Andrew Yang: UBI Before UHI, Solving Job Loss, and the Future of Work | #236

18:39Andrew Yang:I can tell because the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have no interest in giving it back to me. But these guys do. and then you'd get millions and millions of people participating in this primary. The person that wins then gets, you know, Elon and like Daria and the rest of it being like, sure, I'm more into this than I am into that. And then we run it back. This is all on the table for 2028. Now, will all of that come together? Don't know. But certainly every piece is there.

19:11Peter H. Diamandis:Well, at the time, I mean, that last election showed how flawed the primary process is and yeah the timing is perfect for it the amount of change between here in 2028 it's going to be like nothing we've ever seen too so but i had no idea i thought you know my whole life you'd start in new hampshire then you know you trump across the country to iowa and then you i thought that was just sort of written into law somewhere but i had no idea you could just do it anyway you

19:35Andrew Yang:want a thousand percent no dave um as a matter of fact there are people that are trying to change the order right now within the DNC. And the RNC just demoted Iowa, sorry, the DNC already demoted Iowa. So you won't see Democrats going to Iowa anymore. It's carved and thrown in that it's a DNC rule that, you know, they fight over every four years. But there's no magic to it at all. And if you think about it, there are 42 states that have been on the outside looking in. And so if you were to go to them and be like, hey, guys, how would you like to actually choose who the nominee is going to be, California or wherever?

20:15Andrew Yang:They'd be like, oh, I never get to do that. Because by the time it gets to California, it's already settled. Wow. Amazing.

20:23Peter H. Diamandis:Alex, do you have any opinions in this conversation? Sure. Many. So, Andrew, first of all, fun to be chatting. I'd like to maybe start by probing on the implicit assumption that universal basic income as sort of a proxy for wealth redistribution in response to perceived technological disemployment or underemployment or unemployment is necessarily the optimal policy versus, say, one of many alternatives. In my mind, alternatives would be universal basic services where the cost of energy and health care and housing and other utilities drop to near zero or zero or are essentially available for free in the same sense that breathing air is for the most part available for free or Wikipedia access is free or nearly free.

21:15Peter H. Diamandis:So universal basic services could be as much somewhere in between free and say like an Amazon super prime that offers everything that one needs to survive for$100 per month as one possible. Which, by the way, is the subject of something called the abundance XPRIZE, $250 a month for food, housing, water, energy, bandwidth, yeah. As one possible alternative policy, call it a supply-side version versus the demand-side UBI where everyone gets STEMI checks or universal basic equity where everyone is getting dividends from, say, an Alaska or Norway-style sovereign fund. How do you reason? What's the thinking process behind UBI versus lots of other policy alternatives?

22:05Andrew Yang:I'm on all hands on deck. Any solution that improves people's lives is a win. And so right now, and I think Peter knows this, but I started a company called Noble Mobile that's trying to get Americans' wireless costs down closer to what Europeans pay. So the average American spending$83 a month on their wireless. I have a hunch that all of you are spending twice that. I was spending$150 a month on Verizon. The average European spending$35 a month, that delta of$48 a month, comes to about$600 a year for the average American. Then multiply it times all the years they're going to be a wireless customer.

22:50Andrew Yang:and the people in their household. By the way, Verizon gave its shareholders$11 billion in the last 12 months. So you have a hidden tax of about$100 billion on the American people, Alex, in terms of our wireless connectivity. And so I was inspired by what Mark Cuban did with generic drugs, where he bought generic drugs at bulk and tried to make them available to the American people at a low markup. You could frame that as universal basic services. Maybe, maybe that's not enough. But I love it. You know, if we can get energy costs down to zero, near zero, freaking sign me up. Like if you look at the cost structure of the average American household right now, it goes in this order.

23:32Andrew Yang:Number one, housing to health care, three, education, four, food, five, fuel, six, transportation, seven, entertainment and media and eight, wireless. So I think we should be trying to attack each of those. But the fact is, like, the highest line item one is housing, which, you know, like, it's relying upon local zoning ordinances and all this nonsense that it's, like, hard even for the feds to come in and say, hey, we're going to build 7 million new housing units because wealthy people get very conservative when someone's trying to build an affordable housing complex in their neighborhood. So I'm totally down with trying to attack the cost structure at every turn.

24:20Andrew Yang:And, you know, you identified fuel, which is, you know, on the list at like, you know, but it's not the main thing for Americans. If we can get housing and health care and like hopefully education under control, then, you know, then you'd be making real progress.

24:40Peter H. Diamandis:But maybe just to press on that point a bit, so for housing, healthcare, and education, there's an alternative universe perhaps where we create an overabundance of supply rather than juicing demand with stimulus checks. So in your mind, how would you morally wait, say, creating special economic zones where housing is overabundant, filled with skyscrapers, or where healthcare is driven to zero with effectively municipality-level AI, or education is purely AI, basically trying to solve this perceived problem from the supply side with overabundance rather than from the demand side with stimulus?

25:22Andrew Yang:I'm all for it. I just think that right now, if you say, hey, which is going to be faster, I have more confidence in our ability to transfer money into people's bank accounts very, very quickly than I do designing some of the solutions you're talking about. It's not one or the other, right? Yeah, it's not one or the other. And even if you were to have like the permits today to build the skyscrapers and like the place, I mean, you're talking about realistically months or years. And that's if everything were magically in place.

25:55Peter H. Diamandis:Yeah, Elon's point was we're going to have humanoid robots that will be able to build you whatever you want at the cost of basically energy and raw materials. And AI will deliver us health and education. And in fact, AI will become your shadow worker for you, go earn the revenue for you. So we can get into that. Salim, you were going to add. Yeah, two things. I think the UBS, the most constructive thing I've heard about the UBS commentary. Universal basic services. Is the channels aren't burned in, right? I think Andrew makes a valid point that if we want to just give money, it's the easiest model.

26:28Peter H. Diamandis:And on the affordability and how much do you think the best framing I've seen is you give people enough to survive but not be happy. And then you still have a very thriving economy, jobs, et cetera. Entrepreneurship explodes under this model. One, just an observation, in the 1970s, Manitoba in Canada, the province, gave a UBI out and they implemented this program and it was staggeringly successful. And after two years, they realized, oh my God, they don't even need government to exist if we have this instance. And they canceled it instantly because government wants to exist. And that's the immune system.

27:04Peter H. Diamandis:I think that's the most difficult part about this is that if you implement it properly, you can get rid of a lot of government services, let the market take care of it. But that's a very hard jump for governments to make.

27:16Andrew Yang:I would really enjoy that. And one of the things that made me sad when I was campaigning was that like there was a woman in Iowa who said, hey, I'm afraid to volunteer in my community because I might lose my disability check because I'm afraid someone might see me walking around and that I'm healthy. And so I don't. I stay in. And I was like, well, that's really depressing. I think everyone can agree that her showing up to the church bake sale is a win for both her and the people. So there's a lot of bad incentives in this system, a lot of paternalism, a lot of stuff that makes people feel like they're subject to the bureaucracy of government in a way that's really stilling even the most basic forms of entrepreneurship.

28:08Peter H. Diamandis:Andrew, I think your answer is right on target because the timelines, the small timeline differences are going to matter a lot. job loss is a 2026 thing and then have a huge 2027 thing. And then building, you know, low income housing is a multi-year, just getting it approved is a very long, slow process. So you're going to have rampant social unrest during that two year window if we don't do something quick. So giving out STEMI checks is quick. I also think that subsidizing employment, The problem with stimulus checks is when you pay somebody to not work, they lose the work motivation very, very quickly.

