How AI Is Impacting Politics & Accelerating the Need For UBI w/ Andrew Yang | EP #61

27:53I love it. It's got my vote for sure. I mean, it's like, wait, this sounds really logical. It's logical. And if someone wants to dig into this, the progenitors of this set of reforms, it's Michael Porter, who's a Harvard Business School professor and godfather of management consulting, and a woman named Catherine Gale, they co -authored a book called the Politics Industry that said, you know why we're seeing our political system flail and fumble this way? It's because of bad incentives in the system. and the way to fix the incentives is to get rid of the party primaries and here's how to do it.

28:32So the ballot initiative in Nevada costs 17 million, which is more than the six in Alaska. If someone were to say to me, how much does it cost to fix American democracy? I would say approximately $200 million, which in our world Peter is a very manageable son. It's nothing. Yeah, in the context of a system where we're going to spend $8 billion dollars beating each other up and hating each other in 2024. And then one of the Forbes 500 individuals listening here, please just, you know, please get in touch with me. You can grab me on socials, Andrew Yang, Peter has my number and email. But how does the $200 million fixed democracy check it out?

29:16You run the same ballot initiative that won in Alaska and Nevada in 10 states. It fails in five of them, but that's okay. You succeed in five, and then you liberate 10 US senators to do whatever they think is best, and not be in throw to their parties. On either side, that changes the nature of American politics. I just want to read that look. And that's very, very real. That's very, very doable. That's huge. And that's, again, it's the first piece of clear and logical thinking I've heard in a while. So thank you for making that. Thank you for explaining that. What's next on a roadmap? Where do we, you know, okay, pull that off.

29:57What's the next step in heading us towards a true democracy? So I concluded all of these things now about 18 months ago and so I've been running around with forward. Now let's say that we pull off what I'm describing. We get rid of the party primaries in five states, ten U .S. senators, all of a sudden lucid. It cleared the game. Like lots of time on the hands. I mean, it's pretty wild. They would be like, hey, all of a sudden, I'm really happy. They have their own opinion. Yes, they don't have their own opinion. And in the other 25 states, you have mayors and county executives and city council members and occasional members of Congress also throwing off the yoke of the false blue versus red and saying, I'm also part of this new positive, independent political movement forward.

30:47Now, you fast forward to the next cycle. This is the great frustration that you and many others share, is that we might be faced with a Joe Biden Donald Trump rematch in 2024. God forbid. And it's patently ridiculous. But by the way, what do you put the odds that that could happen or would happen? The odds are very high because Trump will probably win the Republican nomination, despite his legal troubles. He's up 20 some odd points. Joe Biden, by all accounts, is running again. There's some rumor that he's going to step aside at the last minute next year, but I'll believe it when I see it kind of thing.

31:30So the Biden Trump rematch, combined age 160, is very much on top. Nothing against folks of an advanced age, but these are not the octogenarians you want. This is people. This is people. I know I'd be fine with, but these are not the people. This is before age reversal has been implemented, yes. Yes, you know, like what I wanna, these aren't the 80 year olds you want, anyway. So, but it's just a clear emblem of how bizarre and dysfunctional two party system is that in a country of 330 million people, those will be the choices. mean, gosh, Peter, like I was with you at a bun in 360 and I could almost just throw a rock and just take any of the people of the rock hits and say, you'd be a better choice than Joe or Donald Trump.

32:18So if we get presented with this choice, many Americans are going to be looking for an alternative. Now, my organization forward, what we'll be doing is we'll be trying to organize swing voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and genuinely independent swing voters, and say we're going to go with whichever party is on board with getting rid of the party primaries and implementing right choice voting and reforming the system itself. So that's our project for 2024, but I'm going to project in the not -so -distant future. Let's call it 2028.

33:00We can all vote for, so this will be fun. Let me set the stage a little bit more. So imagine there was an independent presidential primary where it's Mark Cuban, the rock, me, Oprah, Matthew McConaughey, Justin Amash, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, whoever your favorite figures are. I don't know if you want to throw someone into this mix Peter, if I've missed someone. Is this they have to agree or they being drafted? either. Maybe we'll throw Tony Robbins and Elon into the mix too. Holy cow. So Elon unfortunately is not born in the US so there's like that. But Tony Robbins love love it. Jeff Skanyu, he's got the Washington Post, he's building rockets, he's got to be something he's going to go do.

