The Bleak Impact of Automation | Joe Rogan & Andrew Yang

When you think that these jobs are gonna be automated and then universal basic income is going to supplement, it's gonna give them some money, $1,000 a month. But where do they go from there? How do people exist on $12,000 a year? What do they do? How do they adapt to this new world? Right. So, the first thing you have to do is you have to look at what lies ahead if we do nothing. The way it's gonna play out is that self-driving trucks are slowly going to start hitting the highways. Amazon's testing them out right now. The first stage is gonna be that there's a human driver just sitting there as a fail safe and the truck's gonna drive itself. Now, my friends in Silicon Valley are working on tele-operators, which is... So the trucks have right now a 98% accuracy level, which is not very high because you can't have 2% semi-trucks running into things or going up the roads. So the way they're trying to get the last percent or so is they're equipping trucks with tele-operating software, which means that a trucker, a tele-operator in Nevada or Arizona will beam into the truck and just be able to see out the front like a video game. It's like drone operating, but instead it's a truck. You beam in and then you just steer the truck and tell the computer, it's like, I got it from here and then you beam out. That's what they're working on to try and catch that last bit of uncertainty. So the innovations they're having... And again, Joe, we're talking about $168 billion a year. Like everything becomes possible when you're looking at that much money. So in the absence of anyone doing anything, the robot trucks will start reducing shifts of various truckers, I would say six to 10 years from now. And so then there'll be a bunch of reactions. Now trucking firms already have massive shortages. They can't find enough people. That's one reason why they're trying to automate this job as fast as they are because they're literally like, they're short like a couple hundred thousand truckers right now. And people don't want to go into this field for a variety of reasons. The main thing being it's like extraordinarily brutal on you physically. Very very bad for your family life too, because you're away all the time. Something like 88% of truckers have an early marker for chronic disease, like substance abuse, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, something along those lines. And now people think that the job is going to disappear in the next five to 10 years, you can't get people in. So if you play out what happens when the robot trucks start reducing shifts, then there'll be people trying to flee the field of trucking. And then if it becomes really dramatic where the robots start driving, let's say between Western Pennsylvania and Nevada, and then human beings get in in those states and then take it the rest of the way, because the robots won't be reliable enough to drive in urban areas. They'll be reliable enough to drive on an interstate where they just have to make a few decisions. Then there'll be a massive depletion of truck driving opportunities. And then in my mind, a lot of suicides, a lot of self destruction, and I don't say that lightly. I say that based upon the fact that that's what happened to the manufacturing workers, where if you unpack what happened to the manufacturing workers of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, suicide rates spiked to a point where now our life expectancy as a country has declined for the last three years because of suicides and drug overdoses. It's the first time that's happened since the great flu pandemic of 1918. We are actually coming apart as a country by the numbers. So what happened to the manufacturing workers will then happen to the truckers, but at an even more dramatic scale. So you'll see truckers going home and drinking themselves to death or doing drugs and overdosing or killing themselves. And then eventually there'll be an outbreak of violence because some truckers will say, instead of killing myself, how about I go bust up a robot truck? And there are already truckers that are doing things like blocking Tesla recharging stations and electronic vehicle battery stations because they don't like electronic trucks. Sort of. Those are pickup trucks though. Those are assholes. I mean, this is not like people doing it because they think that these Tesla recharge stations are taking jobs away. They're just being dickheads. Exactly, Joe. So if you're going to be a dickhead, even though it really has nothing to do with you, imagine when you actually think your livelihood's being threatened. Then you can see it getting revved up to a much higher level. So I'm running for president in large part because I think we need to get in front of this set of problems. We have to say, look, if we're going to save $168 billion a year, maybe some of that should go to the truckers and give them a soft landing. Maybe we should have this universal basic income where everyone feels like they're getting a thousand bucks a month, which is not a work replacement. It's not going to make their lives easy. They still need to work. But at least it takes the edge off. It takes the existential threat off. And also their kid's getting it, so they feel like, okay, my kid actually has some kind of path to the future. And it's not like if I lose this trucking job, not only am I going to struggle and suffer, but my kid will too. So