28:46Peter H. Diamandis:And we saw that during COVID. So another very quick thing is subsidizing employment where the government says, look, if you find new productive things for people to do that are AI oriented and that have a long-term future, the government will subsidize half that payroll or three quarters of that payroll. But put it back in the hands of the private sector to decide how to use people subsidized by the government. There's also the public works, right, where the government basically takes on large, massive projects and employs people to do those things. Yeah, but put the, you know, like the Cape Cod Canal to me was a massive public works project with one boat a day and 10 million cars trying to get over the bridges.

29:23Peter H. Diamandis:Just like you created a huge hole in the ground that is more of a problem than a solution. So you don't want the government to decide it. You want to put that back into the private sector saying, hey, creators, you know, find something really useful to do. you know, Amazon, find something really useful to do. We'll just partially subsidize it during this turbulent, you know, window. And then Alex is, so Dave, you're describing Canada, because in Canada, they do a lot of this where they subsidize, but the problem is they put so many rules and procedural barriers, it becomes nonsensical to try and get it.

29:58Peter H. Diamandis:So that's the problem there. Alex, over to you. Yeah, I think there's another potential interesting model that we've started to discuss on this pod a bit over the past few episodes that looks maybe a little bit like what we're seeing with data centers that are being compelled or are opting into subsidizing electric infrastructure construction because they're becoming increasingly the largest consumers of the supply of available power. And one can imagine a near future, a very near future, where data centers and the hyperscalers and frontier labs behind them are essentially subsidizing to the point of offering for free electricity to consumers that can then consume from the same infrastructure that the hyperscalers are building for their own consumption.

30:47Peter H. Diamandis:So I guess maybe to put that in question form, Andrew, going back to UBI versus UBS versus universal basic equity versus whatever is behind door number four, What do you think of the possibility that as superintelligence is driving an overabundance of supply, that what we see is some sort of basically shadow UBI or shadow UBS, wherein as we're seeing, again, with data center builders being asked to subsidize infrastructure consumption, we see the hyperscalers being asked to subsidize universal basic services or income for personnel, for consumers, for municipalities in their general area.

31:34Andrew Yang:Yes, I think that's in the portfolio, Alex, of things that could be helpful solves. I want to underscore just how far along in this process we are. I mean, you all remember when the healthcare CEO was shot in the street and then his killer is lionized. And that was X months ago. I think things just continue to deteriorate where young people today – and this pains me. I was just speaking to a group of CEOs yesterday. It's like young people now regard a lot of successful people as bad. And you look at that and be like, wait a minute. Like that's obviously like a very troubling characterization where, you know, it's like, oh, anyone who's done well must have stepped on people or done something negative or malignant.

32:32Andrew Yang:And so we're, you know, you can characterize what inning we're in of the deterioration. But it's one reason why Dave said it's like, oh, yeah, like we got to move fast. I think we really have to move as quickly as we can because the anger is rising and the anger is getting refracted through our two-party system in various ways. So on the left, it's like, OK, capitalism bad, socialism good. The average age of a first-time homebuyer is like 40 years old now. So if you're 28, you're out of luck. You're going to get a college degree that is valueless. The unemployment rate for recent college grads is now over 50%.

33:09Andrew Yang:You're going to be at home with your parents. You still owe these loans. Like the anger is really, really high and rising. And then on the right, it's taking this other form, this kind of reactive, like hyper genderizing of various like roles and conversations and things that also don't, in my mind, you know, of like solve the problem. And so I'm all about trying to get there as quickly as we can, even recognizing that people are going to slip through the cracks. Like even if we were to do a lot of good things like that, there's I mean, this is where Elon's I predict universal high income and social unrest.

33:59Andrew Yang:It's like the unrest is unfortunately much closer than we'd like to think.

34:04Peter H. Diamandis:Andrew, let me throw out an idea that I've been focused on and trying to work on solutions, which is we have a new pandemic coming. And this is a emotional pandemic of fear and anger that it's going to be spreading, especially due to increased uncertainty and concerns over social unrest. And we need to find some vaccination mechanism, if you would, to protect us against that growing. Because the future is a terrible place to face from a position of fear. I'm going to move us to a conversation around jobs. This is –

34:43Andrew Yang:Peter, I have a joke for you. Okay. To lighten the mood a little bit. Sure. So I was a CNN contributor. And a number of years ago, they pitched me a TV show called The Future Of with Andrew Yang. It was going to be like the future of healthcare, the future of transportation. And then they ran focus groups and said, hey, bad news, Andrew, people don't like the future. So now everyone listening to your podcast loves the future, embraces the future, trying to make it work for them.

35:12Peter H. Diamandis:And this is something we're going to be announcing at the Abundant Summit. I don't know when we're going to particularly air this episode. But we are, you know, one of the biggest concerns is people's vision of the future is dystopian. Why? Because Hollywood paints every future scenario as killer robots and dystopian AI. So if that's the future you've learned, why would you want Ex Machina or Black Mirror or Terminator? And we need to paint better versions of the future. We need visions that are more Star Trek. As Elon said on the pod that Dave and I did with him, we need more Roddenberry and less Cameron in that regard.

35:49Andrew Yang:I used to have a slide, Peter, saying it's either Star Trek or Mad Max.

35:53Peter H. Diamandis:and you kind of veer towards one or the other. Yeah, we have these two futures in superposition and we need to collapse the waveform in one of those directions. To Alex's point, they were speedrunning all science fiction points. I think they are both happening. And also I want to reach for some sort of Strauss-Howe generation hypothesis type theory that it's cyclical with some timescale of 80 years. Like somehow after World War II, tail fins are getting added to cars in the 50s and 60s. and people were reading the golden age of science fiction, but now people are watching Lord of the Rings and fantasy rather than science fiction.

36:30Peter H. Diamandis:Fantasy is completely overwhelming science fiction words if you look at trends over time. I guess maybe, Andrew, to put that in question form, how much of generational pessimism do you think is actually generational? How much of it is cyclical versus periodic trends that'll just, people will eventually cycle back to optimism after something bad has happened?

36:51Andrew Yang:Well, I'm a numbers guy, Alex. And one of the numbers that really haunts me is that young people socialize and get together about 50 % less than we all did in our 20s. And I see gatherings as optimistic events. Like even if you decide to have a little party at your house, you have to assume that people will want to come. You have to assume that they'll like your food. You have to assume that, you know, your house can accommodate them. You know, they won't trash the place. And so to me, like you could go hand in hand with like in real life social gatherings and how good people are going to feel.

37:33Andrew Yang:And right now, unfortunately, we're getting together less and less.

37:37Peter H. Diamandis:Yeah. All right. I am going to move this conversation towards jobs. So here is a comment from the co-founder of Morning Brew, Austin, who says, My friend who works at a large PE firm said, quote, we just had a firm-wide meeting about how we don't need associates anymore. That's the first slide, first topic. Second one here, the Fed Governor Waller highlights unusual growth without jobs. Historic anomaly where GDP is expanding while labor market is fragile. GDP grew 1.4 % in Q4 of 2025 despite the weakest job creation since 2022. And the third story here to weave in comes from Jack Dorsey. It's got to be Block.

38:23Peter H. Diamandis:Yeah, so Block, his company shares were 24 % after 4 ,000 employees got laid off. So this is what Wall Street rewards, higher profitability from lower costs. So let's paint this picture of the growing loss of jobs. There's a lot of conversation out there from other people in the tech community saying, no, no, no, we're going to increase the number of jobs. I think people get confused about entry-level jobs versus more advanced jobs. Andrew, how do you think about all this?