33:54Let's throw Tony and Jeff into the mix. Sure. And we can all vote in this primary on our smartphones say I like Tony, I like Andrew, I like Mark Cuban. And then our vote is verified via personalized QR code that gets sent to our mailing address. You scan it. Congratulations, your vote has been verified. Millions of Americans are participating in actual democracy. And then the legacy parties would be left saying no, none of that is real. What is real is is waiting to hear what 6 % of Iowans think in February. And then millions of Californians and New Yorkers and everyone else would be like, wait a minute, that makes zero sense.

34:39I don't give a shit what Iowans think any other time. Why am I carrying this time? Or no offense to anyone, because I love you all. But like South Carolina and New Hampshire, I mean, you could just like throw whatever the heck the early basket of states. I mean, I went through this process. Only 6 .5 % of Iowans participated in the Democratic caucus I was a part of. It's probably going to be not that much higher percentage of Iowans in this Republican caucus. So let me get this straight. There is a process by which you raise above some threshold, and I don't care if you're the Kardashians or whomever, if you want to run for president, what would be the criteria for getting yourself on this digital ballot?

35:18This is so fun, Peter, because those 20 people, your 20 people whomever, most of them know that But if they ran for president as a Democrat or Republican, it would be miserable. They would get shivved the same way that we've seen, let's call it, Mike Bloomberg get shivved or whomever. But if you got to run in this independent primary, then you could genuinely make your case. You could be proud of them. There's not a machine trying to oppress you at every turn. Real Americans could get behind you and vote for you in real time. So the wonder of this is that a political party can design its nomination process, however it wants.

35:59The Democrat and Republican party have chosen to design it in a particularly an agronistic, nonsensical way, not because they think it's smart, but mainly because of inertia and they prefer to control. It's very, very high control, of course. It's just control, right? And part of that control has been the media, where if you see how the media covers various candidates, and I was part of this too, so in my book forward, they very much have their thumb on the scale for certain candidates. And so that's how they try to make sure that they are chosen candidate or candidates win. But now all of that's falling apart.

36:38And so what is the new process that replaces it all? There is, you and I both know, and everyone listening to this know, the tech for what I'm describing is completely mature. A political party can again nominate however it wants. The only things that you need are number one, some heavyweights who are willing to run in this kind of process, and number two, ballot access in all 50 states. Now the ballot access is, if you had to put a price tag on it, maybe it costs you about 50 million dollars. Now the forward party already has legal recognition in about eight states. We're kind of marching towards 20 by the end of 2024, let's say.

37:24So this is the infrastructure so that reasonable candidates actually can submit themselves, genuinely, genuinely to the American people without the massive gatekeeping function of the two, I guess, parties that just want to keep everyone out. It's the way it should be. I mean, we move millions of dollars, and some people billions of dollars on Bitcoin on your smartphone. You have all of your functions in life in verified fashion. Why not vote? That's brilliant. Now, you've mentioned Mark Cuban three times. I'd be spoken to him about this. I have, and he is one of my top draft picks for this endeavor.

38:08If you don't know, check out his cost plus drugs. I mean, he's, you know, I do know a company to make. Yeah, great stuff. I mean, love you Mark. Yeah, so listen, I think this is a fantastic idea. And, you know, at this point, hopefully, it's not just to being about a popular individual. It's hopefully going to be being popular and being intelligent and having good policies. I mean, why do people say this wouldn't work? I mean, I would imagine people say, well, a populist politician or president doesn't have the experience that's needed to run, they have to rise through the ranks of, you know, local state and federal politics.

38:54Most people have not dug into it, even that deeply, Peter, honestly. Most people just need jerk think, well, third party, hopeless, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Jill Stein, etc., etc. Now, if they looked at the numbers, they would see that now 49 % of Americans self -identify as independence, almost twice as what identify as Democrat or Republican, that this kind of internet voting is now very, very doable and natural for Americans in a way it was not not even in the 90s. But their reservations are not the ones you just cited. Because most Americans are fed up, they would happily take a reasonable human that is not of the machine at this point.

39:41They just don't think it's possible because of the conditioning, particularly from the media, that you must choose either a columnar, a column B and nothing else exists. Yeah, I think people don't realize the influence the media has on politics. And we, for, I don't know what reason, think of the media as still concrete, you know, I was named Howard. Walter Concrackite? Walter Concrackite, yes. I mean, it's independent, it's truthful, it's, you know, representing truth in the American way, but that's anything but. Well, this podcast will probably get a similar audience to, you know, one of the major cable channels, you know?