my plan as president is to install a trucker transition czar and say, look, it is your job to try and manage this transition for the three and a half million truckers. And Joe, we haven't even talked about the five million Americans who work at truck stops, motels, diners, retail establishments, all the places where the truckers stop every day just to get out, eat a meal and live a life. I mean, if you imagine those communities when the trucks don't stop, there's going to be a drying up of economic vitality on a level that's unprecedented in many of these communities. This is something that I'm just becoming aware of over the last year or two. When you are out on the campaign trail and you're talking to media and you're discussing this with people, how many people have no idea that this is coming? Well, what I say to people, Joe, is I say, hey, have you noticed stores closing on your main street? And then they say yes. And then I ask them, why is that? And then they reflect for a minute. And then they say, Amazon. And I'm like, yeah, that's right. Amazon's getting $20 billion of commerce every year and is now tipping your malls and main street stores into oblivion. And is that going to get better or worse? So some people say it's like how the robots, the robots are yours away. And then you're like, no, it's not robots actually walking around your neighborhood. I mean, of course that's unlikely. But Amazon soaking up the business that used to go to your mall, if you go to their fulfillment center, it's robots as far as the eye can see. If you go to their warehouse, it's also robots as far as the eye can see. So when you ask how aware are people that this is happening, it's one of those truths that as soon as you point it out, they're like, oh, yeah, I knew that was what was up. It's just for whatever reason, I'm like the only person just laying out the facts and being like, guys, it's not your imagination. We actually are getting rid of the most common jobs in the US economy filled by high school students, and then replacing them with a handful of jobs for higher skilled people in different places. And then we're pretending that the first population is somehow going to access the new opportunities when the odds of them getting up and like moving to Seattle or whatnot and becoming a web designer or like logistics manager or big data scientist or something like essentially near zero. And so this is what gave rise to a lot of the anger that got Donald Trump elected because they looked around their communities and were like, hey, I used to work in this manufacturing plant, this manufacturing plant no longer exists. For whatever reason, like I'm being told that it's somehow like my fault that I wasn't adaptable enough. Like I didn't, you know, I didn't somehow become a coder or something ridiculous. Then I have to say, Joe, and this is like something that I've picked up from Dennis in part. So I'm with this trucker in Iowa. And he says to me, he says, like, I don't think that Democrats care about people like me. And he says that to me while I'm in his truck. And I'm just like, I can understand why he feels that way. But that's incredibly destructive. Because there's a point at which Democratic Party used to be very, very heavily aligned with working class Americans. And there's now some kind of pathology that if the person who's suffering is a white man of a certain background, then the suffering somehow was like, somehow like diminished, like it doesn't count as much if they're a trucker. And that's something that I find really destructive. It's like we have to start acknowledging the source of the problems. One thing I'm saying to people is like, look, it's not immigrants that are taking these jobs away. Like just facts. It is not immigrants. It is the fact that technology is pushing our economy in a direction that makes it harder and harder for many Americans to get by based upon this current I trade my time for money model. Now, truckers seem to be the big one, right? Yeah. Cashiers are another one. Yeah. What are the other jobs that are going to be killed by automation? So the next obvious one is call center workers. Of course. Where there are two and a half million call center workers still in the United States. Generally high school graduates that make about $14 an hour. Now, when you and I call a company, we're like pounding keys trying to get a human because the AI is so annoying. It's like, hey, just like give me a person. But over the next number of months, AI is going to become indistinguishable from a person. Yeah, like the new Google answering service that comes with the Pixel phones. It's amazing. Yes. And so that two and a half million call center population is going to shrink a ton because after you get AI software that's better than one of them, it can beat most all of them. That's not like 5,000 jobs. That's potentially 500,000 jobs. I was at a conference of CEOs and I asked how many of them are looking at having AI replace back office workers, like various clerical functions. Every single hand went up. There's going to be a lot of clerical work having systems talk to each other that's going to disappear. And one CIO type of like a major bank said that his estimate was that's about 30% of the bank's workers fall into that category. So you're looking at call center workers, you're looking at back office workers, you're looking at insurance brokers. Insurance is a very highly automatable industry because