Andrew Yang on Why Life Expectancy for Americans is Declining | Joe Rogan

To finish top three in a field of 20, you probably need about 40 to 50,000 Iowans to get on board. So you say, hey, do I think I can be President of the United States? The threshold question is this. Can I get 40 to 50,000 Iowans on board with the idea that them and their family members getting $1,000 a month is a good idea, that that would actually help improve their lives? Well, I'm sure it would help improve their lives, and I'm sure they would agree with you. The question is, what are the other things? See, I don't think most people are aware that this is coming. And I think you educating people and explaining all these statistics and seeing the forecast, particularly from your position as a serial entrepreneur who has a deep background in business and you have a deep understanding of this, you're helping in a tremendous way by educating people. But I think most people have, it may be illogically, but they have different concerns. So how do you address these other concerns? I bet if you polled people, what are the issues? What are the issues in this upcoming 2020 presidential race that who's going to beat Donald Trump? How do you do it? This is like on the Democratic side, the idea is like anyone but Trump, right? Yeah. I mean, they would be so happy if fill in the blank. Tulsi Gabbard, you, whoever. On the Republican side, obviously it's Trump, unless someone comes along or he goes to jail. Those are the two possibilities. What are the other issues that you feel that people are really concerned about that you can perhaps shed some unique light on? Sure. So the three big policies I'm running on are one, the freedom dividend, because a lot of Americans are seeing their paychecks not keep up with their expenses. Number two is we need to get healthcare off the backs of businesses and families and move towards a single payer system, Medicare for all. As an entrepreneur, it makes it harder to hire people. When you do hire people, you want to make them contractors and not full-time employees. It makes it harder for people to start businesses because they're concerned about keeping their healthcare for their families. So we got to get healthcare off the backs of businesses and families and try and make the economy more dynamic. We spend twice as much on healthcare as other countries do to worst results. Right now we're in the worst of all worlds. The third thing is, and I reference my wife when I talk about this, my wife is at home with our two boys, six and three, one of whom is autistic. What I say is, what is her work valued at in GDP? Then people think about it and are like, I don't know. I'm like zero because GDP doesn't consider that actual economic contribution. Then I say, what we have to do is we have to actually evolve from GDP as a measuring stick because it actually doesn't work for us. It's almost a hundred years old. We made it up during the Great Depression. Self-driving trucks are going to drive GDP way up, but it's going to be very, very bad for many people in communities. So we have to actually change the measuring sticks to something that would actually make our economy work for us, make it so that the market serves us instead of all us being inputs to the market. Because if we're all inputs to the market, we lose to robots and AI, hands down. It doesn't matter if you were a really conscientious, hardworking truck driver or a really lazy sloppy one. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you were a really diligent radiologist or a ... It doesn't matter. We have to shift the market's emphasis to actually fuel our well-being and change from GDP, which is again this archaic measurement we made up, to things that would actually correspond to how we're doing. Things like health, childhood success rates, environmental quality. How do you quantify that? How would you quantify that in a way that would be translatable to the average voter? Yeah, so we have measurements for most of these things. And again, if you look at our numbers right now, you'd see it's like, how many people listening to this know that America's life expectancy has declined for the last three years? That to me would be a pretty important measurement. And you think that's because of ... Is it because of suicide? Is it because of drug overdose? Is it because of obesity, diet? What is it? The two causes that people point to the most are that drug overdoses and suicides have overtaken vehicular deaths as the most frequent deaths in the United States. I didn't know that suicide was on that list. I knew that drug overdoses had taken obesity, but suicides have overtaken obesity as well? Suicides have overtaken car accidents. I'm not sure about obesity. Oh, I'm sorry. I meant car accidents. I misspoke. So, car accidents used to be number one. Suicides are higher than car accidents now. Yeah. So, suicides, drug overdoses, and then car accidents, or suicides and drug overdoses like equal? I think drug overdose is number one. Number one. And then suicides, number two. Wow. And so that's why life expectancy has declined for the last three years. And you think that the ... Very much likely, there's at least some of the number of the suicides are related to economic disparity. Oh, yeah. I mean, if you look at the suicide rate, it's particularly pronounced in 50 to 54-year-old white Americans, which are the population ... I mean, you resemble that. That's me. Yeah, that's you, which resembles the population that right now is just reaching a point where they're like, hey, my job skills don't have any utility in the marketplace. And then they go home and they just start looking around and being like, what am I doing? I mean, it's really dark. It's punitive. It's really refreshing. And we've