00:26:00 · Mark Jacobstein, Andrew Yang
[00:26:00] S2: But this makes me think that, like, your hat should say systems, not math. I mean, math is shorthand for it, but, like... And and I get it that it's sort of data driven, but actually even more important than the math and the ability to extrapolate, etcetera, I feel like is the thinking from first principles. And I go back to like, how is it that Andrew Yang has done all of these extraordinary things? I feel like there was a lot of good first principle thinking. Like, I need... I'm going build venture for America because we need more good jobs in places like Detroit. So here's the thing I can do that will impact that or I'm going to reform the American political system because that's actually even more impactful than me being an individual politician. You could probably go run for congress. You could find a district right now. You have enough name recognition and they love you over at CNN, etcetera. You could you could find a place to go run for congress, etcetera, but you can probably do more... Have more impact as a systems thinker. And I think that's probably... If I think about, like, your superpower, that that... It's it's that plus the ability to actually, hang out with the regular guys, which, I think is a very rare thing for people who've actually chosen to run for office. [00:27:06] S0: There are definitely people who wanted me to run for this office or that office, and I wasn't as drawn to it in part because of what you're describing. Mark, I'm going to be a good entrepreneur and CEO right now and pitch why what I'm doing now is more beneficial.
00:27:06 · Andrew Yang, Mark Jacobstein
[00:27:06] S0: There are definitely people who wanted me to run for this office or that office, and I wasn't as drawn to it in part because of what you're describing. Mark, I'm going to be a good entrepreneur and CEO right now and pitch why what I'm doing now is more beneficial. [00:27:18] S2: Do it. Yeah. We we haven't we haven't had a chance to get to Noble Mobile, but I'm I'm very curious. And and, I love the idea of the tech entrepreneur trying to get people off of their phones. So so so so talk to us about Noble Mobile.
00:27:30 · Andrew Yang, Aditya Agarwal, Mark Jacobstein
[00:27:30] S0: Right. So I've determined that Americans are sad, and I've determined that Americans are sad for two big reasons. There are other reasons, but these are two big ones. Number one, they're not able to save enough money each month. And number two, they're spending too much time on what Hassan Minus One calls our rectangles of sadness, where I joke, it's like, look, it's not often that your neighbor runs up to you and screams in your face, but you do get that feeling from your phone kind of regularly that like you saw someone scream at someone, maybe they screamed at you even, and you're like, oh, like there's a conflict and like negative emotions. And then so you start thinking what's going on out there in the real world. Meanwhile, the real world, especially where you guys live, the weather is fine and people are just walking around, walking their dogs and their neighbors like another fine human. And so I thought, okay, how can I make progress on these two problems? And I was inspired by Mark Cuban's cost plus drugs, where he's buying generic drugs at bulk and then selling them back to the American people at a modest markup. Just to run this for you guys, and, you know, like successful Silicon Valley folks will get this, but then you don't care. And you'll see what I mean in just a second. Because you're in the West Coast, I'm guessing you're both AT&T guys, just a guess. [00:28:44] S1: Verizon for me. But yeah. [00:28:46] S0: Yeah. I was Verizon too. [00:28:47] S2: Helping to switch to Noble Mobile any day now.
