EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,037 words- 0:00 – 15:00
To me- …
- AYAndrew Yang
To me-
- JRJoe Rogan
Five, four... We'll talk about it.
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Three, two... (laughs) Yes! And we're live. Hello.
- AYAndrew Yang
Hey, Joe.
- JRJoe Rogan
Welcome. Thank you.
- AYAndrew Yang
Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
- JRJoe Rogan
My pleasure. Um, Sam Harris sends his regards.
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah. Sam's a beautiful man.
- JRJoe Rogan
He is. I love that guy. Uh, and he's one of the reasons why you're here. Um, so universal basic income. This is what this is all about.
- AYAndrew Yang
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Joe-
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah, that's what my campaign for president is all about.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's a... an interesting, like, uh, focus of a campaign. And, and... very unusual. And, I mean, four years ago, you'd never even thought that that would have a chance at all, but this is a subject that has been gaining momentum and it g- it made a... I made a big shift 'cause, uh, I had my friend, Eddie Huang, on once, and he was the first person to bring it up. And, uh, my initial knee-jerk reaction was, "Get the fuck outta here." Like, universal basic income? Just gonna give people money. They're just gonna be lazy. Nothing's ever gonna get done. That's a terrible idea. And then I started paying attention to the rise of AI and automation and how many jobs are gonna get taken-
- AYAndrew Yang
Yes, yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
... away from p-... And then, once you see the actual numbers, it's pretty staggering.
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah, and that's how I got there, Joe. Like, I spent the last seven years running an organization that I'd started called Venture for America, and we helped create about 3,000 jobs in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Birmingham, New Orleans, other cities around the country. And I saw that we're pouring water into a bathtub that has a giant hole ripped in the bottom, and that for every 5, 10, 50 jobs that my entrepreneurs were gonna create, we're gonna lose 5, 10, 50,000 jobs.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's not something that people intuitively suspect could be a real issue either. It's, it's one of the o-... the ones where you kinda have to, like, go ha-... shake people. Like, "Hey, look at this. This is coming. There's a cliff. We're going towards this cliff."
- AYAndrew Yang
It's, it's darker still in that... So, uh, when I was digging into the numbers, I found that it's not this cliff that we're heading towards. It's actually more of a curve that we're on. Uh, what I've been telling people is that we're in the third inning now, where one of the main reasons why Donald Trump won in 2016 is that we automated away four million manufacturing jobs that were based in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, all the swing states he needed to win in the center of the country. And a lot of that was just manufacturing work, and if you go to a factory, you'll see, it's just giant robot arms as far as the eye can see.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AYAndrew Yang
So it's not just that you have artificial intelligence on the horizon, it's that we've been eating away at the most common jobs in the US economy, uh, for almost 20 years now, and it's just now hitting a point where it's pushing more and more unskilled men, in particular, out of the workforce.
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, uh, are there other alternatives that you've considered other than just universal basic income, like educating people about this being a real issue and perhaps pushing them or directing them towards other occupations?
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah. So that, that's the, uh, recipe that most people are attracted to. So I just wanna unpack the numbers a little bit more, so people have a sense of it. I was just with a bunch of truck drivers in Iowa last week, and there's a guy, Dennis Bogoski, that gave me a ride from Altoona to Grinnell in Iowa, where I've been campaigning. And the, the truth of it, Joe, is that there are three and a half million truck drivers in this country right now. It's the most common job in 29 states. And the average trucker's a 49-year-old guy with a high school education, maybe ex-military like Dennis was, uh, they're making, like, $50,000 a year. So then, if you say, "Hey, I'm gonna retrain half a million truck drivers," for what, exactly, is like issue number one.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AYAndrew Yang
And that these guys didn't love school 30 years ago. It's not like driving a truck has made them really excited about the idea.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AYAndrew Yang
And then the new job you're training them for... I looked into the data as to how good we were at retraining, let's say, displaced manufacturing workers in the Midwest when we started decimating their jobs, and we're terrible at it. Like, according to independent studies, government-funded retraining programs had a success rate of between 0 and 15% in real life. Like, this is what-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AYAndrew Yang
... actually happened to the workers of Michigan and Indiana and Ohio. And so, if you say we're gonna retrain these people, then you also have to come up with a, a g-... a way for us to become amazing at something that, right now, we're really, really bad at. And if you were an employer, which you are, would you rather employ a 50-year-old former truck driver with health problems who got some certificate program, or would you rather hire a 25-year-old kid who went to community college, is probably cheaper, has lower expectations, uh, and his skills are natively gonna be a little fresher? I mean, if you were an employer, you'd probably choose number two.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, I agree. Um, but I, I'm... I mean, I'm trying to look at this through rose-colored glasses, I guess.
