00:01:20 · Mark Jacobstein
[00:01:20] S2: Yeah. So I've been lucky enough to know Andrew now for more than twenty five years. Really excited to co host him today. He's the only person I know who's actually been a successful entrepreneur, presidential candidate, author of five, now six books, provocateur, math guy, dad, husband, regular guy, and lucky to say here old friend. Really excited to talk to you today about a number of things, but maybe the first is given the extraordinary career path and the choices you've made, one of the things we talk about a lot at South Park Commons is agency and how the best entrepreneurs in the world, the people who really bend the arc of history are people who just do things. They don't ask permission, they just go and get things done and your career speaks to that in spades from the Venture for America work, to most extraordinarily the run for president. I still remember the day you showed up at Guardant Health to tell me you were running, and I I was very confused at first. Running for president of what? And and then you actually made an incredible go of it. I'd love to talk about where this agency comes from. Like, what was it in your childhood? What is it that drives you that has allowed you to continue to do things that are really extraordinary from starting your own political party to now building or running your own business?
00:02:31 · Andrew Yang
[00:02:31] S0: You know, I was the the son of immigrants and felt out of place when I was a kid, but then also, like, a sense of struggle that I wanted to overcome. And so I I think there was, a chip on my shoulder for a lot of my life. And my mom said to me when I was a kid, it's like, look, if you don't succeed, it's just because you didn't try hard enough. Like, your ability level is higher than anyone around you. So if you fail, you didn't exert yourself. And I took that to heart. I was like, all right. I guess if someone else can do it, should be able to do it. And Mark was an early influence on me where I saw him running a company called Small World and then thought like, holy shit, this guy that's not that much older than me is like running his own company. Like I need to try and figure out how the hell you end up running your own company. That guy figured it out. So let me try and figure it out. Of course, it ended up not being that easy. You know, I did start a company that failed. You know, it's not that hard to start a company. It's just much harder to start one that goes anywhere. And so I had a number of stumbles and falls that my Asian parents were very happy to remind me of throughout my twenties. But some of the experiences I had when I was a kid that really hurt me were like getting turned down by girls. And I felt like if you can withstand rejection from Noelle Verboise or whoever the heck the girl is, then getting rejected by a company or an investor or a voter. It's it's like small potatoes. I was very sensitive as a kid, and so I think it kind of thickened my skin for later.
00:04:12 · Mark Jacobstein
[00:04:12] S2: That's fascinating. I hope Noel knows how important she's been in shaping the future of American politics. I am curious though because one one thing people do sometimes after failures is a flight to safety. Right? You could have taken a big job at a safe company and instead you kept doing things that were entrepreneurial.
00:04:31 · Andrew Yang
[00:04:31] S0: Yeah. So I started out as an associate at a big law firm called Davis Polk Wardwell, that some of you know, because it's very fancy. Left after five months. So that was my flight from safety. And then started a company that flops, another company runs out of money, another company sort of doesn't achieve its goals. And there was a point in there, I will say this to your audience who were gonna, you know, then... Like, I probably would have fled to safety if safety had been there. I'm like, so I mean, I became a nightclub promoter. I became a test prep tutor. I did a bunch of side hustles because I thought, well, shit, I need to be able to rely upon myself and assume that my company is going to be shaky. Because in some cases, company, I mean, the company I started ran out of money, so that's on me. But then the next company I joined was run by other people and ran out of money. So at a certain point, you're like, Oh, I guess I should just expect things to run out of money. And those experiences too toughen me up because it's like, you you have a couple of companies fail. I used to joke that no one knows you have a net worth of negative $100,000 unless you're stupid enough to tell them. But if you just met me, you might think I was like a smart guy who had something going for him and not realize I was a total failure. I guess I really did get toughened up through a set of failures throughout my twenties.
00:06:01 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:06:01] S1: Let me ask you a question here, which I've often thought about, which is, I think there's a classic study that shows that people's perceptions around how well markets perform in general are a function of essentially how well did the stock market do when they first entered the workforce. Like, was the stock market booming or was it kind of going up or going down when they were in their early twenties? And that kind of forms your perception of are markets... Like, do markets generally go up or do they generally go down? Are you default optimistic or pessimistic? So one of the things I often think about is that I had the good fortune early on in my career to meet someone who I still deeply admire today. This is Mark Zuckerberg. Zuck is like in some ways a personification of you can just do things, right? And I learned from him that age is not kind of a barrier. All it is is a kind of high agency and will. And you can just like, there's no problem that you can't tackle if you put your mind to it. So, and you obviously were lucky enough to meet Mark Jacobstein kind of early in your career to kind of like show you that same path. Does that resonate? Like, do you think that this is a function really of, this is like a lot of like people's pensions for risk is really kind of path dependent on really the formative years early in their career, right? Which means that, you know, we really like, know, something like SPC obviously can play a big part because, you know, in a lot of the other kind of institutions in the same ilk.
00:07:24 · Andrew Yang
[00:07:24] S0: I do think those early exposures shape your perception of the way things go. When I was starting out, it was 'ninety nine, two thousand. And so it was like the waning days of the first tech bubble. And then my company died when the bubble burst. I remember NASDAQ went from 5,000 to 2,000 and companies I'd literally attended launch parties for a few months earlier were shutting down all around me. And so seeing that, you realize like, oh, wow, it really all can go away and bubbles definitely exist and burst. And I saw people ride the hype train up and then ride it down. And a lot of my friends who are entrepreneurs were struggling for the next couple of years. And my wife jokes sometimes that she thinks I'm always waiting for the shoe to drop somewhat negatively. I don't know if you guys read my book from the presidential, The War on Normal People, but it's fairly dark. It's fairly dystopian. It's like, hey, AI is gonna come to meet the jobs, like, blah, blah, blah. And I remember when I was doing research for the book, I was like, am I just very pessimistic? And I'm an entrepreneur, so I'm very optimistic by action, But am I pessimistic by outlook? But then I looked at the facts and I was like, no. No. I'm actually pretty confident that this stuff, you know, is gonna head in this direction.