put our citizens in the situation where we all see ourselves as economic inputs. What the market says we're worth is what we're worth. And if we're worth less, then it's our fault. And so the next move is to say, okay, I guess there's no place for me here. I don't mean to sound skeptical, but I just don't believe that $1,000 a month is going to fix that. It seems like that would be a good thing. Certainly not moving in the wrong direction, certainly moving in the right direction, but it seems that there needs to be some sort of a massive rethinking of civilization itself. If you're going to have that many things that are going to be automated and that many people that are going to be out of jobs and feeling that the world that they prepared for no longer exists, it seems like we need a step further, another move. 100%, brother. And that's one reason why the freedom dividend doesn't solve the problem. The problem is fundamentally one of reconstituting means of structure, purpose, and fulfillment in people's lives, particularly in men's lives. Right. How do we do that? Right. So one important aspect of that is to actually start measuring how we are doing as a society and saying that's actually where we're trying to go. So instead of using GDP, using some sort of other quantifiable method of measuring health and happiness and fulfillment. Yes. Levels of engagement with work, mental health. We have measurements for that. We are sophisticated enough to do that. And then if we say, and as president, I'm going to be up there in 2021 being like, oh, here's the state of the union and here's the data. And then we're going to say, you know what we're going to try and do? We're actually going to try and move those measurements in the right direction. So let's try and get drug overdoses down by 50% in two years. Let's try and get our mental health up a little bit like in these ways and then make it so that that person who's at home being like, okay, like, you know, like there's not a job for me. I'm getting a thousand bucks a month. That does not solve all my problems. It takes the edge off, but then we can hopefully start reconstituting what that person's purpose is in their community, in their neighborhood. And so one of the things that I'm going to point out is that if you pump a thousand bucks a month into that neighborhood, it ends up creating a whole new rung of opportunities for the people in that community. Like some of that money goes to, you know, like youth leagues and churches and like nonprofits and creates jobs right there in that community. One of the examples I use is like, if you're in a town in Missouri with 50,000 people, and let's say you really like to bake, but starting a bakery is a dumb idea because people just do not have money in that town to buy your baked goods. But then I pumped $60 million a year into that economy. And a lot of that just circulates right there in that town. Then if I start a bakery, it's a good idea. And I know if my bakery fails, I'm not going to die. I can at least go home and get my dividend. And then if I go to other people and say, hey, you want to like help me out with this, then they also think it's a better idea than they would have. So the money is not the solution. The money helps set the stage for the solutions. So does the measurements. So does if you, because right now if like you don't even know that your life expectancy is declining, that's kind of hard to solve that problem. So if you say, look, this is actually how we measure how we're doing. And then you go in and say, okay, like local government, NGO, entrepreneur, because right now, like our entrepreneurs, none of our entrepreneurs are working on trying to make that dude's life better. Right now, you know, it's like that's not. You can only do so much. Most entrepreneurs are just trying to succeed. I mean, it's very difficult to start a business, right? And then actually have it work out well. The idea that they're going to look out for truck drivers. Yeah, it's not realistic. But at least we can start moving ourselves in that general direction if we start, because as a CEO, you know this, you make what you measure. You're not measuring it. There's no chance. If you start measuring it, you at least start to open up the chance. But what you're saying is the most profound, which is like we need to reconstitute meaning for many, many Americans. And that's what to me, the most destructive aspect of the, you know, again, like the mental health indicators and like the suicides and the rest of it is like there's a real loss of meaning for many, many people here in this country. Obviously, we're talking about a large scale, but if you go back to the time before trucks and truck drivers, that was not a viable occupation. It wasn't something people did, but yet they still found a way to occupy their time. Do you think that there needs to be some sort of an education and some sort of a method of explaining to young people in particular that you have to think of something to do, because most of the things that you think you can do won't exist. So we have to think of what are the other possibilities and be creative and do something with your life that only a human being can do, which is a really weird way to think about it, because most of the things you used to be able to think that a human being could do for a living are now going to be done by robots. But I don't think, I think there's a giant gap between the understanding that you have and the understanding that the average person has. And this could be a real problem in trying to expand this platform. Well, we have to inform people. I gotta tell you though, Joe, when I say this to people, they're like, that makes perfect sense. Yeah, it does make perfect sense. That's what's scary about it.