it's a lot of information getting passed back and forth. Cashiers, as you said, truck drivers, delivery drivers, Uber drivers. I heard that it goes even as far as medical procedures. There was a recent automated medical procedure where they did surgery on a grape. Yes. Yeah. You see that? Yeah, I saw that. And China's already had just a complete automated dental implantation because China actually has a real shortage of surgeons. And so their incentives to try and automate this are very, very high. Now the interesting thing here, Joe, is that let's say I made a robot surgeon tomorrow. That was awesome. Could do better work than a lot of people. Right now the economic incentives still are not necessarily for everyone to use my robot surgeon because the regulations aren't there yet in the US. And so healthcare is a really interesting one. Another one that's very clearly going to get taken up by AI is radiology and looking at tumors on a film because it turns out that AI can see shades of gray that a human eye cannot. And it can reference millions of films where the most experienced doctor can probably reference thousands. And so radiology, I'll tell you, medical students are running from radiology as fast as they can because they know that's going to get taken up by AI. Man, this is such a bleak forecast. It's very strange when we stop and think about all the different things that human beings find value in as far as their occupation, like, hey, I'm a this, I'm a that, this is what I do. And the idea that these things are all going to go away is very, it's kind of disturbing. Oh, and when I was digging into the research, Joe, it's been happening and it's tearing us apart. I mean, I referenced the fact that, so here are some things that are at all time are multi-decade highs right now in the United States of America. genocide, drug overdoses, anxiety and depression, mental problems, financial insecurity, people being unable to pay their bills, all of these things are at record highs. And one thing I know you've talked about in the past that I think you'd really find fascinating. So there's been there have been studies as to what happens to your mind when you can't pay your bills. And when you can't pay your bills, you're like stressing out like if I pay this, I can't pay that and there's like always the time money trade off. It's like, oh, if I spend extra time commuting, maybe I can save a couple bucks. And so what it does is it actually constrains your bandwidth to a point that your functional IQ goes down by 13 points or one standard deviation. So just if you say to someone, hey, here's a bill you can't pay, and then you give them an IQ test, their score actually goes down by 13 points a lot. That's like a really huge effect. And so what we're doing right now, Joe, is we're actually making our population less rational, less reasonable, more impulsive, more subject to bad ideas, nastier, more subject to things like racism and misogyny too. Because it turns out what happens with most of us is you need executive functioning to resist like racist and misogynistic impulses. And so if I make you cash strapped and make it so you can't pay your bills, you're actually more likely to be like, yeah, like blame them. So what we're talking about, again, it's not the speculative future. It's that we've been doing this for years. And it's actually pushing our population into a mindset of scarcity, of nastiness. And that's why universal basic income is so crucial, because it gets the boot off of people's throats. And it replaces the mindset of scarcity with a mindset of abundance and rationality and optimism and capacity. Like I'm an entrepreneur, you're an entrepreneur. I'll tell you, very, very few entrepreneurs start businesses out of scarcity where they're like, oh, I can't pay my bills. I guess I'm going to start a new company. Like most of them. But $1,000 a month isn't even enough money for most people to pay for their rent. Well, the great thing is, again, this thousand dollars is yours no matter what. So right now, let's say you're doing a normal job. So if you make a million dollars a year, you still get $1,000 a month. Yes, yes, you do. I mean, it's opt in. So you could opt in and take it, which most Americans would, because it's still a thousand bucks a month. Yeah, people get greedy. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. $1,000 to get my nails done. Yes. Or give it away if they were, you know, they felt like it. Yeah. Yeah. But the this. So those are the things that are like all time highs is like all these negative social indicators. Here are things that are at all time lows. Getting married, starting a business, having a kid, moving for a new job. All of those things are at historic lows in the United States of America. Having children. Really? Yeah. We're at record low birth rates right now. And it's largely because people feel too strapped to have kids. I mean, that's literally where we are. When you say record low by like what percentage? You can look up right now, Jamie, I don't know if you want to look this up. Uh, but the stories have come out over this last year saying that Americans are now at, uh, the lowest rate of childbirth that has been the case in decades or ever. Yeah. That's a conversation that I have with people whenever they say that, uh, they're worried about population, that the population is growing so fast and overpopul. Here it goes. 1.80 births per woman, 2016. What does that