40:25Well, so, you know, and a much cooler audience, I will say, a much better audience. Both the people watching this are not, you know, two of them. Yeah, they're entrepreneurs. They care about changing the world and they want, you know, the mindset is let's find out where we can make things better, you know, up into the right. You know, it's interesting, right, because maybe it's going to be Twitter, maybe it's going to be Google, maybe it's going to be some other platform, but the platforms exist for full verification and to reach everybody in America. Well, you talk about the media. I mean, I think that's what motivated Elon and buying Twitter slash X now was that he thought, you know, this is going to be one way.

41:02I can actually try to improve the nature of the messages that are getting out. But what I'm describing, it's right there for us, man. The fun thing is, you can imagine who would run. And a lot more excellent people would run if they thought they would be treated fairly. Do you think the US people would change the rules about being born in the US if you long wanted to run? I don't know but I'd certainly love to test that proposition out I was with Arnold Schwarzenegger not that long ago. I said you should test that proposition out But here's one of the fun things Peter. Let's say that this independent primary does come to pass Let's I'm just gonna speak for myself If I were part of it and let's say I lose to I'll keep using Mark just as my example.

41:49Yeah, sure. I would then endorse Mark and say, Hey, man, let me go campaign for you around the country. And you could campaign anywhere. You'd end up with a team of a dozen high -powered surrogates and something of an administration or a cabinet in waiting. And the American people would be like, that crew is a crew I would trust. I guess. Or much, much more than the current freaking panoply. of, frankly, mostly second -rateers. I love it. You're right. Once it flips, you've got 30 incredible influencers ready to back the independent candidate. Yeah. That's the vision, man. It's going to be the avengers of rationality and true progress.

42:37And so, have you written up these ideas in a concrete fashion someplace? So if you go to Forward Party, this is the movement. I have not written up the independent primary plan though there have been frankly versions of this that have been written up. I've written up the other stuff around getting rid of the party primaries, shifting to an all -party primary, rank choice voting. I'm going to be excited to get energy behind the a 2028 plan. One reason why I'm not hammering that that hard is because we are stuck in 2024 right now to our earlier conversation. And so we're trying to organize independent swing voters in swing states to try and keep the current thing from collapsing.

43:26I love it. And this in fact is the digitization and democratization of democracy in this It's making the fiction real Peter and to the way you describe me before My dad was a PhD in physics at a Berkeley so when I saw up in Heimer I was like oh my gosh. This is like the freaking family tree in action my brother's named after Ernest Lawrence Nice, uh, the Josh Hartnett's character. Oh, yeah, um, but I'm Uh a deeply flawed politician shall we say in that I just want to try and make things work better I would prefer to be doing something else. Very frankly, I mean, I'm like you where you also are trying to solve problems and you've wisely said, you know what, I'm going to solve the problems that are solvable through entrepreneurship in the private sector.

44:16For better or for worse, the problems I started getting animated about, like poverty, were things that I thought you needed the public sector to solve. And then now I've gotten very deep into the, okay, how the heck do you build a functional public sector? Well, I wish you luck and I'm going to help spread your meme virus here of those two approaches because they're the most logical, smartest approach I've heard. So thank you for that. Everybody at this speeder, a quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming.

44:58I don't watch the Crisis News Network, I call CNN or Fox, and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology. How long entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges? What the breakthroughs are in longevity? How exponential technologies are transforming our world? And so twice a week I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain.

45:41These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of you use you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to demandus .com, backslashblog, and learn more. Now back to the episode. Andrew, let's flip to your second moonshot, which is the idea of universal basic income. So the idea, just to lay it out as I understand it, and I welcome your modification here, is as AI and robotics and other exponentials, 3D printing, ARVR blockchain, start to disrupt them job markets and people lose their jobs to technology that we need to do a few things. One of them is going to be to help level up those individuals up skill them to better skills.

46:34But potentially at least in the interim is give them reliable income. A universal basic income that allows them to put food on the table, get insurance, not feel panicked, perhaps get a better education, perhaps invest in whatever tech they need to start a small business. And it's about human dignity to a large degree and getting rid of fear because it's going to be a lot of fear as AI steps in in a bigger way in the next few years. I'll say one more thing and then this is your platform and you did a huge amount to, I'm not saying this sort of popularized, but educate people about universal basic income, which I'm grateful for.

