Navil Ravikat, "UBI Is a Non-Solution to a Non-Problem" | Joe Rogan

This brings me to what is a subject that keeps getting brought up nowadays is universal basic income with the oncoming apocalypse of automation. This is how it's being portrayed by Andrew Yang who's running for president. I sat down and talked with him about it. It's very compelling. And he's a very smart guy and he's an entrepreneur himself. And when he starts talking about automation and how it's going to just eliminate massive amounts of jobs and leave people stranded, I know you're a guy who thinks about the future. I'm going to take the unpopular point of view on this. I think it's a non-solution to a non-problem. And I mean that in a sense that automation has been happening since the dawn of time. Man, when electricity came along, that put a lot of people out of work. Did it? Right. A lot of people carrying buckets of water and lighting lamps and all those kinds of things. Now this was the concern with factories as well, right? Yeah, apps, everything. Literally every single thing that comes along. In the printing press, right? Absolutely. And what it does is it frees people up for new creative work. So the question is not, is automation going to eliminate jobs? There is no finite number of jobs. We're not like sitting around dividing up the same jobs that were around since the stone age. So obviously new jobs are being created and they're usually better jobs, more creative jobs. So the question is, how quickly is this transition going to happen and what kinds of jobs will be eliminated and what kinds of jobs will be created? It's impossible looking forward to predict what kinds of jobs will be created. If I told you 10 years ago that podcaster was going to be a job or that playing video games is going to be a job or commentating on video games is going to be a job, you would have laughed me out of the room. Those are nonsense jobs, but yet here we are. So society will always create new jobs. Civilization creates new jobs, but it's impossible to predict what those jobs are. So the question is, how quickly is that transition happening? Well the reality is, even though everybody keeps talking about this automation apocalypse, we're at a record low unemployment. Explain that. Where's the transition? Donald Trump. That's how it... All I'm saying is, I don't see it in the numbers. I don't see it actually happening. The question is, how quickly can you retrain people? So it's an education problem. The problem with UBI, there's a couple of problems with UBI. One is, you're creating a slippery slide transfer straight into socialism. The moment people can start voting themselves money combined with a democracy, it's just a matter of time before the bottom 51 votes themselves or everything in the top 49. And by the slippery slope fallacy is not a fallacy. I know people like saying that, but they haven't thought it through. But the moment you start having a direct transfer mechanism like that in a democracy, you're basically doing it with capitalism, which is the engine of economic growth. You're also forcing the entrepreneurs out or telling them not to come here. The estimate I saw for 15K a year basic income for everybody would be three quarters of current GDP. And of course, GDP would shrink in response as all the entrepreneurs fled. So you would essentially bankrupt the country. Another issue with UBI is that people who are down in their luck, they're not looking for handouts. It's not just about money. It's also about status. It's about meaning. And the moment I start giving money to you and put you on the dole, I've lowered your status. I've made you a second class citizen. So I have to give you meaning. And meaning comes through education and capability. You have to teach a man to fish, not to basically throw your rotting leftover carcasses at him and say, here, eat the scraps. So it doesn't solve the meaning problem. And lastly, it's nonsense to hand 15K out to everybody. You want to means test people. There's no reason to give it to you and me. So you end up back towards the welfare system where you do have to figure out who knew needs it and who doesn't. So I think the better route is that we actually establish a set of basic substance services that you have to have. And we provide those in abundance to technology-based automation. So get basic housing, get basic food, get basic transportation, get high-speed internet access, get a phone in your pocket. Those are the kinds of things you want to give people. And finally, in terms of the rate of automation, I think we can educate people very quickly. One of the myths that we have today is that adults can't be reeducated. We view education as this thing where you go to school, you come out when you're out of college and you're done. No more education. Well, that's wrong. You have all these great online boot camps and coding schools coming up. They're ones that will even pay you to go there now. You can educate people en masse, and you can educate them into creative professions.