environment actually open to innovation because you become very very anti-innovation very quickly if you think it's going to take your job increase your power bills and leave you on the outside looking in with your kid depressed and at home I remember one of the things that you said when you're running the campaign back in 2020 you said something like people in New York don't want to step over homeless people that is not an enjoyable experience like most people

do not want to experience that like no one no one wants to see this level of wealth inequality but at the same time I look at you you mentioned some of those there's AI superpacks that we've been seeing and the idea that like Mark and Jason would be bankrolling these AI superpacks

whose goal is to basically address this problem I don't I mean aside from maybe the Bernie

Sanders AOC moratorium I've seen mostly AI policies that are pretty reasonable that like get at the issues that we're describing and then I see you know that those kinds of political actions combined with this sort of like techno utopia paradise that a lot of these guys this sort of

want private security guards in their own little uh cap maybe maybe they do actually want to

“go off to New Zealand and like live in their bunker like sometimes I struggle to believe”

that some of our leaders actually are united with us in believing that would be a bad thing for America or at least are interested in preventing it from happening some of them seem to still not care but maybe I'm being pessimistic or not fair I mean I guess from your conversations with a lot of these people and having run that campaign what do you think is actually going through the head of a person like Mark and Jason for example I can't speak for Mark he's not someone who calls

me I don't know there is a range some of them have already mentally flipped the switch and are heading to the bunker and could give a shit what happens to everyone else some are still you know like they sometimes have kids who are in schools and they like their lives and they like being able to be on the street and not uh get tomatoes thrown at them or the equivalent um and so they know like it's a split um I will say the culture in Silicon Valley has gotten markedly worse

over the last eight years since I ran like I would attribute it partially to the binary nature of our politics where they didn't like one size they threw in with the other side and now they're trying to insulate themselves uh it's darker than it was but there's still some totally lucid human beings who even if they're not driven by empathy and altruism like recognize that look some kind of investment in the general public would not be a terrible move and if only just to make them look

better and to get people off their backs. We'll be right back and for even more Mark it's content

sign up for our newsletter at profitemarkets.com I'm Mitch first two time into resale champion

championship MVP and forward for the US Women's National Team before I went pro I graduated from Harvard with a degree in psychology which comes in handy more than you think any athlete pursuing

“greatness knows there's a certain mentality you have to have what people don't know”

there's what that costs in my podcast confessions of an elite athlete I sit down with the best athletes in the world and explore the psychology mindset and unseen battles on the path to greatness so take a seat and learn from the confessions of an elite athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast honest to God like fuck skinny I want to be jacked without context tone and sculpt or rooted in die culture we're inheriting a lot of nonsense that makes specifically women feel like they have to

shrink in order to expand and I'm just saying no let's just like lift heavy and like take up space that's the expansion I'm Reverend Arson and this week on project swagger I break down the strategies that helped me build confidence and feel at home in my body especially after two babies listen now at project swagger wherever you get your podcasts from Iran to Venezuela to China what is driving President Trump's foreign policy both Russian China are big losers if there's a transition in the

“nature of the of the Iranian government what's again is why I think we have to see this campaign through”

I'm Jake Sullivan and I'm John Finer and we're the hosts of the long game a weekly national security podcast this week Trump's former national security adviser a charming master and deputy national security adviser Matt Potinger join us the episodes out now search for and follow the long game wherever you get your podcasts we're back with property markets how do you think you can be most effective coming into

the midterms and with the presidential action are you trying to use your platform to advocate for certain policies we get behind a certain candidate what is your plan to try and have some influence over the next few years oh my gosh Scott how do you even do I have a plan now

I'm kidding of course I have a plan I'm here to I'm here to do as much as I can so first I want to

put a plug in for the backdrop some of you can see it but I'm the head of a company called noble mobile that's trying to save people money right now on your wireless bills and then we give you up to $20 back at the end of every month based upon any data you don't use so it's even

whole time so that's a joy and the reason we started noble mobile was that there are a lot of folks who

