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.
00:12:00 · Aditya Agarwal, Mark Jacobstein
[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. [00:12:24] S2: And actually it's related to a question that I had. In general, you've seen trends before people. So you were talking about job displacement and what it was going to mean before anybody else and UBI before anybody else, and then it was actually Sam who came along soon thereafter and and I think I think probably largely inspired by you. You're also like the first democrat to talk about, you know, the problems of cancel culture and folks being overly woke and problems with two party systems and the need for things like ranked choice voting, you've always been, I think, out ahead and a provocateur. I mean, now, you know, talking about addiction to mobile phones and the fact that we all need to be spending more time IRL, which I think is absolutely true and incredibly important. So talk to me about like the systems that help you to do this. I mean, you're obviously very sharp. There's lots of smart people who don't see the future so well. So I'm curious about like, is there a thing that helps you to do that? Is there is there a reason you think that that's been sort of part of your DNA?
00:12:24 · Mark Jacobstein, Andrew Yang, Aditya Agarwal
[00:12:24] S2: And actually it's related to a question that I had. In general, you've seen trends before people. So you were talking about job displacement and what it was going to mean before anybody else and UBI before anybody else, and then it was actually Sam who came along soon thereafter and and I think I think probably largely inspired by you. You're also like the first democrat to talk about, you know, the problems of cancel culture and folks being overly woke and problems with two party systems and the need for things like ranked choice voting, you've always been, I think, out ahead and a provocateur. I mean, now, you know, talking about addiction to mobile phones and the fact that we all need to be spending more time IRL, which I think is absolutely true and incredibly important. So talk to me about like the systems that help you to do this. I mean, you're obviously very sharp. There's lots of smart people who don't see the future so well. So I'm curious about like, is there a thing that helps you to do that? Is there is there a reason you think that that's been sort of part of your DNA? [00:13:21] S0: I think the main gift I have is that I don't socialize well. By that, what I mean is if you stick me with a bunch of people that all went to fancy schools and like, because, know, Mark, I know where you went. Don't know, but I assume it was pretty fancy. Not as, not as [00:13:42] S1: fancy as Mark, you know, I went to Carnegie Fancy ish. [00:13:48] S2: It's pretty fancy.
00:13:48 · Mark Jacobstein, Andrew Yang, Aditya Agarwal
[00:13:48] S2: It's pretty fancy. [00:13:50] S0: Yeah. It's like, I am around these people and I just think to myself, like, you know, these people are a slice of a slice of a slice very often. And like, I don't think it defines reality. That's And the main so then when I try and figure out what defines reality, I just look for numbers and I'm like, okay, this is the closest thing I can find to it. And then I try and follow those. I took a test a little while ago trying to identify my political alignment by personality, and I came up completely neutral. Like, was, you know, I'm just pretty much... [00:14:30] S2: You can feel that in in I think in very in very good ways. [00:14:33] S1: In that case, Andrew, you strike me as one of the people who maybe I've met who has the highest score on agency. Because most people have all these provocative ideas, but they don't act upon it. They just have theories. But you actually have the remarkable tendency to go and actually do something about it. And you've done this multiple times. That's very rare, even in Silicon Valley, which I think is probably the best crucible for high agency in the world, in my opinion. But you having done so in multiple domains, that's very rare. Yeah. [00:15:04] S0: Well, thank you. I mean, certainly see Silicon Valley as the crucible. And when I spend time there, I get invigorated. I feel like, oh yeah, these are people who are doing things. I just think I've picked different domains that a smart person would avoid, like the plague, like politics.