38:56Andrew Yang:I talked to CEO of a publicly traded tech company, and he said, unannounced, he said, we're going to fire 15 % of our workers. And then two years from now, we're going to fire another 20%. And then two years after that, we're going to fire another 20%. He's like, after that, don't know. And I take him at his word. I mean, especially after this block illustration, where CEOs are going to have to be ruthless on headcount, if they want to keep their own jobs, and if they want their stock to be healthy. I will also say something kind of bleak and negative. But if you've been inside one of them, then you'll tell us a joke.

39:36Andrew Yang:Yeah, and then I'll tell you a joke. But if you've been inside one of these large corporations, you kind of sense instinctively that 40 % of the people aren't really indispensable, shall we say. Because I've worked in startups. And in startups, even in startups, not everyone's indispensable all the time.

40:04Peter H. Diamandis:But there's a much more of a culture of finding problems and solving problems in a company versus laying back.

40:13Andrew Yang:Oh, yeah. And I mean, it's one reason why I love startups so much. I find them to be pure utilization of the soul, like energy, talent, optimism, et cetera. So I think publicly traded companies are going to fire white collar workers very, very quickly. And the easiest people to fire are the people you haven't hired yet. So they're not going to hire a bunch of whippersnappers. And that's showing up in the numbers where the college premium is quickly evaporating. I do think that these changes are going to apply to small private companies too. I'll use Noble Mobile as an example. We were hiring junior engineers or trying to for the last several months.

40:59Andrew Yang:And then our CTO came and said, hey, I don't think we need to hire for that role because the AI tools are now good enough. Like if you have like a strong managerial type, the comparison I make is that you used to have pyramids. And someone said I would hire three juniors for every senior. And then now you have columns, maybe. So you have like a senior and then one junior and you're good. And so if you're a young person, then you never make it into one of these environments to get trained and learn and develop and ascend. And so that's one of the things that's going to be driving the despair is that for all these young people that thought the way I did, probably you all did too, get good grades, get into a good school, get a good job, have a good career.

41:55Andrew Yang:That's a social contract. Yeah, like the steps three and four are going to be harder and harder to find.

42:02Peter H. Diamandis:And that's going to cause a lot of anger. If I can't get a job, can't get a house, can't get a wife or a husband and can't have a family, that is what causes social unrest and anger towards those tech companies or those investors that made that future, destroyed the American dream that we had. So let's bring it back. Jack, what's the advice for someone in college today or someone, a junior, senior in high school? What's the new strategy? We've talked on this pod a lot because we're all entrepreneurs, as are you, that entrepreneurship is ultimately the future career. It's not working for somebody else.

42:41Peter H. Diamandis:It's working for yourself. That's what I would like for my kids. It's not cut out for everybody. What advice are you giving people?

42:48Andrew Yang:You know, it's similar, Peter, in that the only career path you can rely on is entrepreneurship. and owning your own future and path. But a lot of people aren't cut out for that. And I'm actually going to look at my two boys, one of whom is 13, one of whom is 10. One of them is definitely not cut out for that. You know, and so you're trying to guide people on a path that isn't going to be right for, in my opinion, 80 % of people, because entrepreneurship is really, really difficult. And so one thing I say to parents is the success factors for our kids are the same as they ever were. It's grit, it's perseverance, it's coachability, it's sociability, it's caring about something, it's hustle, it's believing that your efforts can actually pay off.

43:38Andrew Yang:One of the single biggest factors in whether your kids have those attributes is screen time. Like you give them too much screen time and their self-control goes down, their ability to focus goes down, all this stuff. So the shorthand for parents is try and keep your kids off of screens and social media to the extent you can and try and train them to be an awesome ass-kicking human being regardless of circumstances. And then they'll have a chance knowing that their course of study might not matter. That's like the big thing is to be like, look, you know, to the extent your course of study matters, it's just like it's how to think, how to approach things, how to care about, you know, learning and development.

44:25Andrew Yang:But the actual subject matter, it could be anything. And knowing too, that to the extent that some of our kids can be channeled towards the trades and jobs that we're going to need because, you know, the simplest examples I use is, and Elon might disagree with me, but like, you know, I'm pretty confident I'm right. We're not going to have a robot plumber anytime soon. We're not going to have a robot HVAC repair person anytime soon. Like all of the old buildings will still need electricians of which there's a massive shortage. So if you have like a young person who might be handy, and let's say they're a guy, you know, like it's not a bad thing.

45:08Andrew Yang:I mean, you know, You skip the indebtedness. You skip a lot of things. This is awesome.

45:13Peter H. Diamandis:So all the women become entrepreneurs and all the men become plumbers. What was the gender angle there, Andrew? That's great.

45:18Andrew Yang:Well, it's just that it's more likely for a man to pursue some of these trades statistically. And what we've done is we've stigmatized the trades for everybody. And then we should be saying to men in particular, trades are cool. Really good, solid, steady job. Like, don't worry about it.

45:39Peter H. Diamandis:If you're a data center builder, you have a hell of a future right now. So there's all sorts of areas that you could apply this. Yeah. The question of when an optimist or pick your favorite robot is able to do that. Yeah. Elon's vision is, you know, next three years, even if it's eight years, right? I mean, the progress we're seeing in robotic software and robotic agility and progress is stunning. What we've seen in a year.

46:04Andrew Yang:Data centers, yes. I can see robots building them. in some foreseeable time frame. Plumber, no. It's just that because the human is just going to have an easier time knocking on your door being like, hey, what's the problem, coming in, doing the thing. Can we talk time frames, Andrew? Yeah, please.

46:22Peter H. Diamandis:When I think about the time frames here, the challenging time frame where UBI stimulus checks capital into to sort of quelch the fear and uncertainty is like the one to three year timeframe, you know, bringing universal basic services, I think is, you know, starts coming in maybe in three years to the five, eight year timeframe, right? I've always viewed that, you know, the challenges are the next three to eight years. And then on the backside of that is abundance where people have access to everything they need. Do you agree with that timeframe, that layout?

47:04Andrew Yang:Peter, I love your timeframe, because it's actually very, very optimistic. You know, I mean, you're talking to the preeminent proponent of UBI. And if you're like, yeah, UBI next one to three years, I would take it 100 times out of 100. You know what I mean? Like, even as I'm the guy who's saying, like, we should do this, and it's totally possible. So I hope you're right. I hope we end up heading down this road over the timeline you laid out. Because the truth of it is that, and this is like the Buckminster Fuller quote, that the race between utopia and dystopia will be decided at like the very last moment kind of thing that, you know, that there's like a race on.

47:48Andrew Yang:And the dystopian march is going on along in a pretty nice clip, shall we say. And then the utopian march, it's like fits and starts in my view. But it's one reason why I would urge people who have the capacity to do more, to do what they can, to do what we can. because like utopia is like a deliberate choice and it's going to require like a group of innovators like you all and the folks that we collectively know to do what we do and build.

48:27Peter H. Diamandis:But maybe, Andrew, just to press this point, what is your expectation regarding the timeline for humanoid robots making themselves available for plumbing services to the broad American public?

48:38Andrew Yang:Oh, so again, I don't foresee robot plumbers for quite some time because the home environment is like, you know, especially like a home you haven't been in, like the rest of it. It's like, you know, you'd rather send a human and the human's not that expensive in that context. Whereas like a data center, the whole thing is controlled and controllable. And then, you know, like you'd have humans still in there, but like you'd also have a ton of robots. And I think people sense that.

49:06Peter H. Diamandis:Can I persuade you to put a number to the not for some time? Is it like 10 years that you think we get humanoid robot plumbers? 20 years? What's the precise timescale you envision?

49:17Andrew Yang:I think human plumbers are safe for at least 10 years and probably significantly longer.

49:26Peter H. Diamandis:Wow. Well, isn't that then the solution to, in your mind at least, to technological disemployment? Let's just ramp up the trades and the trades will absorb the excess of so-called white-collar surplus. Why isn't that the solution?

