#1245 - Andrew Yang

Joe Rogan (0:00)

Very strange.

Five, four, we'll talk about it. Three, two, yes, and we're live.

Andrew Yang (0:09)

Hello.

Joe Rogan (0:10)

Welcome, thank you.

Andrew Yang (0:11)

Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

My pleasure. Sam Harris sends his regards.

Andrew Yang (0:16)

Yeah, Sam's a beautiful man.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

He is, I love that guy. And he's one of the reasons why you're here.

So universal basic income, this is what this is all about.

Andrew Yang (0:25)

Yes, yeah, that's what my campaign for president is all about.

Joe Rogan (0:29)

That's an interesting focus of a campaign, and very unusual. And I mean, four years ago, you never even thought that that would have a chance at all. But this is a subject that has been gaining momentum.

And I made a big shift, because I had my friend Eddie Wong on once, and he was the first person to bring it up. And my initial knee-jerk reaction was, get the fuck out of here. Like universal basic income, just gonna give people money, they're just gonna be lazy, nothing's ever gonna get done, that's a terrible idea. And then I started paying attention to the rise of AI and automation, and how many jobs are gonna get taken away. And then once you see the actual numbers, it's pretty staggering.

Andrew Yang (1:12)

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 3000 jobs in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Birmingham, New Orleans, other cities around the country.

And I saw that we're pouring water into a bathtub that has a giant hole ripped in the bottom, and that for every 5, 10, 50 jobs that my entrepreneurs are gonna create, we're gonna lose 5, 10, 50,000 jobs.

Joe Rogan (1:39)

It's not something that people intuitively suspect could be a real issue either. It's one of the ones where you kind of have to, like, go shake people, like, hey, look at this, this is coming. There's a cliff.

We're going towards this cliff.

Andrew Yang (1:52)

It's darker still in that, so when I was digging into the numbers, I found that it's not this cliff that we're heading towards. It's actually more of a curve that we're on. What I've been telling people is that we're in the third inning now, where one of the main reasons why Donald Trump won in 2016 is that we automated away four million manufacturing jobs that were based in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, all the swing states he needed to win in the center of the country.

And a lot of that was just manufacturing work. And if you go to a factory, you'll see it's just giant robot arms as far as the eye can see. So it's not just that you have artificial intelligence on the horizon. It's that we've been eating away at the most common jobs in the US economy for almost 20 years now.

And it's just now hitting a point where it's pushing more and more unskilled men in particular out of the workforce.

Joe Rogan (2:42)

Now, are there other alternatives that you've considered other than just universal basic income, like educating people about this being a real issue and perhaps pushing them or directing them towards other occupations?

Andrew Yang (2:57)

Yeah, so that's the 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 truth of it, Joe, is that there are three and a half million truck drivers in this country right now. It's the most common job in 29 states. And the average trucker is a 49-year-old guy with a high school education, maybe ex-military like Dennis was.

They're making $50,000 a year. So then if you say, hey, I'm gonna retrain half a million truck drivers, for what exactly is issue number one? And then these guys didn't love school 30 years ago. It's not like driving a truck has made them really excited about the idea. 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 zero and 15% in real life. Like this is what actually happened to the workers of Michigan and Indiana and Ohio.