00:28:49 · Andrew Yang
[00:28:49] S0: For twenty six years. Oh yeah, please. After this, you're gonna want to even more. So Verizon charged me $140 a month for one line for like a decade or so. So I was overpaying even more than normal. The average American is spending 83 a month on their wireless. You guys are probably spending a bit more than that. You're probably spending a bit like somewhere between Like 105, maybe 100 Yeah, 105, guess, a $100 or more. Now, the last time you guys brought the families to Europe or whatnot, you got these text messages saying, hey, $10 a day. Yeah. So if you went away for ten days, you owed them a $100. There are two of you, maybe it was $200 and then you got home and you still had your native $100 bill. So maybe you spent 300, even 400 that month. And you were like, well, that's weird. Like how the hell did my cell phone bill cost that much? Meanwhile, in Europe, instead of spending an average $83 a month, they're spending an average of $35 a month. And the cost to put you on that foreign carrier cell tower is only about $2 a day, and they're charging you $10 a day for no discernible reason. Verizon paid its shareholders in dividends 11,000,000,000 last year. AT&T was 7,000,000,000. The delta of $48 per head per month between The US and Europe comes to 100,000,000,000 a year as like a hidden data tax. So when you start digging into, okay, if I'm going try and get money back into America's hands at scale, I think this is actually a very direct way to do it. And so we licensed the data from T Mobile, and then you pay $50 for unlimited, but we'll pay you back $20 that month based upon any data you use less than 20 gigs that month. So we'll pay you to use your phone less. You doom scroll more, you get paid less at the end of the month. And the average Noble user is using 17% less screen time in month two, because it turns out we respond to measurements and money and their cell phones bills getting cut in half. And if you do the math on, again, saving that $50 a month, times 12 is 600, times 30 is 18,000, put an interest rate on that, compound it, save the average American tens of thousands of dollars, which would be like a down payment on their retirement. And get us all off our screens and looking at each other, touching grass, etcetera, etcetera. What do you think, Mark? Does my Noble Mobile?
00:31:19 · Mark Jacobstein, Andrew Yang, Aditya Agarwal
[00:31:19] S2: First of all, you know, your old senior mentor, as an entrepreneur, I'm gonna give you like probably an A minus or could be even That's an A on that a damn good pitch. As Jake McDolly used to say to me, the best lie is the truth. Like the most important thing is it's actually all true, and really powerful. And I think just as important as the money in people's pockets is anything we can do structurally to get people off of the dopamine machine in your pocket or the rectangle of sadness which I have not heard before. I don't think there's anything in our evolutionary history that prepared us for having all the information all the time and all those dopamine hits, many of them negative. It's not just about doom scrolling, it's even happy scrolling is not good for us compared to getting out there and, you know, playing some pickleball. [00:32:11] S0: Wow. I'll take an a minus from my old mentor. I'll take it. I'll take it. It's [00:32:16] S2: cool. It's cool. [00:32:17] S1: Know, it's funny because this morning I was just, this is related. I just woke up thinking, why is it that a lot of content on the internet has a comment box? We're not allowed to go and comment on everything we see to the whole world in real life. It literally doesn't make sense. Why would I go to a YouTube video and Instagram? Why is there a comment box? It doesn't make sense. Why should some rando be allowed to comment [00:32:43] S2: on stuff? Especially when the first rule of the internet is never read the comments.
00:32:43 · Mark Jacobstein, Aditya Agarwal, Andrew Yang, Mark Jacobstein
[00:32:43] S2: on stuff? Especially when the first rule of the internet is never read the comments. [00:32:46] S1: Correct. Exactly. So I'm like, why does this exist? And I was just kind of thinking more from... Because who is getting value from it? Because nobody likes to read those comments. They're all garbage. Maybe the people writing the comments feel happy about it. I don't know. Sorry, Andrew, as somebody who worked on social products for many years, I was just kind of going back to why did we put this in the first place? Maybe in the beginning it was because friends like to write comments and that was cool, but all of that happens now in your DMs anyways. I can take a piece of content and send it to my friends. That's way better because at least then we can banter about it in our kind of like group chats. But so much of the design of the Internet is just weird in like bad ways that don't make us happy right now. So I strongly agree with the premise. [00:33:34] S0: Well, fantastic guys. So we'd love you guys to join Noble Mobile. It's good fun growing every day. But you see the vision, see the mission. I agree with you, Aditya. There are a lot of things. First of all, I mean, as a political type, I definitely should not read the comments. I will say that most every celebrity I know and political figure sometimes does. There's like this constant temptation to be like, let me see what they're saying. And then most of the time you regret it. Most of time you're like, [00:34:04] S2: I shouldn't. [00:34:04] S3: Yeah. For sure.