49:38Andrew Yang:Oh, it's part of it, Alex. And unfortunately, there's going to be a lot of competition for those jobs. But the numbers don't work out, to your point. It's like you have a certain number of plumbers per capita, and then you can't have 10x that number.

49:55Peter H. Diamandis:But look at the sectors with Balmol's cost disease, like health care. Like, why can't everyone have one or not everyone, but the wealthiest portion of the society, and this is a thought experiment, this isn't a policy prescription, have like one or two personal health care assistants as one of several classes or, you know, personal plumbers, personal assistants, and absorb the labor surplus that way.

50:20Andrew Yang:You're certainly going to see a significant proportion of Americans whose job it is to serve the top layer, the top 20%. You're going to see nannies. You're going to see personal assistants. You're going to see personal trainers. You do now. But I will say, if you look at home health care aids as a profession, the turnover is rampant because it's very difficult isolating work and the average compensation is$35 ,000 a year for a home health care aid. So if you say, hey, that's going to be the job of the future, like none of the people listening to this right now want to be a home health care aide.

50:56Andrew Yang:Like it's, you know, in one of my jokes in one of my books was like, I was a home health care aide for one day and I wanted to tap out, you know? And so if you were to ask like millions of people, be like, hey, bathe grandma. And that's what you're going to do is like your job forever. Like, you know, it's very, very few people are cut out for that. then the people that are doing it right now often are doing it because it's the only job on offer.

51:20Peter H. Diamandis:They have to do it. Yeah. Hey, Andrew, you had a book come out last month. Tell us about it. And I love the title of it.

51:30Andrew Yang:I'm sure it's very aptly named. Hey, Yang, where's my thousand bucks? You can see the image. It's me with some money. The alternate title, you'll enjoy even more. It's, Hey, am I racist? Or are you Andrew Yang? Oh, no. So what's the book about? The book's about the ins and outs of trying to make utopia happen over this last number of years. And I sensed that this was going to be kind of a fraught time. So I wanted to write something light hearted and humorous, while also trying to get some ideas across. So it was a really fun process a lot easier than writing my other nonfiction books. Um, and I'm happy to say people are enjoying it.

52:16Andrew Yang:So if, if you're, if you want like a laugh, that'll make you think, um, I think it's a good choice.

52:22Peter H. Diamandis:You know, Andrew, you're going to be joining us at the abundance summit, uh, this coming Sunday. Excited. Can you bring a couple of books with you?

52:29Andrew Yang:Um, I, I think I'll have a whole crate or your team might already order the crate. Oh, great. Then I'm so happy we did, you know, but have, uh, yeah, thank you. I every, By the way, this is funny. Peter, have you written a book? I have. Yeah, so then you know. And I sense maybe the rest of you have too. But if you want to prey on someone when they're vulnerable, get to them when they have a book coming out. Because then they're just like, oh, I have all your thoughts. You know, I wrote them down. If you're like, I want to hear your thoughts, then they'll be like, ooh, someone wants to hear my thoughts.

53:05Andrew Yang:It's like a very vulnerable time.

53:06Peter H. Diamandis:Alex is bringing 600 copies of Solve Everything, which is a book slash paper that we co-authored mostly under Alex's Genius. So excited for both of your works of art and intelligence to make it there.

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53:50Peter H. Diamandis:Blitzy delivers 80 % or more of the development work autonomously, while providing a guide for the final 20 % of human development work required to complete the sprint. Enterprises are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI-native SDLC into their org.

54:16Andrew Yang:Ready to 5x your engineering velocity? Visit Blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today.

54:25Peter H. Diamandis:I want to take us forward to a tweet you sent out that went viral, which is the end of the office. AI will replace large numbers of white-collar jobs in 12 to 18 months, 20 to 50 percent of 70 million U.S. office workers could be displaced. what happens to all of this real estate? We saw this over COVID take a sharp hit, and now a double tap to the head. Yeah.

54:54Andrew Yang:So if you play out block times 10 ,000, not to say there are 10 ,000 blocks, because there aren't. But there are going to be private companies, again, making choices that are quite similar. And so you're going to have fewer workers who head to an office, you're going to have commercial districts under tremendous pressure, which we did see under COVID. You're going to have folks questioning the value of a college degree because there's not like a high paying corporate job waiting for you on the other side. And it's going to get nasty and dark. And I do rely upon some of my friends who are more normal than I am.

55:35Andrew Yang:So what do I mean by that? It's like one friend, my age, I'm 51 now. And one of my jokes is like, I'm lucky not to get dumber in any given month, where while AI just gets, you know, twice as smart. So like, eventually, we just have to raise our hands and say, you know what, like, asking us all to compete against AI is probably not going to work out. But my friend is, is 50 years old, has three kids, has a mortgage, has a corporate job at a bank. And, and he was recently laid off. And so then like, what's the next move for him? You know, and so I've been very encouraging. But that's the kind of place I turn to see like, what is the by the way, he's got a college degree, you know, six figure job, like, you know, educated pillar of the burbs.

56:30Andrew Yang:And, and then you imagine him losing his job, and then not being able to find another one that pays in the same, and then how that plays out in his town and the surrounding suburbs where some people are going to start selling their houses. And one of the things I put in this note, which it was not just a tweet, it was a blog post that went somewhat viral at like I have a sub stack. I said, you might want to put your home up for sale first because you don't want to be last. If you live in Westchester County or some of the peninsula suburbs, people are going to be selling. So if you can get a reasonable price at the front of the line, you'd much prefer that than trying to wait until later.

57:17Peter H. Diamandis:Everything starts unwinding. And of course, one quick follow on there. We've seen, in fact, the bankruptcy rate in colleges start to skyrocket. right because who wants to get that much of a you know debt and like you said the majority the highest the group with the highest unemployment rate is college graduates yeah yeah you're starting

57:44Andrew Yang:to see um debt delinquency rates rise mortgage delinquency rates rise like the the personal financial distress is uh is ratcheting up uh and you know we you've probably seen a lot of the stats where, you know, significant proportions, call it half of Americans have limited savings, living essentially paycheck to paycheck. Like I know people who resemble this, who are college grads who have had, you know, multi decade long careers who I think are doing great. And then I like have coffee or dinner with them. And then you'd like press a little bit and they're super stressed because they borrowed money to send their one kid to college.

58:22Andrew Yang:And I was like, oh my gosh, Like I thought you were – it just goes to show too. I mean it's like I'm not normal. You guys are not normal. Most of the people listening to this are not normal. Like if you hang out with normal Americans, it's like a real splash of water. And so you're seeing the distress pick up by the numbers. You can look at any of like the credit card rates, like all that stuff. Like people are less and less able to meet their obligations, financial or otherwise.

58:55Peter H. Diamandis:Don't you think, though, Andrew, this whole notion of a life path or career path where you go to college and then you graduate and you get a so-called white-collar job and then you have a stable life in suburbia or whatever the cliche is, is such a modern invention? humanity has existed for thousands of years prior to any notion of everyone goes to college and everyone sits in yeah hundreds of depending on how you count uh sits in commercial real estate at a desk job and does some stuff moves papers around and then goes home commutes back and forth this is such a modern 20th 21st century invention that's in some sense evolutionarily highly unnatural for people to be spending their time on this anyway and that in some sense it would be far better, at least more ergonomic for most people to be doing something other than this like really cliched life story?

59:48Andrew Yang:You know, Alex, I agree that it's something of a modern invention that's about to get uninvented. You know, the problem is that all of these people came of age and made life decisions based upon something that was true during their lifetime that's going to become untrue. And so, again, I'd put you in the shoes of either a young person or a parent trying to decide, am I going to go to college? And it's like, well, shoot, like traditionally going to college, I mean, I'm going to guess all of us went to college, just to guess. And so then...

