Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang's Case for UBI | Joe Rogan

Hey Joe. Welcome. Thank you. Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Sam Harris sends his regards. Yeah, Sam's a beautiful man. He is. I love that guy and he's one of the reasons why you're here. So universal basic income. This is what this is all about. Yes. Yeah, that's what my campaign for president is all about. That's a interesting like focus of a campaign and very unusual and I mean four years ago you never even thought that that would have a chance at all, but this is a subject that has been gaining momentum and It made a I made a big shift because I had my friend Eddie Wong on once and he was the first person to bring it up And my initial knee-jerk reaction was get the fuck out of here like universal basic income Just gonna give people money. They're just gonna be lazy. Nothing's ever gonna get done That's a terrible idea and then I started paying attention to the rise of AI and Automation and how many jobs are going to get taken away and then once you see the actual numbers, it's pretty staggering Yeah, and that's how I got there Joe Like I spent the last seven years running an organization that I had started called venture for America And we helped create about 3,000 jobs in Detroit Cleveland st. Louis Birmingham New Orleans other cities around the country and I saw that we're pouring water into a bathtub that has a giant hole ripped In the bottom and that for every 5 10 50 jobs that my entrepreneurs are gonna create we're gonna lose 5 10 50 thousand jobs It's not something that people intuitively suspect could be a real issue either It's it's one of the ones where you kind of have to like go shake people like hey look at this. This is coming There's a cliff we're going towards this cliff. It's it's darker still and that so when I was digging into the numbers I found that it's not this cliff that we're heading towards It's actually more of a curve that we're on what I've been telling people is that we're in the third inning now Where one of the main reasons why Donald Trump won in? 2016 is that we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs that were based in Michigan, Pennsylvania Ohio Wisconsin Missouri Iowa all the swing states he needed to win in the center of the country and a lot of that was just Manufacturing work and if you go to a factory you'll see it's a giant robot arms as far as the eye can see So it's not just that you have artificial intelligence on the horizon It's that we've been eating away at the most common jobs in the US economy For almost 20 years now, and it's just now hitting a point where it's pushing more and more unskilled men in particular out of the workforce now Are there other alternatives that you've considered other than just universal basic income like educating people about this? being a real issue and perhaps Pushing them or directing them towards other occupations. Yeah, so that that's the Recipe that most people are attracted to so I just want to unpack the numbers a little bit more So people have a sense of it I was just with a bunch of truck drivers in Iowa last week and there's a guy Dennis Bogosky that gave me a ride from Altoona to Grinnell and Iowa where I've been campaigning and The truth of it Joe is that there are three and a half million truck drivers in this country right now It's the most common job in 29 states and the average truckers a 49 year old guy with a high school education Maybe ex-military like Dennis was and they're making like fifty thousand dollars a year So then if you say hey, I'm gonna retrain half a million truck drivers for what exactly is like issue number one Right and that these guys didn't love school Thirty years ago. It's not like driving a truck has made them really excited about the idea Yeah, and then the new job you're training them for I looked into the data as to how good we were at retraining Let's say displaced manufacturing workers in the Midwest when we started decimating their jobs and we're terrible at like according to independent studies Government funded retraining programs had a success rate of between zero and fifteen percent in real life Like this is what actually happened to the workers of Michigan and Indiana and Ohio and so if you say we're gonna retrain these people then you also have to come up with a way for us to become Amazing at something that right now. We're really really bad at and if you were an employer which you are Would you rather employ a 50 year old former truck driver with health problems who got some certificate program? Well, would you rather hire a 25 year old kid who went to community college is probably cheaper has lower expectations And his skills are natively gonna be a little fresher. I mean if you were an employer you'd probably choose number two I Agree, um, but I I mean, I'm trying to look at this through rose-colored glasses I guess I'm trying to think if there's a way that these people can adapt You know, I mean some will for sure you can retrain and rescale some people But if you look at even the conversations we're having around this where people legitimately talk about retraining coal miners to be software engineers Stuff that on the face of it makes no sense But the the reason why we're stretching for that is because we're looking for some kind of retraining oriented solution When the numbers show that that's just not going to be the recipe therefore actual success And this is where this whole learn to code Controversies coming out online where people are actually getting banned for writing learn to code It's a really a hot subject on Twitter and it's very confusing too And I haven't really got an explanation for why that's such an offensive thing to say but people are getting banned Around saying learn to code it's Very weird but the idea behind it is that it's kind of preposterous to ask someone who doesn't have an education to Do something that's as difficult as code computer language Yeah, and unfortunately, we're gonna get to a point where AI can do some basic coding at a certain level So if you think about the impulse to say learn to code what it's really saying is you need to do