“like me and Scott who actually wanted their financial lives to be better now today and not based upon”

my being in office or being able to you know like implement UBI or a lot of these things so that's one thing I'm doing now to Scott's question and of the bigger sense I'm trying to help various good people get into office in November with a little bit of a different bent than a lot of other folks who do this work so this morning I was on a call with a guy I'm supporting named Seth Bodnar who's running for U.S. Senate in Montana and the reason why it's unusual is that he's running as an

independent he's a former special operations commander in the U.S. airborne he graduated first in his

class from West Point so he's a stud he was the president of the University of Montana until a couple months ago where he said screw it I'm going to run for U.S. Senate and in Montana a Democrat would not be able to win but as a military veteran who's running as an independent by the way Seth Bodnar first month he raised more money than every other candidate combined including the Republican and he's been endorsed by John tester so if you can get someone like

Seth Bodnar into the U.S. Senate all Senate votes count the same you know like you could have like a scene public spirited patriotic senator out of a traditionally red state in Montana and so that's the kind of candidate I'm boosting and trying to help in the goal of rationalizing our politics come January of next year and are there two or three candidates for president that you would be excited about I'm not talking to one right now there aren't two on this very call

hey Ed how are you are you not old enough to run yet what's going on oh yeah and I wasn't wondering I'm not going to happen oh my gosh two strikes against you Ed we have to forge a birth certificate for you and change through up seven years or so or whatever it is so Scott to be

“you and I both know a lot of this field I think you're when when we were together you thought”

a couple of the governors were kind of in the the sweet spot I tend to agree with you I think a governor is a very good background for this because they've run a state they've got that have to gravitas Americans know what that isn't respond to it and you can disavow yourself of all of the nonsense that's been coming out of DC for the last number of years Andrew just given all discussions here about what an AI future might look like I know you have two sons

I'd be curious to know how you speak with them about all of this if at all do you teach them about this stuff do you have thoughts on what it would take for them to succeed in an AI era and if you could remind us of their ages please do so as well so you guys are going to believe this maybe

you will whatever first let me say I don't like I don't worry about my kids in the sense that

my kids will have a lot more going for them than the average American family and so like the

“late when put that out there but my 13 year old has come to me and my wife and said I think I'm”

going to have an AI girlfriend not a human girlfriend and then we were terrified and said why and he says because it's going to be a lot easier I don't think I can get a human girlfriend now my son is on the autism spectrum but I think that he's very honest we've been having him watch love on the spectrum of a Netflix to try and boost him to the fact that maybe he can get a human girlfriend the fact is a lot of our boys are going to fall into that kind of rabbit hole and it's very

much they're waiting for them to pray on them and so we're doing our best to insulate our kids I can't tell you how good a job we're doing I just want to shout out Scott's colleague Jonathan Height for getting smart phones and social media out of a lot of these schools because as a

parent it's real you know like you see that our kids are up against forces that we never were as

kids and childhood is hard enough if you don't have trillion dollar companies trying to pray on your brain and your soul what kind of strategies have you employed I mean what what what what is your view on your children using devices using social media is a policy that you try to stick by or well they don't have phones they don't have social media accounts and I wish that they were on

in a source of tension in the house it's one reason why to me noble mobile is so positive is because we can try and help families like you can have your kid get a higher allowance if they use less screen time and things like that but it's a problem and I'm not going to pretend to be doing it great like where we're not you know we struggle it's one reason why I want to help families is there any advice that you would give to any fathers in a similar position that might

“have children of your right of your children's edge I mean the the best thing we can do is get them”

off screens and reading books any book any book or sports team outdoors nature I mean a lot of this is just old school at this point it's just human formation and I'm happy to say the culture is turning on the screen but if you show me a household where the kids aren't on screens they have a much much better shot at flourishing Andrew Yang is an entrepreneur author and founder of the Ford Party best known for his 2020 presidential campaign where he wrote universal basic income into the

mainstream conversation he found adventure for America a fellowship that placed hundreds of entrepreneurs in immersion startup cities and it's the author of the New York Times best seller the war on normal people today is the CEO of noble mobile a wireless carrier that pays users back for using their phones less his latest book hey Yang wears my thousand bucks and other true stories of staggering depth is available now Andrew we are such fans and you know this but I'm telling the audience now