1:00:26Peter H. Diamandis:Alex has like a half dozen degrees.

1:00:28Andrew Yang:Yeah. And so then, you know, so if someone comes to you and says, hey, guess what, that entire path got de-invented. So, um, like figure it out. Um, then are you going to pivot at age 17, 18, or if you were a parent of a 17, 18 year old, are you going to say, Hey, guess what? All that stuff's obsolete. And I wrote a, another sub stack post about like, is college still worth it? Being honest, being like, look, my kids are going to college almost certainly unless they become savant entrepreneurs or shut-ins. Um, but part of it is that I can afford it. And to me, them going to college is about this social development as much or more than it is the vocational.

1:01:10Andrew Yang:Building a network. And adult daycare. Yes, that's what I said, Alex. I said my strongest memory of going to Brown was my college girlfriend leaving me for another guy and then being sad for a semester or two. And so my major learning from Brown was how to deal with a breakup, which I'm going to suggest is a very important life skill. It served me very well.

1:01:32Peter H. Diamandis:On the other hand, simulating a breakup at the tender age can probably be afforded at a much lower cost than brown tuition. Probably.

1:01:42Andrew Yang:But again, like, you know, we're in a circle where, you know, like, and I was honest. It's like, look, I'm not going to be, because I think it's disingenuous to be like, hey, don't do the thing that my kids are totally going to do. Like, you know what I mean? It's like, I was honest, like, look, my kids are going to go to college. And like, like, so, but it's just a much worse value proposition for most families than is being sold to them. And so, like, both of those things are true. So, that's really what, you know, I'd like to suggest to folks is that, you know, it's like these paths are still going to be there and lots of people are going to take them.

1:02:19Andrew Yang:They're just not going to lead to as steady ground.

1:02:23Peter H. Diamandis:I'm going to move us to another fun and important subject. We've sort of danced around this, which is the impact of AI on youth and on populations. So here we go. Population decline in China is extraordinary. China's birth rate reported at 75-year low. This demographic shift is fueling a trend in particular because AI is being seen as a partner option. Young women in China are opting for AI boyfriends, seen as a real alternative to a life partner. You don't have to deal with your boyfriend's snarky attitude. And one in eight teens are seeking emotional support from AI chatbots. 64 % of teens use chatbots, 12 % of them for emotional support.

1:03:12Peter H. Diamandis:Andrew, thoughts on this?

1:03:15Andrew Yang:Yeah, one of my kids resembles this where he doesn't interface very readily with other people generally. And so he already is joking about having an AI girlfriend. And then his mom and I are like, no, no, real girlfriend.

1:03:34Andrew Yang:And then he's like, nah, AI. Your AI girlfriend will not leave you. Yeah, so this trend is playing out in my household. This is part of my sadness for the death of partying. Because if you're at home on your screen, it's hard to meet a girl. and easy to meet an AI chatbot because AI chatbot's right there. So I see this trend, unfortunately, growing more and more, and I wish it were otherwise. Yeah. Other comments, Jen?

1:04:12Peter H. Diamandis:Well, so I have to, I guess, press on the point. Andrew, it sounds like in some sense you're concerned about it using, I think Peter's language, a growing abundance or overabundance of romance. It's artificial romance, but it's an abundance of romance nonetheless. At the same time, I look to China. There's this notion in China of, I think it's pronounced Tong Ping, lying flat, where due to pressures of society, many youth are, again, sort of the cliche, but choosing to opt out of the so-called rat race and instead staying home. as shut-ins or in Japan, the hikikomori, again, similar concept. But isn't this in some sense a reflection of an abundance of entertainment and artificial romance?

1:05:01Peter H. Diamandis:And in that sense, why wouldn't you reasonably expect that as we achieve abundance, if you think we're going to achieve abundance in other sectors as well, not just sort of the personal lifestyle type sectors, that, again, we come back and have this conversation, and now we're drowning in abundance in all these other areas. And, you know, I, Andrew, I'm encouraging my children to stay away from abundance because I want them to work hard and experience a traditional, in some sense, scarcity-based lifestyle.

1:05:33Andrew Yang:You know, the word that popped into my mind, Alex, is friction. I'm married, have been for 15 years, and it's far from frictionless. I mean, now, the AI chatbot is there and ever present and ever supportive and all that stuff. And so you have to have a tolerance for a certain degree of friction to get married and have a family. And these are things that I see as positives on multiple levels. I see them as positives personally. I see them as positives societally. I see them as positives for the species. You know, I think reproducing is a good thing. And it's, you know, to be a husband and father and the rest of it or, you know, wife and mother.

1:06:24Andrew Yang:I mean, you just have to put up with a lot of bullshit. And our young people, you know, I think are not used to putting up with tons of bullshit like in their entertainments and interactions. And I talk about my college girlfriend. I mean, you have like a lot of false starts and like trial and error and be like, oh, I like I like this sort of person. Like, oh, maybe that that, you know, it's and so that's what I want for my kids. That's what I want for other people's kids, too. I want them to be out there meeting other real life flesh and blood humans, having misadventures and adventures and then eventually settle down, have a family, have kids.

1:07:05Andrew Yang:I don't think that's going to be easy at all. I think what we're talking about now with work, for men, if you don't have a steady paycheck and path and you don't feel good about yourself and then you don't think you're worthy of partnering. And by the way, some women might agree with you.

1:07:24Peter H. Diamandis:This is such a gender. I mean, just like note for the record, it seems like a somewhat gendered vision for the role of post-scarice economics. One last question, if I may. I'm curious about the, neither the quote unquote man nor the quote unquote woman, but the AI side. So do you have a position or does the forward party, I guess, have a position on AI personhood? Should the AIs have a say or rights in this entire discussion?

1:07:52Andrew Yang:Right now I'm pre-AI personhood, but I'm open-minded.

1:07:58Peter H. Diamandis:Salim, I want to go to you on this subject of AI companionship in youth. You know, the dropping birth rate is not just China. It's Japan's an all-time low. South Korea, much of the world other than Africa and parts of India is massive decline. But, you know, you and I both have boys at age 14. How do you think about AI and in normal relationships? So keep taking into account that I have a radical positivity bias in my view of the world, right? I think people will adapt. When we were growing up, our parents were like, oh, my God, you're on the phone nonstop. That phone's going to be stuck to the ear.

1:08:40Peter H. Diamandis:You don't know how to communicate with anybody else or socialize. It was the same conversation, but something is a bit different now. We saw a photograph. We sent our son to kind of hang out with his friends, and he sent back a photograph of a dark basement with six kids sitting independently on their phones. And all you could see was their cell phones not talking to each other at all. And we're like, oh, my God, this was a driving lily to do this teenager mindset workshop that she's doing. Andrew, I think you dropped some really deep wisdom there. You know, a lot of the reason we get married is to work out our deepest issues and bring the biggest trauma that we have to the surface and process it in that intimacy of a marriage over a number of years.

1:09:22Peter H. Diamandis:and if we stop having that type of a relationship as adults then that burden of processing that will go to somewhere else and so this is going to be an interesting evolution to see where this goes it could be that ai processes that and is able to do that but that visceral human experience partying uh falling in love going through that hassle etc is the essence of all of this i for years was convinced I wouldn't get married and wouldn't have kids. When I got married, about half the people came just to physically witness the fact that it was actually happening. But the grounding and the reality of being a human being that it brings you to deal with a spouse and deal with kids and deal with the process they're all going through and watching that is such a powerful one.

1:10:16Peter H. Diamandis:I can't imagine now not doing that, right? And so what does it look like if somebody marries an AI and then just switches AIs over time, etc. We'll just have to adapt to that.