- 15:00 – 30:00
Yeah, but they're gonna…
- JRJoe Rogan
be paying most of this.
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah, but they're gonna get some of that money back obviously.
- JRJoe Rogan
How are they gonna get it back?
- AYAndrew Yang
'Cause one of the things I say to the CEOs, it's like if everyone in Missouri is getting a thousand bucks, you know Amazon's gonna see some of that because they're just gonna buy more stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AYAndrew Yang
That's true for all of the big companies. What I say to CEOs, and I've spoken to groups of dozens of CEOs, what's really bad for your business is when people don't have money to spend. (laughs) Wha- what's good-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AYAndrew Yang
... for your business is when they do. So they're gonna give up some money at the top end but then just gonna end up getting it back, uh, when their consumers end up spending a bit more.
- JRJoe Rogan
And has this been actually fleshed out, like the- the real numbers or the projections of how much they're gonna get back?
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah, yeah. Uh, like the... So the Roosevelt Institute studied this plan of everyone getting a thousand bucks a month and projected it would create two million new jobs, uh, and grow the economy by 8% to 10%. And then you can model out what that means to each business because in that climate they're gonna see a similar uptick in revenues.
- JRJoe Rogan
Did they factor in all the jobs that are g- gonna be lost?
- AYAndrew Yang
So one of the things that's a misconception about universal basic income is that, uh, it somehow will, like, facilitate job loss.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, for job losses though is the reason for universal basic income in the first place, right?
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah, yeah, which we're in the midst of right now. Like right now as we're sitting here together, the labor force participation rate in the United States is 63%, uh, which is the same levels as El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. That's right now. Like, uh, 94 million or so Americans have left the workforce over the last number of years. Now a lot of that's natural demographics, a lot of that's people in school, but about five million of it is unskilled men who've gotten pushed out of the workforce. So, uh, so again this is not like, uh, you know, we're gonna solve a problem that's coming down the pike. Like we're actually in the middle of this problem. So if you put a thousand bucks a month into people's hands, it actually grows the economy and creates jobs, uh, because of more economic activity.
- JRJoe Rogan
Now when you say a problem that's coming down the pike, what- what are the projections in terms of, like, the timeline for-
- AYAndrew Yang
Yes, so, uh, there... A lot of the projections are actually pretty consistent with each other, which means they're probably right. (laughs) So the, uh... So Bain says you're looking at, uh, between 20 and 30% of jobs subject to automation by 2030, which is pretty soon. It's like 11 years-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- AYAndrew Yang
... from now. McKinsey says about 25%. Uh, the Obama White House, literally like their last day in office they issued a report saying, "Hey guys, we're gonna automate away all the jobs and then, like, you know, cl- turn the lights off." Um, they said 83% of jobs that make less than $20 an hour will be subject to automation by 2030. MIT is saying the same thing. Uh, and so we have 11 years to try and accelerate meaningful solutions, and this 11 years it's not like it all happens on 2030. It's gonna happen between now and then progressively according to all of the major institutions that have looked at this.
- JRJoe Rogan
Now when you take a guy who's working as a truck driver and he's making $50,000 a year and you tell him that automation is gonna take away his job but good news, we're gonna give you $12,000 a year, that's a substantial loss in income. And-
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah, it's a problem.
- JRJoe Rogan
... it leaves them... And it al- yeah, it also leaves them with this feeling of uselessness or hopelessness that they're not contributing, you know. I think one of the things that people enjoy is, uh, earning their own way, you know. They- they... People don't... It sounds counterintuitive, people don't like free money.They like a feeling of satisfaction, of a job well done, that they've created something, that they've done something.