47:23The other thing I wanted to mention is it is something that's not a theoretical concept. It's been implemented and tested and studied over dozens, if not hundreds, of experiments both in the United States and around the world. So that's my setup for it and I want people to understand it's this is coming because we need a Counter -belling force to the fear that people have about potentially losing their jobs I love the way you frame that Peter The way I described it is that you have a mindset of abundance and possibility and optimism and entrepreneurship and then you have a mindset of scarcity fear us versus them xenophobia and negativity towards technology, honestly.

48:13And so which of these things is winning, which of these is going to win? I think you'd be hard pressed to say that nationwide, the mindset of optimism and possibility is winning. It was definitely winning at abundance 360, which was a blast. You know, I go there and it's like, I was uplifted because here are people who are literally building the future. but then you drive a few hours in any direction and you wind up like a different mindset. And so the question is how do we help people transition? There are a lot of very smart folks who are deep in AI who've also been studying the effects of UBI or cash relief programs.

48:57And one of the things I think is going to appeal to folks like you is that right now we have the worst of all worlds were we're spending so much money and energy on dysfunctional administration programs that are really punitive and dehumanizing. I spoke to thousands of Americans who are on various aid programs. And the single biggest thing that motivates them is beer. They are scared stiff of losing their benefits. There was a woman in Iowa who said to me, I would like to volunteer for my local nonprofit, but I'm scared to because I'm on disability and I'm afraid that if someone saw that I could volunteer, they'd take my money away.

49:40And so you listen to that story and you think, my gosh, like what have we done? Where this woman's getting the money, but instead of using the money to live a better life, she's staying in because she's afraid of being seen as able -bodied. I mean, like that's what's happening right now for millions and millions of Americans where we've set up this,

50:05this unfeeling machine above them that they do not trust at all, by the way, and said, hey, your subsistence is going to be reliant upon your staying on the good side of this bureaucracy. And if you fill out the form wrong, we're gonna pull the rug out from under you. I mean, like, I've spoken to military vets who are in this boat. I've spoken to so many Americans, and it's, we can do better, let's say. Yeah, Jusela sent me an article which framed it as insecurity versus inequality as the issue people are facing. They don't feel secure. They do not feel secure in the least. And if we can change that, then we have a much better chance of building a society where if someone else makes some rapid advance, you look at it and say, oh, good.

50:56But maybe that's good for me in some way. Right now, unfortunately, it's more like, look at that jerk over there who's doing well. Like, I'm not seeing any of that. Yeah. So you've studied this. If you have to, most people say, listen, if you're sending people $500 a month, it's going to be used for beer and Netflix. And it's a waste of money, for God's sakes. why are you going to spend my tax money to do that? How do you respond to that? What's the data show? Well, the data shows that people tend to spend the money on food, fuel, shelter, books for their kids, activities for their kids. And the biggest example of that data set was the enhanced child tax credit that was implemented in 2020 and 2021 that in the US where it lifted millions of American kids out of poverty and 130 economists who looked at it said we should keep doing this because the money is getting used very very effectively.

52:04And American politics being what it is we then pulled the plug on that even though there were so many literally there were Nobel laureates saying this is the best thing we've done in a generation to alleviate poverty. But the data is there for anyone to find. You also saw decreases in things like domestic violence, child abuse. I mean, if you put a little bit of money into people's hands, you talked about the data, Peter. There was one study I found very, very compelling out of an Indian tribe in North Carolina, where one tribe started giving people a certain amount of money because they had a casino, honestly.

52:45I've got it here. It's the Eastern band of Cherokee Indians, Casino dividend in North Carolina, and giving them no strings attached between 4 ,000 and 6 ,000 per year is that particular one. Yeah, and you probably have it there that you had the kids learn better, and even their personalities became more conscientious, more trusting their environment. of education, mental health, decrease in addiction and crime. Yeah. And by the way, if you wound up with people who do turn to crime and drugs, we end up paying for that too in ways big and small. I mean, like we're spending 30 to $50 ,000 per individual per year who is homeless or incarcerated in our country.