1:10:28Andrew Yang:That's what we tell our son. It's like, look, AI girlfriend can't have kids. Unacceptable. You know, need grandkids. Reprogram.

1:10:36Peter H. Diamandis:Need grandkids reprogram. Or no college tuition for you. We don't go that far. So pro-natalism and also pro-UBI. Yeah, yeah. Guilty. Andrew, I am curious, given this program here, our focus is one of the top, if not the top, AI and exponential tech podcast out there. It isn't about politics. It's about technology typically. But given the fact that we have you and the Forward Party, the American Party, whatever it might be, I'm curious about your thoughts here on this particular article. So pro and anti-AI regulation groups are amassing a war chest for lobbying, right? A war chest of$265 million.

1:11:22Peter H. Diamandis:Lobbying spent by AI companies surged 200 % in the last 24 months. $170 million were contributed to the 2024 election cycle. Your thoughts on this topic here?

1:11:36Andrew Yang:Yeah, I'm not really seeing the money from the anti-AI groups. I see a lot of money from the NBA. They're typically not very rich. Yeah, right. Exactly. But by the way, the folks who are dubious of AI, those ranks grow every day. And the polling, let's say if you were to ask a basic question like, hey, should AI be more regulated than it is? That gets 80%. And one joke is that there are more regulations to open a hot dog stand on the streets of New York, definitely New York, than there are of launching like a large language model. Now, all the money is on the other side. And if you had a, like in my mind, a nuanced intelligent conversation, you could be like, okay, guys, we want to do this.

1:12:26Andrew Yang:We don't want to do that. But like right now, there's this massive divide between what the companies want. And the companies want what companies want. The companies want, look, we just want to do what we want. Like stay out of our way. We're just going to do what we want. And then the vast majority of elected officials are right there with them because this is where all the money and the growth is. You know, if you're even the governor of Pennsylvania, you're like, hey, we're opening data centers. I'm pro data center. I'm pro growth. Like, yeah, like I'm on board. And so then there's this popular sentiment that's on the other side that has not actually found its way into the political system yet because no Republican wants to pick it up yet.

1:13:06Andrew Yang:very few democrats want to pick it up yet but it's where most americans are so so that you're going to wind up with a regulatory regime that's very very pro business um and a lot of people listening to this be like sure um and then most americans are just going to be looking at it being like yeah like that happened um but most americans are uh going to feel like they're on the outside

1:13:27Peter H. Diamandis:of this one i want to bring us back before we uh we go to an ama section back to the conversation earlier about this idea of an American party. What do you imagine might unfold over the next few months?

1:13:44Andrew Yang:I think that there's going to be an independent candidate and they're going to get an outsized amount of support despite attacks from one side or the other. And then the rubber is going to hit the road as to whether there are multiple candidates, a primary, a process, like a genuine competition. I have those conversations all the time. What's fun is that among Andrew's projects, so like I'm for alleviating poverty at scale via universal basic income. I don't foresee that happening without some kind of political realignment, which then makes me pro-political realignment.

1:14:22Peter H. Diamandis:Have you been having these conversations with Scary Moochie as well?

1:14:26Andrew Yang:Yeah, yeah. Anthony and I are in touch and friendly on it. Some of the other figures that you'd imagine. But the ranks are growing all the time. Even folks who were in one party or another now have just thrown in the towel, said, like, I'm out.

1:14:45Peter H. Diamandis:I give up. Do you think Elon – I mean, have you had a conversation with Elon about this or DMed with him?

1:14:51Andrew Yang:Elon and I DMed. I talked to his team. I get the sense that right now Elon's on board with the administration and that there are a lot of people in a circle that are saying, look, we need the administration. We've got too much stuff. But I also think that folks kind of know that Elon's his own person. And if he had his druthers, I think that things might look a little different.

1:15:19Peter H. Diamandis:Amazing. You know, the big conversation here is can AI fix poverty? You know, the vision that I painted, God, 14 years ago with my first book, Abundance, and a new book that's coming out, We Are As Gods, is in fact, we're demonetizing and democratizing access to food, water, energy, healthcare, education, all of these things. and there is a flip side of this technological challenging societal period where people are godlike and they have access to everything they need. The biggest challenge on that flip side of this is going to be purpose. Can you use that technology to do something purposeful?

1:16:06Peter H. Diamandis:Can you be a creator versus a consumer? A couch potato is the consumer and the creator is the entrepreneur out there. It's Star Trek versus Mad Max, as you said. Do you think that AI can, in fact, uplift every man, woman, and child?

1:16:21Andrew Yang:I think it's certainly a possibility. And my goal is to try and get us there. AI is going to create trillions of dollars of value, for sure. It's going to completely transform the way we work and live. And the question is, who wins in that world and who doesn't? When you say can AI fix poverty, that suggests that people who are currently poor will not be. And that's where I think we should try and go. Right now, the path of least resistance is that of the trillions of dollars of value that get generated, it's going to be in the hands of the firms and then the stakeholders in those firms. and then, you know, if you do the math like that, that's a very small slice of the population.

1:17:10Andrew Yang:And so the question is how the value gets from within those confines out to, let's say, the broader American public. Though from the look of this picture, you're thinking even bigger than America, which I love. So for me, I take shots at what's happening in America, but I think there's a chance that AI does fix poverty globally. Amazing.

1:17:41Peter H. Diamandis:I have a simple thought on this. You know, if you can use AI to reduce poverty of access, like education, health care, etc., faster than you can fix the poverty of power, like rights and ownership, then you win. If AI boosts productivity while concentrating ownership, then you get worse. And so poverty gets worse. And so you can solve it by having AI go for poverty of access. Solve for that. And that'll help. UBI has one path to that. So much of this discussion in my mind is focusing on redistribution rather than growing the pie. I'm curious, Andrew, you talk about Star Trek versus Mad Max. What is the most Star Trek-ian type scenario that you envision realistically happening over the next 10 to 20 years that radically grows the pie beyond just the separate discussion of how best to redistribute wealth?

1:18:35Andrew Yang:Oh, I mean, Alex, shoot, like everyone can see the pie is going to grow, like very, very quickly, because AI is going to do the work of millions of humans in like hours instead of years, and then do the work better, like run down all these loose balls that we never would have identified, like, enhance the discovery of life saving drugs, material sciences, like, you know, like, everything is going to, so the pie is going to grow. I mean, it can't not grow in that scenario. And so, you know, like the most Star Trekian thing I can imagine is that – and this, by the way, is a vision I'm going to talk about at Abundance.

1:19:17Andrew Yang:is that so ubi is like a piece of the puzzle but to me it's not like the answer because individuals families want purpose community uh values development training like all these a place to go in the morning like all these things that people want and there would be an explosion of entrepreneurship to what Salim said. So I give you, or what might have been Dave, like if you put money into people's hands, of course, people are going to start all sorts of new businesses, initiatives, orgs, you know, get out more. Um, but this most Star Trek thing would be if you had, um, a caring and nurturing economy and a health and wellness economy and arts and creativity economy, and then people, uh, got to do various things on various, um, um, like wavelengths and then get rewarded, get recognized, like self-organized around these things.

1:20:15Andrew Yang:Like to me, the utopian path is a multivariate economy with multiple currencies around different pursuits of human flourishing. And I played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid and role playing games. So maybe it's like a bit of that coming in where you have like different classes with like different strengths and weaknesses and different pursuits. But one of the comps I make is that at this point, we should be getting paid to go to the gym. instead of paying ourselves, like someone should be paying us to go to the gym. And then the personal trainer who's there whipping us into shape should be getting these like wellness bucks that he can or she can then go out and like, use to like go to the game and like, you know, like live a great life.