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah. Yeah, you're 100% right. It's one reason why we call this the freedom dividend. We say, "Look, it's not money for nothing. You're an owner and shareholder of the richest country in the history of the world." Just like when I buy Verizon or Microsoft, they send me a dividend. Like, I don't complain about that. Like, you are now a shareholder in this great nation and you get a dividend. But when I was with Dennis, the trucker who owns his own trucking company in Iowa, uh, the, the role that jobs play in, in truckers' lives is vital. A- and again, I'm a very data-driven guy, where men deal with joblessness very, very poorly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AYAndrew Yang
By the numbers, we spend, uh, between 40 and 75% of our time on the computer playing video games or doing other things. Uh, w- our substance abuse goes up. Our volunteering in the community goes down, even though we have more time.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AYAndrew Yang
And we generally spiral into antisocial and self-destructive behaviors. Now, this is not something that's, uh, experienced by women in the same levels. Like, women and joblessness, women actually are more adaptable. They're more likely to go back to school and volunteer. They don't spend all their time on the computers the way that we do. So there's a real problem. Uh, and the purpose of universal basic income is not meant to be a job replacement for those truckers. Because right now, those truckers... And when I talk to the truck drivers... So I've, I've been campaigning for president now for a number of months, so I spent a lot of time in Iowa, which is a really huge trucking hub. And you go to them and say, "Hey guys, you worried about robot trucks taking your jobs?" They're like, "There's no way a robot could take my job." Like, that, that's, you know, that's like totally matter of fact. They're like, they're like, this is not something that they worry about.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AYAndrew Yang
Their attitude has transitioned from that somewhat to, uh, "We should make robot trucks illegal," or, "We should make it so that a robot truck cannot, uh, displace me." So that's been a big shift, because a year ago, they were like, "It's impossible."
- JRJoe Rogan
The idea that a, an American would say, "We should make a, a robot job illegal," like it's y- we should s- have some laws that keep you from being free to use robots for your business instead of person, like you should be forced to hire, like mandatory unionization or something, that sounds pretty ridiculous.
- AYAndrew Yang
Well, that's where a lot of them are, Joe.
- 30:00 – 45:00
Sorta. Those are pickup…
- AYAndrew Yang
and, and drinking themselves to death or, uh, doing drugs and overdosing or killing themselves. Uh, and then eventually there'll be an outbreak of violence because some truckers will say, "Instead of killing myself, how about I go bust up a robot truck?" Uh, and there are already truckers that are doing things like blocking Tesla recharging stations and electronic vehicle, uh, battery stations because they don't like electronic trucks.
- JRJoe Rogan
Sorta. Those are pickup trucks, though. Those are assholes. I mean, this is not like people doing it because they, they think that these Tesla recharge stations are taking jobs away. They're just being dickheads.
- AYAndrew Yang
Exactly, Joe. So if you're gonna be a dickhead, even though it really has nothing to do with you...
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AYAndrew Yang
Imagine when you actually think your livelihood is being threatened.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. Good point.
- AYAndrew Yang
Then you can see it getting revved up, you know, to, like, a much higher level.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AYAndrew Yang
So...So I'm running for president in large part because I think we need to get in front of this set of problems. We have to say, "Look, if we're gonna save $168 billion a year, maybe some of that should go to the truckers and give them a soft landing." Maybe we should have this universal basic income where everyone feels like they're getting a thousand bucks a month, which is not a work replacement. It's not gonna make their lives easy. They still need to work. But at least it takes the edge off. It takes like the existential threat off. Um, and also their kid's getting it, so they feel like, "Okay, my kid actually has some kind of path to the future, and it's not like if I lose this trucking job, not only am I going to, you know, struggle and suffer, but my kid will too." So, uh, my plan as president is to install a trucker transition czar and say, "Look, it is your job to try and manage this transition for the three and a half million truckers." And Joe, we haven't even talked about the five million Americans who work at truck stops, motels, diners, retail establishments, all the places where the truckers stop every day just to get out, eat a meal, and you know, like live a life. I mean, if you imagine those communities when the trucks don't stop, there's gonna be a drying up of economic vitality on a level that's unprecedented in many of these communities.