53:35So if it hits our institutions, it's a lot more expensive than that for $6 ,000 that those kids got. You know, unless you think that this is a new idea, I'm just going to rattle off here the research that my producer Nick did. You know, we've seen this in Alaska since 1982. Alaska's had their fund funded by oil. I mentioned North Carolina. We've had experiments in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina, Seattle, Denver, Gary, Indiana. A number is a big study done in Stocking, California, Canada, England, Brazil, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands has done a number, Finland, Iran, Kenya, Libya, India, China.

54:27So I mean, this has been done hundreds of times. And as I read through the details here, it's consistent that this investment has super positive outcomes. I haven't read any place where it's been a negative outcomes or a waste of money. Yeah, it's much more effective than frankly starting up a new bureaucracy and then saying, hey guys, improve the lives of people that are not you. One of the organizations in this space that some people might have heard of is Give Directly, which is it transfers money directly to people in developing countries. Now, there's probably some skepticism among your audience, rightly so, of kind of a non -profit industrial complex or an NGO industrial complex.

55:19There's probably that mistrust when it comes to certain government bureaucracies that are at administering benefits in a, like, frankly, a sane way. This skips the middleman and gets the resources to where it'll actually do good. And I've been a donor to give directly, I think it's a brilliant, super low overhead, minimized overhead process. On a personal level, Peter, the way that you and I do this probably is we just tip really well, because you're around someone that's like, Okay, this is gonna be dollar for dollar. Oh no. And it's such a beautiful thing when someone unexpectedly gets a large tip and you know, for that evening, that moment, you've changed their life.

56:06Yeah, it's a great, great feeling. I highly recommend it. Yeah. Yeah. So the question becomes, where does this money come from? You know, can we afford it? And I'd like to play a few conversational games here. I remember Jeff Bezos and a few other folks said, But if we're going to start to see technological displacement of jobs, and a robot takes a house cleaning job, or a robot takes a factory working job, or an AI takes a physician's job, why don't we just tax that robot and that AI for that work it's being done and then use that tax base to fund a UBI program? Does that make sense? I think taxing AI makes a lot of sense.

56:49I think the practice of it might be a little bit trickier. The where the money comes from for starters, I don't know what people are going to receive this. So our data right now is worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year to various companies. Your data is going to be worth more than others, Peter. Thanks. But we're not seeing a dime of that. So one of the proposals I had was look, there should be a data dividend where I'm not wanting to hold back certain forms of development, but if you're going to be buying and selling my data, maybe I should see what's going on and get a cut. And that could be the start of multi -hundreds of billions of dollars type measure, AI itself, could also, and one of the examples I use is that there are two million Americans who work at call centers still, and let's say that AI is going to be able to do that job pretty soon.

57:56How much do those two million Americans pay in taxes right now? I'm going to guess that they do pay taxes, and then the question is, will the tech company that use the AI pay anywhere near that level in taxes? History suggests it will not. And so you'll wind up replacing tax paying humans with AI that we might not see that kind of revenue from unless we change the system. You know, I've had this conversation with Elon and we've been trying to go back and forth on when we're going to do another podcast together on the subject of abundance. And you know, his first reaction is yes, we're going to have full up abundance post -AGI.

58:33Right? And I get that. And once we have artificial general intelligence, which leads rapidly to artificial superintelligence, and let's put away the dystopian scenarios, the terminator, and we have AI. We're heading towards what I would call technological socialism. Being a good capitalist entrepreneur, the term socialism and communism sort of like like, you know, our knives into you. But technological socialism is an idea where technology is taking care of you. And it's what will happen, right? AI, your best physician in the world will be an AI, your best diagnostician, your best surgeon will be an AI in a robot.

59:22And those things will rapidly demonetize towards zero cost, your best educator, we saw this with Sal Khan, who's a real hero, So as you would said on stage, you know, he is a year I had dinner with Sal last month and what a privilege. Yeah, he's such a sweet man and brilliant entrepreneur. And so the things that we spend a large amount of money on today, we spend a disproportionate amount on healthcare and education. A lot of Americans are not going out of here now, Peter. Well, and what we're going to see is the very best health care and the very best education is eventually going to be free because it's going to be delivered by these AI or AI systems, right, to the cost of electricity.

1:00:10And so that's going to be a significant, I mean, if there are cost -delivings, we spend our money on, we spend our money on health, on education, on transportation, eventually an autonomous Uber will be four times cheaper than owning a car. And if you don't need to live in downtown Manhattan or downtown Boston because your job is there because you can commute via Zoom or because you can commute in an autonomous Uber back and forth. And the hour of travel time is usable. Then you can live someplace where the real estate is four times cheaper. And still of a beautiful backyard. So we're heading towards a world of massive demonetization, I think, and efficiency of our time.