mean? So it's dropping from 1970 at a high to yeah. Well, it seems fairly, fairly similar from 1980 to today. Now that's still, I mean, that's actually above. If it goes from 1.8 to like, uh, if it goes from even something like 1.9 to 1.8 is like a pretty significant drop. There it is. US birth dipped to 30 or low. Fertility rates sink further below replacement level. And so you think, but the thought is that this is because of education and this is because of people are waiting longer to have children and that this is a byproduct of industrialization and modern world. And that the more educated and affluent people get, the less likely they are to have children than it's not the science. I was far as what everything I've read about it is that, that it's not a symptom of people doing poorly. It's a symptom of people doing well. You know, there, there are definitely cases where richer countries just have fewer kids. Yeah. And that's cool. Cause they concentrate on their careers, right? Is that the idea? But the, the darker part of this Joe is that right now, if you're a non-college educated, uh, person in the United States, the odds of you are ever getting married less than 50% now for the first time ever. And then people are having fewer kids to play devil's advocate though. The, the marriage thing might be people looking at it and go, God, my parents got divorced, my brother got divorced. Everybody else got divorced. What the fuck am I doing? There are a lot of good reasons for it. It's just, you know, as a, as a happily married man. Me as well. I always tell people don't do it. I tell people don't do it. It's just, it's too risky. Yeah. So, so you can look at, uh, to me, certainly to me, getting married and having kids like an act of like prosperity or optimism, there are reasons why it's going down otherwise, but if you look at things like starting a new business, I mean that being at multi-decade lows, there's like no positive spin on that. Right. People moving between States is now in multi-decade lows. Uh, people moving for a new job, multi-decade lows. Like you think this is the product of automation or it's a product of a bunch of different factors like internet purchasing and marketing and think people buying most of their goods and clothes and stuff on it's a range of factors, but one of the big problems and keep in mind, I spent seven years helping entrepreneurs grow businesses in 18 cities around the country between 2011 and 2017, that was actually my job. My job was to be the job creator guy. And so when you go out to these places, you see that the dynamism is getting sucked up by certain markets to a level that's unprecedented in our history. Like that, that the disparities between Cleveland and San Francisco or St. Louis and LA are much, much higher than they've been at any other historical period, both by the numbers and like after you actually go to the places, you're like, wow, like this is not a flourishing the way that you'd hope. Do you feel like an economic Paul Revere in a certain sense? Like the robots are coming, the robots are coming. I do. Uh, it's weird, man. Well, the comparison I make is that if the United States economy is like an elephant, you know, the parable of like the people like, you know, blind people, you know, touching the elephant. Um, so I'm, I'm an entrepreneur. I sold a company to a public company that was a national education company is based in New York. What is the parable of blind people touching an elephant? So what happens is they're, they're like seven blind men and they, they get asked like, what is the L what does an elephant look like? And then one of them is touching the trunk and is like an elephant looks like a snake. And another one's touching its leg and it's like an elephant looks like a tree trunk. Uh, so that's the way most people experience the economy is that they're like touching a part of the economy and they're like, this is what it looks like. It feels like, so I've had this really strange set of experiences where I sold a national education company to a public company. I lived bicoastally between New York and San Francisco for the last five years. I've operated in 18 cities around the country. I was a, I was an appointee in the Obama administration in DC. So I've actually seen the elephant. If you know what I mean? Like I whole elephant. Yeah. Like I'm, I'm like hanging out with, uh, the tech wizards of Silicon Valley. And I'm like, Hey, you know, we're going to automate these jobs. And they're like, Oh yeah, we're going to automate this job. Like it's, you know, so it's, it's not a mystery. And they're not bad people. It's like, Hey, it's my job to like make this work better. And if you gave me a choice between making things work better and creating abundant opportunities for the other people, I would choose that. But I do not have that choice. I have a job to do, you know, this is my job. And what I tell people is like, whose responsibility then is it to go tell the people, look, it's technology, it's transforming the economy in fundamental ways, and we need to make it so that everyone benefits. And it's not just that this like hyper concentrated set of winners and then this like huge army of, of relative losers. And it's the government's job. But at this point we've given up on our government as anything, like it can't really do anything. And so now it's no one's job. And so somehow Joe, it has become my job and it blows my mind too sometimes.