- JRJoe Rogan
This is something that I- I'm just becoming aware of over the last year or two. Um, how... When, when you were out on the campaign trail and you know, you're talking to media and you're discussing this with people, uh, how many people have no idea that this is coming?
- AYAndrew Yang
Well, what I say to people, Joe, is I say, "Hey, have you noticed stores closing on your main street?" And then they say, "Yes." And then I ask them, "Why is that?" And then they reflect for a minute, and then they say, "Amazon." And I'm like, "Yeah, that's right." (laughs) You know...
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- AYAndrew Yang
... Amazon's getting $20 billion of commerce every year.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AYAndrew Yang
And it's now tipping your malls and main street stores into oblivion.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AYAndrew Yang
And like, is that gonna get better or worse? 'Cause... So... So some people say it's like how the robots, like the robots are years away. And then you're like, "No, it's not robots actually, like, walking around your neighborhood." I mean, of course, that's unlikely. But Amazon soaking up the business that used to go to your mall, if you go to their fulfillment center, it's robots as far as the eye can see. If you go to their, uh, their warehouse, you know, it's also robots as far as, far as the eye can see. So when you ask how aware are people that this is happening, it's one of those truths that as soon as you point it out, they're like, "Oh, yeah. Like, I... I... I knew that was what was up." It's just for whatever reason, I'm like the only person just laying out the facts and being like, "Guys, it's not your imagination." Like, we actually are getting rid of the most common jobs in the US economy filled by high school graduates and then replacing them with a handful of jobs for higher skilled people in different places. And then we're pretending that the first population is somehow gonna access the new opportunities when the odds of them getting up and like moving to Seattle or whatnot and becoming a web designer or like logistics manager or, uh, big data scientist or something like essentially near zero. And so this is what gave rise to a lot of the anger that got Donald Trump elected because they looked around their communities and were like, "Hey, I used to work in this manufacturing plant. This manufacturing plant no longer exists. For whatever reason, like I'm being told that it's somehow like my fault that I wasn't (laughs) adaptable enough." Like I didn't... you know, I didn't somehow, uh, become a coder or... or... or... or something ridiculous. And I have to say, Joe, and this is like something that I've picked up from Dennis in part. So I'm with this trucker in Iowa, and he says to me, he says like, "I don't think that Democrats care about people like me." Uh, and he says that to me while I'm in his truck. And I'm just like, "I can understand why he feels that way," but that's incredibly destructive-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AYAndrew Yang
... because there's a point at which Democratic Party used to be very, very heavily aligned with working class Americans.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AYAndrew Yang
And there's now some kind of, uh, pathology that if the person who's suffering is a white man of a certain background, then the suffering somehow is like, somehow like diminished. (laughs) Like, it doesn't count as much if they're a trucker. Uh, and that's something that I find really destructive. It's like we have to start acknowledging the source of the problems. One thing I'm saying to people is like, "Look, it's not immigrants that are taking these jobs away." Like just facts. It is not immigrants. It is the fact that technology is pushing our economy in a direction that makes it harder and harder for many Americans to get by based upon this current I trade my time for money model.
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, truckers seem to be the big one, right?
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, cashiers are another one.
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, what are the other job... uh, jobs that are gonna be killed by automation?
- AYAndrew Yang
So the... uh, the next obvious one is call center workers.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah, of course.
- AYAndrew Yang
Where there are two and a half million call center workers still in the United States, generally high school graduates that make about $14 an hour. Now when you and I call a company, we're like pounding keys trying to get a human because the AI is so annoying.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Do you feel like…
- AYAndrew Yang
markets to a level that's unprecedented in our history. Like that, that, the disparities between Cleveland and San Francisco or St. Louis and LA are much, much higher than they've been at any other historical period, both by the numbers and, like after you actually go to the places you're like, "Wow, like this is not, uh, flourishing the, the way that you'd hope."
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you feel like an economic Paul Revere in a certain sense? Like the, "The robots are coming, the robots are coming."