something that the market Values. Mm-hmm. It's like hey being a truck driver The market's not going to value that much and when the truck start driving themselves in the next five to ten years So what does the market value and then people are like well coding and stem and and Engineering skills and so there's a drive to try and push people in those directions. But if you look at the numbers about 8% of American jobs right now are in stem fields like in technology engineering math, etc So you're talking about 92% of the population that is not in those fields and it's unrealistic to expect that 92% to somehow shift into the 8% right and there even be places for them Yeah, that's true, too, even if they perfectly seamlessly transition. There's too many people for those jobs Yeah so I've been driven to universal basic income in part because I've been looking at the numbers the five most common jobs in the United States right now are administrative and clerical work retail and sales food service and food prep truck driving and transportation and manufacturing Those five jobs comprise about half of all American jobs Only 32% of Americans graduate from college so the average Americans a high school grad doing one of these five jobs and if you look at it technology is already doing a number on each of these jobs like the first administrative and clerical includes call center workers and AI is in the process of Taking over that job retail and sales 30% of malls are closing in the next four years so that the danger here is to think of it as Artificial intelligence is coming. It's actually already eating up the most common jobs in our economy and it's driving Americans into distress in various ways in the numbers Now when you're talking about universal basic income to just two questions to come up how much money and where is it coming from? Yeah So first I want to say that if you look at the heritage of universal basic income It's a deeply American idea where Thomas Paine was for it at the founding of the country and then Martin Luther King was for it Milton Friedman the godfather of conservative economist was for it and One state has had it in effect for 37 years where everyone in that state gets between one and two thousand dollars a year No questions asked this Alaska. Yeah, it's Alaska and they fund it with oil money And what I'm going around telling people is that technology is the oil of the 21st century So I know you spoke to another guest about hey How do you get let's say approximately three trillion dollars a year to fund? universal basic income and The great thing is that it's well the first thing is it's not actually three trillion and the reason why it's not three trillion Is that if you look at what we're currently doing we have? We're spending about 1.5 trillion right now on 126 welfare programs and Social Security And so if you show up to someone's door and say hey Here's a dividend of a thousand dollars a month, but if you're already getting more than a thousand dollars and stuff We're not just going to stack it on top You know we're going to just going to say you're guaranteed a thousand and if you're already getting more than this Doesn't touch you you can keep your current stuff if you're getting 700 in food stamps and whatnot Then you can just get 300 on top so the three trillion actually shrinks a lot very fast Because of the fact that about half Americans are already getting various Income support from the government so the real price tag is closer to about 1.8 trillion if you say everyone who's 18 and up Now for context the entire us economy is now 20 trillion up 5 trillion in the last 12 years and the federal budget is 4 trillion So you're looking at 1.8 trillion. It's a lot of money But it's actually Manageable and one of the things that I haven't heard discussed here With you is that when you put money into people's hands the money doesn't disappear Like if I gave you a thousand bucks a month It probably would not make a big difference in the economy because it just go into your account somewhere And you know nothing would happen, but we all know that right now most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck 57% of Americans can't afford an unexpected $500 bill So you put a thousand dollars a month into their hands. It's gonna go right back into the economy They're gonna spend it on food child care Car repairs they've been putting off the occasional night out and then all of those businesses end up hiring more people And then we end up getting some of the money back as tax revenues so of the 1.8 trillion You we're gonna get back. Let's call it 400 billion in new tax receipts because everyone's gonna be spending more money We're gonna save one to two hundred billion on things like incarceration and Homelessness services and emergency room health care. I was in New Hampshire Last month and a prison guard said to me. There's a prison guard He said we should pay people to stay out of jail because we waste so much money when they're in jail Like he sees all the waste in the system So if you imagine a society where everyone's getting a thousand bucks a month That's like a it's a great incentive to try and stay out of jail because you know you stop getting it if you wind up in Jail and it Reduces recidivism because when you come out of jail at least you have you know a thousand bucks a month waiting for you And then you're less inclined to to commit a crime and head back in how much crime you think you'd actually prevent though by giving People a thousand dollars a month. I mean think most of the people that are doing crime whether it's the thievery or Assault they're not thinking this out. You know this is this is just either a way of life for them either You know they're they've got real mental issues or a pattern of behavior that they can't break I really don't think that a thousand dollars a month is gonna fix any of that I was not gonna fix all of it for sure. I mean we'll still have jails. It's not like you know silver bullet Yeah, but at the margins would it keep like that person who's Falling through the cracks and feels like they have no place in society And maybe they you know it's like the people around