I was an original Yang Ganga back in 2019 2018 so we're very much a big fan where's your tattoo and where's your tattoo I'm I'm getting well thank you to both of you you make me feel better about humanity and boyhood and manhood and our shared future and Lord love to do more together also anyone who's listening to this noblemobile.com/hang you get three months off noblemobile and you just say that prophecy and Ed Elson said thanks brother thanks Andrew

appreciate the heck out of you guys

that I did know that I always find out things that you didn't know I was original Yang Ganga I did not know

one of the first interactions that I had with you actually it's the first interaction I had with you was with the first call that I made to you and I introduced myself but I told you in our first meeting that I was a fan of Andrew Yang and you said oh well that's great because I have a meeting with Andrew Yang next week and you can join me so our second interaction ever was a zoom call between you and Andrew Yang and me and I sat on the sidelines sort of fanboying out with my two favorite

fortfluences and I just took notes and then I sent you a transcript of our meeting but Andrew is a big piece of our of our origin story interestingly enough. I had no idea I mean that was

“such an important moment I'm glad that you joined me and I remember none of that but yeah that”

the kind of zombra and for you and I've known Andrew I remember he knew he'd be touched me I

think 2018 that said I want to come on your part I'm running for president I never heard of him like

no I'm not I'm not interested in entertaining these weird candidates and he did have a really positive impact I thought on the race I didn't support him for president but I supported him from mayor and he and I have become friends and Andrew is people have a kind of a public persona and they have a private persona Andrew is absolutely as advertised he is a super nice guy super family man incredibly optimistic like sees the best in people he's this whirling dervish of energy very

positive I have never heard him say a negative word about anybody and he you know he was being generous I invested in his company I like the idea of trying to get people off their phones and

“but I invested because I Andrew I think the guy is just he just won he's the kind of guy that you”

want to win you meet him is there if you people to meet with Andrew and say what all I think I or don't vote for him he's very people meet him and go his hearts definitely in the right place so I I would I hope he gets I'd love to see him as a cabinet member like maybe I don't know Secretary of Commerce or I actually head at the small business administration he'd be great at that although the woman who ran the WWE is very qualified and doing a great job

oh wait she's small business no she's a Department of Education who's working on A1 thinking that was AI she's Chris cacca stockers so yeah cacca stockers say cacca stockers say that's all

it is amazing though I mean all of the issues that he ran on he was he said that he was right on cue

that that that message is really going to resonate politically I mean suddenly this issue is the

political issue of our time it is the thing that a lot of these different candidates are starting to rally around it's it's the AI and automation issue and suddenly all of these politicians who kind of

shook off that that issue for a very long time they suddenly have to reckon with it they

“suddenly have to decide okay what is my position on this policy I think what we're going to”

start to see is a lot of people either make or break their careers based on how they approach AI and and and what messaging they put out there and what policy they propose which makes you think that a lot of people are going to be calling up Andrew Yang over the next couple months as it relates to AI they're going to want to get some advice from this person on okay you ran this exact campaign you were literally eight years early it worked you were on the national

“debate stage you created this whole movement like what should I do and so I think it's you know”

I think it's a big moment for Andrew in a lot of ways because everything he predicted is kind of coming true and certainly from a political perspective yeah so I think it would be a positive influence this episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weissen engineered by Benjamin Spencer

“our video editor is Jorge Carty our research team is down at Shalain is about a cancel”

Krishna Don here in Mia Savario Jake week first was a social producer drew bars is a technical

director and Katherine Dylan is our executive producer and keep listening to property markets from property media if you like what you heard give us a follow and join us for a fresh take on markets on Monday you have in time for you yeah as a long time bye.