- AYAndrew Yang
I do. Uh, it's weird man. Well the w- the comparison I make is that if the United States economy is like an elephant, you know the parable of like the people, like, you know, blind people, you know, touching the elephant.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AYAndrew Yang
Um, so I'm, I'm an entrepreneur, I sold a company to a public company that was a national education company, it was based in New York.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wait a minute, what is the parable of blind people touching an elephant?
- AYAndrew Yang
Uh, so what happens is, uh, there are, there are like seven blind men and they, they get asked like, "What does the el- what does an elephant look like?" And then one of them is touching the trunk and is like, "An elephant looks like a snake." And another one's touching its leg and it's like, "An elephant looks like a tree trunk." Uh, so that's the way most people experience the economy, is that they're like touching a part of the economy and they're like, "This is what it looks like or feels like."
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AYAndrew Yang
So I've had this really strange set of experiences where I sold a, a national education company to a public company. I lived bicoastally between New York and San Francisco for the last five years. I've operated in 18 cities around the country. I was a, I was an appointee in, uh, in the Obama administration in DC so I've actually seen the elephant, if you know what I mean.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AYAndrew Yang
Like I-
- JRJoe Rogan
The whole elephant.
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah, like I'm, I'm like hanging out with, uh, the tech wizards of Silicon Valley and I'm like, "Hey, you know, are we gonna automate these jobs in any way?" And they're like, "Oh yeah, we're gonna automate these jobs." (laughs) You know (laughs) like, like it's, you know, so it's, it's not a mystery. And they're not bad people, it's like, "Hey, it's my job to like make stuff work better."
- JRJoe Rogan
It is what it is.
- AYAndrew Yang
And, and if you gave me a choice between making things work better and creating abundant opportunities for the other people, I would choose that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AYAndrew Yang
But I do not have that choice, I have a job to do.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AYAndrew Yang
You know, this is my job. A- and what I tell people is like, "Whose responsibility then is it to go tell the people, 'Look, it's technology, it's transformed the economy in fundamental ways and we need to make it so that everyone benefits and it's not just that this like hyper-concentrated set of winners and then this like huge army of, of relative losers.'" And it's the government's job, but at this point we've given up on our government as anything, like it can't really do anything and so now it's no one's job. And so somehow, Joe, it has become my job and it blows my mind too sometimes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Now g- coming from a place of being a serial entrepreneur to this presidential candidate who's kind of warning people about the upcoming technological apocalypse as it were, um, how did you make that transition and what, what, what was your motivation to get involved in this to the point where you're actually running for president on this platform?
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah, so, uh, so I sell the company in 2009 and that was the financial crisis, like Wall Street had crashed the economy. And I had personally taught these kids who had worked at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and, and McKinsey and I was like, "Man, we need smart kids to do something other than just head to Wall Street and Silicon Valley. We need to have them go to Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore and New Orleans and start businesses." So I quit my job, I donated, um, low six figures to so- start this new organization and then we trained hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped create several thousand jobs. So that was like my wholesome give back, I was like, "Hey, I'm like the, you know, the guy who just believes in entrepreneurship." 'Cause just like you, I freaking love entrepreneurs and I was like ... So here's the joke I used to tell. I went to law school, I was an unhappy lawyer for five months.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- AYAndrew Yang
Uh, and so what, what I tell people is like if you're a clueless, ambitious 22-year-old who came out of college and you say to your parents, "Hey, I'm gonna go to law school." They're gonna say, "That's great." Uh, it's really easy to find the law school 'cause they're just there, you just apply to it. And the government will give you $100,000 loan, no questions asked. And then if you say to your parents, "Hey, I wanna be an entrepreneur." Your parents will think, "That's stupid, it's hard to find and no one's gonna give you $100,000 loan." So we have this huge over supply of indebted, uh, law school graduates and a huge under supply of entrepreneurs, was my thinking. And so I was like, "Okay, how do we fix that?"... so I started this organization Venture for America to try and fix that. And so imagine being this guy getting medals and awards for helping create jobs around the country, and then realizing that automation's coming like a tidal wave, and that your efforts that you're getting applauded for are really not gonna do the trick. And then Donald Trump wins the election in 2016, and for whatever reason, in my opinion, the media is just not being honest about all the economic drivers. They're blaming racism, Russia, Facebook, the FBI. And if you look at the voter district data on a district by district basis, there's a straight line up between the adoption of industrial robots in that voting district and the movement towards Trump.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- AYAndrew Yang
Like it's a straight economic story, where we blasted away four million manufacturing jobs in the swing states, and Donald Trump is our president. So imagine being me and then seeing that and being like, "Okay, I get it. This is an economic technological story." And then I went to people in Washington, DC. I was like, "Hey, guys, what are we gonna do? We're in the third inning of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country, and the third inning has brought us Donald Trump. The fourth, fifth, sixth innings are gonna be horrific. What are we gonna do?" And then the answers I got were somewhere between disappointing and horrifying, where if you go to mainstream politicians and you're like, "What are we gonna do?" the answers I got were literally, number one, "We cannot talk about that." Number two, "We should study that."