them are also like hey You know you don't have any value and they get a thousand bucks a month Maybe like it keeps them off at the margins and everything we're talking about is at the margins I mean everything's like this Statistical curve and you're taking the people who are let's call it like the last 10 to 20 percent But if you reduce our incarcerated population by 10 to 20 percent, I mean that's billions and billions of dollars so you You're saving money on a bunch of things we spend like about a trillion dollars on right now like healthcare incarceration homelessness services and then the the Magic is that if you have a thousand bucks a month and you're a parent so you feel this That studies have shown that your kids are healthier better nourished More likely to graduate from high school and get further education mental health improves Relationships improve domestic violence goes down Hospital visits go down and your worker productivity goes up Mean you're an entrepreneur and CEO so you know when you run a company you say I'm gonna invest in my people I'm gonna like treat them well and try and train them and give them resources because you know that'll increase your productivity as an organization In the public sector we have the opposite Approach we're like if I can just avoid spending money on you Then you know, I'm gonna somehow save money when we end up spending that money in very very dark Costly counterproductive ways in the back end because they wind up, you know In our institutions and our institutions just spend a truckload of money So if you look at the cost savings and the value gains and the economic growth That actually gets you back about a trillion dollars or the 1.8 This is like the trickle-up economy because none of the money disappears It goes right back into the economy and the way you get the last 800 billion or so is related to What we think is happening with AI and all these advanced technologies because if you look at who's gonna win with AI and? self driving cars and trucks The savings from robot trucks are estimated to be 168 billion dollars a year just from that one thing So the problem is that the American public is gonna see very little of that money Because the winners are gonna be the trillion dollar tech companies that are great at just not paying a lot of taxes They'll move it through Ireland Amazon will say didn't make any money this quarter No reason to pay taxes and so what we need to do is we need to put in a new tax that actually gets the American Public a slice of every robot truck mile Amazon transaction Facebook ad and every other industrialized country already has this tax is called a value-added tax and Because our economy is so vast at 20 trillion a value-added tax that even half the European level generates about 800 billion in new revenue And that gets you all the way there So this is much more achievable and affordable than most people think when they start unpacking how the numbers Work out so essentially it would be the biggest corporations the the companies that gain or that Have the largest revenue they're gonna be paying most of this yeah But they're gonna get some of that money back obviously because one of the things I say to the CEOs It's like if everyone in Missouri is getting a thousand bucks You know Amazon's gonna see some of that because they're just gonna buy more stuff, right? That's true for all of the big companies what I say to CEOs and I've spoken to groups of dozens of CEOs What's really bad for your business is when people don't have money to spend what's good your business is when they do So they're gonna give up some money at the top end But they're just gonna end up getting it back when their consumers end up spending a bit more And has this been actually fleshed out like the real numbers or the projections of how much they're gonna get back yeah Yeah, like the so the Roosevelt Institute studied this plan of everyone getting a thousand bucks a month and projected it would create two million new jobs And grow the economy by eight to ten percent And then you can model out what that means to each business because in that climate They're gonna see a similar uptick in revenues did they factor in all the jobs that are going to be lost? So one of the things that's a misconception about universal basic income is that? It somehow will like facilitate job loss Well for job losses though is the reason for universal basic income in the first place, right? Yeah, yeah, which we're in the midst of right now Like right now is we're sitting here together the labor force participation rate in the United States is 63% Which is the same levels as El Salvador in the Dominican Republic. That's right now like Ninety four million or so Americans have left the workforce over the last number of years now a lot of that's natural demographics A lot of that's people in school But about five million of it is unskilled men who've gotten pushed out of the workforce So so again, this is not like you know, we're gonna solve a problem That's coming down the pike like we're actually in the middle of this problem So if you put a thousand bucks a month into people's hands, it actually grows the economy and creates jobs Because of more economic activity now when you say a problem that's coming down the pike What what are the projections in terms of like the timeline? Yes so There a lot of the projections are actually pretty consistent with each other which means they're probably right. So the So Bane says you're looking at between 20 and 30 percent of jobs subject to automation by 2030 Which is pretty soon. It's like 11 years from now McKinsey says about 25% The Obama White House literally like their last day in office they issued a report saying hey guys We're gonna automate away all the jobs and then like, you know clip turn the lights off They said 83% of jobs that make less than $20 an hour will be subject to automation by 2030 MIT is saying the same thing And so we have 11 years to try and accelerate meaningful solutions and this 11 years It's not like it all happens on 2030. It's gonna happen between now and then Progressively according to all of the major institutions that have looked at this