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.
00:08:48 · Mark Jacobstein
[00:08:48] S2: I I wanna ask more about that because I... There's an extraordinary extraordinary dichotomy here between... You wrote a book, you know, the the war on normal people. And I think you were one of the first people to talk about AI is going to change workforce dynamics in really profound ways. I think your quote from just a day or two ago was about 40,000,000 jobs that we're going to lose. I don't think you're wrong, I think hopefully there's a sort of Jevons paradox and lots of other productivity increases will help absorb a lot of that, but there's going to be a lot of pain and you were one of the very first people to talk about it in a very blunt and real way, it led to conversations about UBI and a bunch of other things we can talk about. You're also the same person who wrote smart people should build things, which is a deeply optimistic book about the fact that the smartest people should be making stuff and maybe not working for Davis Polk and maybe, you know, think about not going to McKinsey instead, like, make stuff. And you have the pessimistic piece and the optimistic piece and how they all sort of fit together for you and what you do with that tension.
00:09:48 · Andrew Yang
[00:09:48] S0: So again, I consider myself optimistic by action. Like, I wake up every day saying, okay, Noble Mobile is going to save Americans billions of dollars and get us off of our phones, stop the brain rot, touch grass, look up. So it's all very positive. That said, I also listened to data and numbers. And what happened to me was I ran Venture for America, which had very, very positive goals, and realized that for every startup that creates 50 or 100 jobs, there's going to be an innovation that decimates 10 times as many jobs. And so it's like, well, if I'm going to be clear headed about this, I'm pouring water into a bathtub that has giant holes ripped in the bottom. So does it make sense to keep pouring water? Now, if someone comes to me and says, hey, my jam is pouring water, I'm like, fan, fucking tastic. Do that. Love it. Employ those 50, 100 people, you're going to change their lives and careers. I mean, I've done that. And it's some of the stuff I'm the proudest of. But having traveled the country even at that point, you see that their first high school graduates outnumber college graduates in this country two to one. And a lot of the innovations I hoped that would employ lots of people just aren't going to employ a lot of what I called normal people, because the normal person in America is not a college graduate. Even today, I mean, even after this number of years, I think the proportion of college graduates in this country might be 38%. And so I started to enlarge my perspective, Mark, I think. Like, I'm really today very positive about my life, my family's life. I'm positive about your lives, the two of you, because I have a feeling they're pretty good.
00:11:35 · Mark Jacobstein, Andrew Yang, Aditya Agarwal
[00:11:35] S3: But [00:11:35] S0: then I took a look around by the numbers and was like, yo, this is going be go really, really poorly for like the 2,000,000 call center workers, the 2,800,000 truck drivers, the 3,000,000 clerks, like whatever the categories were. And so that's when I started to think about running for president, because I thought that was the only thing that could make a difference at the right scale. [00:12:00] S1: I will give you a bunch of credit. You saw that shit a lot earlier than most people. And you know, I live, me and Mark, and we live in a world where a lot of people like to make predictions, but I think you saw that way earlier than most. And it's obviously accelerated even in the last two or three years. So props on that. A lot of people think, yeah, that's props.