- JRJoe Rogan
"We cannot talk about that."
- AYAndrew Yang
That was, that's verbatim.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And why were they saying that?
- 1:00:00 – 1:14:04
And you think that's…
- AYAndrew Yang
a pretty important measurement, but like most people don't know.
- JRJoe Rogan
And you think that's because of, is it 'cause of suicide, is it because of drug overdose, is it because of obesity, diet, what is it?
- AYAndrew Yang
The, the two causes that p- people point to the most are that drug overdoses and suicides have overtaken vehicular deaths as, as the most frequent deaths, uh, in the United States.
- JRJoe Rogan
I didn't know that suicide was on that list. I knew that drug overdoses had taken obesity, but suicide has overta- overtaken obesity as well?
- AYAndrew Yang
Suicides have overtaken, uh, car accidents. I'm not sure about obesity.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, I'm, I'm sorry. I meant, I meant car accidents. I misspoke. So w- s- car accidents used to be number one?
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Suicides are higher than car accidents now?
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
So suicides, drug overdoses, and then car accidents? Like or, or suicides and drug overdoses, like equal?
- AYAndrew Yang
I think drug overdose is number one.
- JRJoe Rogan
Number one.
- AYAndrew Yang
And then suicide is number two.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- AYAndrew Yang
Uh, and so that's why life expectancy has declined for the last three years.
- JRJoe Rogan
And you think that the sui- and very much likely there's at least some of the number of the suicides are related to, uh, economic disparity?
- AYAndrew Yang
Oh, yeah. I mean if you look at the suicide rate in, it's particularly pronounced in 50 to 50 year old, 50 to 54 year old white Americans, which are the population, I mean you resemble that.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's me.
- AYAndrew Yang
Yeah, that's you. Which, uh, resembles the population that right now is just reaching a point where they're like, "Hey, my job skills don't have any," uh, you know, like...... utility, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AYAndrew Yang
... in the marketplace, and then they go home and they just, like, you know, start looking around and being like, "What am I doing?" (laughs) I mean, it's, it's really dark. It's punitive, it's punishing, and, and we've put our citizens in this situation where we all see ourselves as economic inputs, what the market says we're worth is what we're worth, and if we're worth less, then it's our fault. And so the next move is to say, "Okay, I guess, you know, this place, uh, th- there's no place for me here."
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't mean to sound skeptical, but I just don't believe that $1000 a n- a month is gonna fix that. It seems like that would be a, a good thing, certainly not moving in the wrong direction, certainly moving in the right direction. But it seems that there needs to be some sort of a massive rethinking of civilization itself. If, if you're gonna have that many things that are gonna be automated, that many people that are gonna be out of jobs, and feeling that the world that they prepared for no longer exists-
- AYAndrew Yang
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
... it seems like we need a step further, another move.
- AYAndrew Yang
100%, brother, and that's one reason why the Freedom Dividend's not like a s- like a ... It doesn't solve the problem.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AYAndrew Yang
The problem is fundamentally one of reconstituting means of structure, purpose, and fulfillment in people's lives, particularly in men's lives.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. How do we do that?
- AYAndrew Yang
Right. So one important aspect of that is to actually start measuring how we are doing as a society and saying, "That's actually where we're trying to go."
- JRJoe Rogan
So instead of using GDP-
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