Donald Trump's Election Was Really About Economics | Joe Rogan and Andrew Yang

Coming from a place of being a serial entrepreneur to this presidential candidate who's kind of warning people about the upcoming technological apocalypse as it were, how did you make that transition and what was your motivation to get involved in this to the point where you're actually running for president on this platform? Yeah, so sell a company in 2009 and that was the financial crisis. Like Wall Street had crashed the economy. I had personally taught these kids who'd worked at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and McKinsey and I was like, man, we need smart kids to do something other than just head to Wall Street and Silicon Valley. We need to have them go to Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, start businesses. So I quit my job, I donated low six figures to start this new organization and then we trained hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped create several thousand jobs. So that was like my wholesome give back. I was like, hey, I'm like the guy who just believes in entrepreneurship because just like you, I freaking love entrepreneurs. And I was like, so here's the joke I used to tell. I went to law school. I was an unhappy lawyer for five months. And so what I tell people is like if you're a clueless, ambitious 22 year old who came out of college and you say to your parents, hey, I'm going to go to law school, they're going to say, that's great. It's really easy to find the law school because it's there, just apply to it. And the government will give you a hundred thousand dollar loan, no questions asked. And then if you say to your parents, hey, I want to be an entrepreneur, your parents will think that's stupid. It's hard to find and no one's going to give you a hundred thousand dollar loan. So we have this huge oversupply of indebted law school graduates and a huge undersupply of entrepreneurs was my thinking. And so I was like, okay, how do you fix that? So I started this organization Venture for America to try and fix that. And so imagine being this guy getting medals and awards for helping create jobs around the country and then realizing that automation is coming like a tidal wave and that your efforts that you're getting applauded for are really not going to do the trick. And then Donald Trump wins the election in 2016. And for whatever reason, in my opinion, the media is just not being honest about all the economic drivers. They're blaming racism, Russia, Facebook, the FBI. And if you look at the voter district data on a district by district basis, there's a straight line up between the adoption of industrial robots in that voting district and the movement towards Trump. It's a straight economic story where we blasted away 4 million manufacturing jobs in the swing states and Donald Trump is our president. So imagine being me and then seeing that and being like, okay, I get it. This is an economic technological story. And then I went to people in Washington, DC. I was like, hey guys, what are we going to do? We're in the third inning of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country. And the third inning has brought us Donald Trump. The fourth, fifth, sixth innings are going to be horrific. What are we going to do? And then the answers I got were somewhere between disappointing and horrifying, where if you go to mainstream politicians and you're like, what are we going to do? The answers I got were literally, number one, we cannot talk about that. Number two, we should study that. We cannot talk about that. Really? Yeah. And why were they saying that? Because it seems alarmist, like anti-progress or like, you know, you're like, you know, throwing stones at like big tech companies. And it's like, I'm not throwing stones at anyone. I'm just pointing out the facts. So number one is, so number one was can't talk about it. Number two is need to study it. And then number three was the point you made originally, which was we must educate and retrain Americans for the jobs of the future. And then when I was like, hey, we're terrible at that by the numbers, then they'd literally be like, well, I guess we'll learn to get better at it then. And then so I came back to my home in New York City and I was like, oh my gosh, like we are so backward and far gone as a, certainly as a government. And so then I was grappling with it and I'm a parent like you are. And I looked at my kids and I was like, am I really going to bring them up in this shit show? Like, is this really the plan? And so then I was like, okay, how would you actually solve this problem if you, if you had to do so? And so then I said, okay, universal basic income rebranded the freedom dividend after we did a bunch of tests because it tests much better as the freedom dividend than universal basic income. And then try and make the rules of the economy work better for more people as fast as we can before this automation wave really crescendos. What do you mean by that? Well to me, like, you know what I'm saying is like retail and truck driving are the two major, major obvious sectors that are going to get displaced. Being a retail worker is the most common job in the United States right now. The average retail worker is a 39 year old woman with a high school education making between 11 and $12 an hour. So what do those workers do when 30% of the malls and stores close in the next five years? You know, and then truckers are next in line, you know, by the five to 10 year mark. So it's like, we have to get our acts together before these populations end up getting displaced. And we know Americans don't have a ton of savings to fall back on. It's not like they'll be like, oh, like, you know, let me take a month off to like, think about it. That's not the real life situation most Americans live and experience. So this is all 2017 where I'm like doing the data research and saying like, okay, like what's the plan? And then when I went to various politicians, I was like, there is no appetite for making this case. There's no appetite for anyone even talking about this. So the only thing I can see that would have a realistic chance of accelerating meaningful solutions to this automation wave in a five to 10 year timeframe is if I run for president and I either win, which is very doable, I can win, or I mainstream this set of considerations to a point where other politicians are willing to tackle something like universal basic income and make it a reality in that timeframe.