1:20:56Andrew Yang:So that's the most Star Trekian thing. And I do think we can get there because it's one of the only paths that makes sense to me in terms of people living the lives they want to live.

1:21:09Peter H. Diamandis:Just to be clear on that, this is fascinating, by the way. Your sort of Star Trek scenario is for different verticals of the economy or different sectors like health and wellness versus education. Do I understand correctly that you want sort of non-fungible currencies with one currency or credit system per sector? Well, I mean, they could be fungible. But not between fungible between sectors?

1:21:34Andrew Yang:Like, could I trade a gym credit for an education credit? Maybe you could. And so there are a couple of really fun things about this, Alex. I have 300 ,000 American Express points right now. Like how much does it cost American Express for me to have those points? Zero. Zero, because I haven't done anything with them yet. Did I modify my behavior to get those points? I 100 % did. And so like you can imagine, by the way, it's also an asshole move if I show you my American Express reward points or the money in my bank account. But it might not be an asshole move if I showed you all the points I got, like visiting the nursing home or tutoring kids.

1:22:15Andrew Yang:Like it might actually just make me like a person who does a lot in the community. And then maybe I get honored at the baseball game. Like the way that right now military veterans get honored at the game. So that there are things that we can do that make it just like social credit. Yes. I mean, so what's funny, Peter, is that I was prohibited from saying the word social credit because I'm Asian. And, and people, you know, look at it and be like, Oh, freaking like, you know, like, dystopian Chinese, like authoritarian government, like measuring like blah, blah, blah. Like, it's not like that. It's like doing stuff that people want to do and enjoy and want to self organize around.

1:22:53Andrew Yang:And then some sort of centralized,

1:22:56Peter H. Diamandis:multivariate credit-based scheme for shaping human behavior.

1:22:59Andrew Yang:But it doesn't need to be centralized, to your point. I mean, like, you could put it in the hands of, like, local municipalities. The church can assign it, right?

1:23:08Peter H. Diamandis:The church can assign what they think are incredible support that their community needs.

1:23:13Andrew Yang:And there, by the way, there are communities doing a version of this right now. And they tend to be religious communities.

1:23:19Peter H. Diamandis:All right. I want to move us next to our AMA with our mates. Andrew, the way this works is each of us picks a question. As our guest, I'm going to ask you to go first. Where do you want to hit? Well, geez, I have to pick number three. Okay.

1:23:34Andrew Yang:UBI is the most important topic right now. What can individuals like me do to help accelerate its adoption? Yes, you are wise and smart.

1:23:45Peter H. Diamandis:This is at law and delete. Yes.

1:23:51Andrew Yang:Yes. So the best thing you can do is become an individual advocate, like put it on social media to say, look, like I think we should adopt universal basic income. And then to the extent that there are a couple of organizers and organizations around that, you should follow them. A guy named Scott Santens, S-A-N-T-E-N-S, is excellent. Big fan of Scott. Yeah, yeah. Big fan of Scott and also me. you can come to andrewyang.com and i have a sub stack with hundreds of thousands of members and i'm pushing in this direction and then just keep making the case you know when there's a candidate who comes around show up and ask a question to say like hey universal basic income and to the extent that you know folks in your community that might be able to help others uh you know like push them in that direction but thank you i totally agree Dave Blunden.

1:24:41Peter H. Diamandis:Quick point there, very quick point. The please, when you talk to people about UBS, stress that it is not socialism. Yes. Okay. Professor Blunden, your question, please. I'll take question number one because it's so hard. This is really, really tricky. So I'm a public school superintendent. I want my students to be prepared for AI. I use AI daily and I understand it. That's a great start. But where do we begin? And that's from Ralph Sassir Jr. Yeah, really, really tough time. Actually, I feel for you specifically because do you guide your students to go to college or not? It's a really, really tricky question.

1:25:19Peter H. Diamandis:But the one hard and fast answer is encourage them to use AI as much as you can and get them into groups. As Andrew said, there's way too little socializing going on between people. So get them into groups that are also experimenting with AI. The new thing is OpenClaw. There'll be something new every single week. keep them on the tip of the spear and keep them talking to each other about it as they use it and the answers will emerge the more difficult question of like okay what do you study next where do you go next hopefully that'll resolve relatively quickly right now as long as they follow the normal path apply to college you know get in but keep using ai daily and stay on the front end something good will happen because remember the tailwind of abundance is overwhelmingly strong.

1:26:05Peter H. Diamandis:So even though there'll be a lot of disruption, a lot of job displacement, a lot of people that are perturbed, a lot of social unrest, the tailwind is still in your favor in aggregate, in macro. So keep them hands on. For Ralph, which is please, please, please, when you're encouraging your students to use AI, it's not to do their ninth grade homework or their 10th grade homework. It's to do something that they would consider impossible to do. It's like give your students the objective of designing a Starship to go to Alpha Centauri? What's involved in doing all of those things? You know, basically giving them the superpower of deployable intelligence to go solve a challenge that they're blown away by their ability to solve.

1:26:49Peter H. Diamandis:This is about uplifting the capabilities they have. All right, Alex, over to you, pal. I'll take the softball question, Peter. So question number five, How is debt going to be paid in a hyper-deflationary AI economy if scarcity disappears, earnings collapse, but debt remains? And this is from poetry to song. It's such a softball question. The answer is obvious. We'll hyperinflate. We know how to do it. If the cost of everything goes down to zero or near zero because we've solved everything, we start printing money and everyone becomes billionaires or trillionaires. We have the state capacity, both as a country and as a world, to hyperinflate, to compensate against the hyperdeflation.

1:27:32Peter H. Diamandis:And that's probably the easiest numerical way to make everyone billionaires. Salim. I'll also take the softball one number two, which is, UBI, who decides how much? Only for citizens. Is it scale to wealth? Is human effort no longer a criteria? And this is from QuietUs6. so we've talked about this already UBI is not really kind of a moral prize it's a stability protocol and you find the amount that is enough for people to survive but not be happy citizenship is a political choice but the economic logic is that whoever participates in the economy needs a floor to prevent that collapse when you have this type of a demand destruction so you can do it implicitly through taxes rather than means testing the benefit side.

1:28:24Peter H. Diamandis:But the real, the scarcest resource these days is not effort, it's human coherence. And UBI buys human coherence. It buys stability.

1:28:34Andrew Yang:All right. I'll take number four. Nice work, Salim. I approve that message. I'm your biggest super fan. Well, thank you.

1:28:42Peter H. Diamandis:I thought we were here. Salim for vice president under Andrew Yang's next. Got it. Yes. All right. From at Steve, Tricia Wilson, quote, as someone leaving the labor market next year for retirement, what economic disruptions should I be prepared for? First of all, I don't believe in retirement. I think retirement is a four-letter word. I think you should be looking at what you do next. I think you should be looking at what you enjoy. How do you create something around a passion that you have that can still earn income, keep you in the game? Retirement is the worst thing for your longevity. But what should you prepared for next?

1:29:19Peter H. Diamandis:Well, first of all, have you saved enough money if we hit longevity escape velocity, right? If you're 65, say, and you've saved enough to get to 80, the average US lifespan today is 79, healthspan is 63. What happens if all of a sudden new protocols hit and you can make it to 120? So that's something to think about. The second part of this is we're going to see rapid inflation and then rapid de-inflation as the cost of things begin to drop towards zero. The rapid inflation in the near term is going to come from the government just printing money around the whole UBI side. I mean, I don't know if you agree with that, Andrew, in terms of this cycle, right?

1:30:05Peter H. Diamandis:We basically have a ton of money being printed like we did during COVID. And then And as AI and robotics come in and provide oversupply of product and services, the prices begin to drop dramatically. Thoughts on that?

1:30:19Andrew Yang:That makes sense to me. All right.

1:30:22Peter H. Diamandis:We're going to do a second round here of one question each. Andrew, you get to go first.

1:30:31Andrew Yang:Wow. Wow. Oh, I have to take in the questions. I have to choose one.

1:30:37Peter H. Diamandis:Yes.

1:30:41Andrew Yang:I'll do number eight. Why not? If AI replaces CEO shareholders, shed a major cost, means of production shift to capital owners, isn't that the extreme version of wealth concentration? You know, people make jokes about CEOs being like, oh, the CEO is firing all these people. Why not just replace the CEO with AI? I think this questioner, MGP Star, is actually hitting on something really important, which is what I was suggesting, too. It's like, look, if you look at these large corporations, they're overstaffed and you can make a decision as to like who's deciding who stays and who goes. And then people naturally become very hostile towards the CEO because that's the decision maker on that.

1:31:33Andrew Yang:I think that in most places, the CEO will be the last to go. And this is within private companies and public companies. And one reason why CEOs are expensive is because you kind of need someone. And in the scheme of the enterprise, that cost actually makes sense. So I do think, though, that wealth concentration will pick up because these firms will have fewer workers. Thank you. Dave, over to you, Bill.

1:32:08Peter H. Diamandis:All right, I'll take number seven then. Many Americans rely on gig work like Uber for income. Once AI eliminates those jobs,$400 a month is gone. who's addressed this impact yeah I really from a Joe Kingstown joking Joe night down night and night down all right yeah I would you have to take agency like nobody is thinking this through for you the amount of change and disruption is happening very very quickly I think Andrew on this pod is one of the few guys really really trying to brainstorm through it but you see all the friction in politics. So we meet with governors all the time. The rate of motion is near zero.

1:32:50Peter H. Diamandis:So no one is thinking it through for you. That's the short answer. Do not rely on somebody else to give you the path forward. Start talking to the AI. The AI will give you a better roadmap and a better answer to what you should do next than anyone in politics or anyone out there. Corporations are going to be cutting these jobs. They're not the ones to talk to. So get your AI agents up and running, start talking to them, ask them what you should be doing next. But you're absolutely right. This is going away. No one's creating a roadmap for you.

1:33:18Andrew Yang:I think it's Joe King H-Town and he's in Houston. So if I'm right, Joe, thumbs up. But I agree with Dave.

1:33:25Peter H. Diamandis:Nice. Salim, over to you. I will go with number nine. So FSD, full self-driving, will tip because of insurance costs. once people can't afford ev insurance adoption stalls isn't affordability the real point to discuss and this was from j s bg mc 66 13 um so insurance for now is absolutely the hidden governor on autonomy adoption but it's transitional right because as safety data improves the underwriting drops and you flip from driver risk to systemic risk okay now we there's a huge shift coming in this because we won't be purchasing cars we'll be accessing cars right so you flip from consumer ownership to subscription models i want to go back to the best model we've seen for this is we've already seen this transition in the music business where you had seven or eight music studios selling you the cassette the cd the dvd selling you scarcity okay then we digitize music and now you have itunes and spotify delivering abundance on a subscription model that transition that we've seen fully in music, we expect to see in transportation, healthcare, education, energy, anywhere, everywhere, right?

1:34:41Peter H. Diamandis:So the affordability matters, but it's the path to the new model from I own a car to I buy miles from an autonomous network. All right, AWG, over to you, Bill. That leaves me with number six, which is a fun question. So six is, what's the role of nonprofits in the AI economy? How can they safely adopt AI when they lack, when I think when they lack the tech and financial resources. And this is from GNIUS45. Okay, so the elephant in the room, the very center, the beating heart of the AI economy was until very recently a nonprofit, OpenAI, and it's worth nearly a trillion dollars. So I would question the premise of these pairs of questions.

1:35:23Peter H. Diamandis:The modern AI economy as it currently exists was arguably created by a nonprofit that then transitioned to what it is now, which is structured as a constellation of entities. But it is essentially a public benefit company. And I would, again, in the spirit of questioning the premise that they lack, the financial resources, I think my hot take for this episode is I think the open AI transition from nonprofit to PBC is in fact a template for the future of nonprofits in general, educational and otherwise. One of my fever dreams is to take some of the largest research universities in this country, which are right now nonprofits, and with the help of government, transition them over to being for-profit public benefit companies and then take them public.

1:36:11Peter H. Diamandis:I'd love to take Harvard, MIT, Stanford public on the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ. I think it would unlock an enormous amount of societal value. Can't wait to have that conversation with the presidents of universities. You know, I don't trade individual public stocks, but I'd love to buy Harvard and MIT stock on public markets if I could. There's so much societal value, I think, that right now is being kneecapped because we have so many faculty who are doing their best to try to pretend to be basically employed at a nonprofit. They're handicapping their ability to spin out companies.

1:36:46Peter H. Diamandis:That would be societally valuable. Why? because many universities, Stanford is sort of a quasi-exception, but certainly Harvard and MIT are doing their best not to look like venture capital firms. These universities become the largest incubators on the planet, and the faculty get ownership and upside in everything they help incubate and all their rock star students who succeed. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, universities turning into incubators and venture studios is absolutely the only way it's going to go. and survive for them to survive. But to do that, they need to escape from the sword of Damocles that they'll be taxed as a for-profit, which right now they're petrified of.

1:37:27Yeah, amazing.

1:37:28Peter H. Diamandis:All right, everybody, I hope you've enjoyed this AMA. Again, we're putting out at this week three episodes on Moonshot, so please subscribe, turn on notifications so you can find that when they come out. If you've got questions for the Moonshot mates, please drop them into the comments. We read them all. If you've got any outro music that you want to send to us, send it to media at diamandis.com. And with that, one of my favorite parts of the show, we have an incredible piece of outro music called Moonshot 2035 by Manos and Seika. Andrew, enjoy this. I think this one is especially apropos for our conversation today.

1:38:14Peter H. Diamandis:dry 2029 cash rent high 2030 ag i spoke we didn't freak we didn't move like it or not we got a moonshot

1:38:342035 we made it through good times clear sky something new

1:38:42Peter H. Diamandis:Built from the ashes From all decay We hailed the line

1:38:53Andrew Yang:Was that you, Peter, in that? It's all of us.

1:38:59Peter H. Diamandis:This is amazing. This is really an appropriate theme for what we're talking about here. There's some serious devastation coming here. And then we get to the other side. Wow.

1:39:14Andrew Yang:We got a moonshot.

1:39:19Andrew Yang:Well, I, for one, feel like closing my eyes and opening them in 2035. So, you know, I'm going to do that. It does look a lot better.

1:39:27Peter H. Diamandis:But if you do that, Andrew, you'll sleep through the singularity.

1:39:30Andrew Yang:I sleep through a great deal, Alex. I sleep through a great deal.

1:39:38Andrew Yang:That was super fun. That was amazing.

1:39:39Peter H. Diamandis:that was we have such an awesome community of uh of creators that follow us support us thank you uh for all of you generating extraordinary music outro videos and sometimes intro videos we love you andrew this was an amazing conversation pal thank you one of the most important yes for

1:39:57Andrew Yang:sure well thank you all um thanks for having me and look forward to seeing you uh out at abundance

1:40:03Peter H. Diamandis:yeah it's going to be incredible we're on together on sunday yes yeah much appreciated

1:40:08Andrew Yang:See you all soon. Thank you. Thank you, Salim in particular. Bye, guys.

1:40:38Peter H. Diamandis:entire week looking at the meta trends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a two minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the meta trends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com slash meta trends. That's diamandis.com slash meta trends. Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week.

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