1:00:56So I think the cost of living should go down while the standards of living go up. Do I have it wrong anyway in your mind? I love the vision and I agree with the mega trends. The problems are twofold. Number one is the regulatory problem. This is where the public sector comes back in. Let's say I invented AI that could do the job of a surgeon tomorrow. You wouldn't see that happen in hospitals because the surgeons would just lobby the legislators and say, hey, it's got to be a human surgeon. Or at a minimum, it's got to be a human surgeon advising the AI. So there's this regulatory capture that's going to make it rough.

1:01:40Now, Now, there are certain sectors, and I'm going to use my call center worker example, where legislators aren't going to give a shit about them. They don't have a lobby. So there you'll see it go very rapidly. It's one reason why this political reform is so important is because there's going to be a race toward regulatory protection. It's like who's gonna be viewed as like, oh, indispensable human worker, I can't replace you. The AMA, by the way, why do we have a physician shortage in the US of humans? I mean, which is one of the reasons why AI doctors will be such a massive value ad. It's because of the American Medical Association artificially keeping the number of doctors low because they didn't want - I just thought people got smarter.

1:02:35People got smarter and realized they don't want to actually spend four years in medical school. Five, six, seven years with internship and residency come out such massive debt just at the time that AI is going to take their job. So that's why. No, no, because if you think about it, there are all of these folks who are below the line in terms of applying to medical school. I'll make an insert Asian joke here. Anyway. Right. What were, where, so there's been an artificially curved supply and then you know that those professionals are going to lobby very, very furiously and it's not just the doctors themselves.

1:03:12You see it with certain device manufacturers where do you know Dean Kamin by chance? I was with him for dinner at his home and you have sure on Friday night. Yes. Oh my gosh. All right, so Dean told me a story, I might have told you to, where he invented a portable dialysis machine, which would improve people's standard of living dramatically, but then the folks who profit from inpatient dialysis said, no, no, no, that's not safe. Their motivation was obviously that they make a whole lot more money. It's actually evil. It's actually evil. It's evil. There's a lot of evil going on in the system because people are making money off of the inefficiency and they will fight, fight, fight to keep the inefficiency because that's their business now.

1:03:56So, the future you're describing is the future that would be happening in the absence of this regulatory capture, but there are going to be some folks who get displaced very summarily. And so, managing this transition in both groups is a must. And right now, the question is, how can you coax some folks, being like, look, guys, you're be okay, but AI is going to start doing this lifting for us or this surgery for us and you're not going to starve to death, you'll be fine. Then also go to the folks whose work is made irrelevant very quickly. Yeah, by the way, for those who don't know Dean Cayman, you may know him as the creator, the Segway, which is unfortunate because the things that he's actually done in the world have been so extraordinary.

1:04:42One of the most brilliant inventors on the planet, creator of implantable infusion pumps, the Luke arm, the Ibot, and I don't know, 1500 patents. One of the most generous brilliant individuals. He'll be joining us at A360 this year. We'll spend five days with him in a few different dimensions. Both he's got a company right now. We toured it a few, myself and my few my audience members called the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute. It's government funded. Good thing, the good thing the government's doing. They're basically re -growing organs. You give them a skin sample and they turn that skin sample into induced pleuripotent stem cells and then grow a pediatric heart, a bone ligament, bone, new eyelid cells for your pancreas.

1:05:32It's amazing. The guy is one of those brilliant engineers on the planet. Dean came in as a genius and a force for good and it surprised me not at all that you had done over the last week. And his, of course, his most important invention is first, which is his high school, junior high school, high school level, educational program that is 85 ,000 schools around the world. Teaching the next generation robotics, indeed, you know, like movable wheelchairs that help people live more functional lives. I mean, the guy has improved a lot of people's existences. So, I get the idea that we're going to have ingrained biases and self -motivation keeping things the way they have.

1:06:22And that's always been the case, right? I'm sure it falls eventually. I mean, there will be a point where when you see that human surgeon coming at you and you say, oh no, no, no, I do not want that human touching me. You know, I don't know how much coffee they had if they had a fight with a boyfriend to grow for in last night. I want the robot that has seen this surgery a million times and cost 100 times cheaper. I want it doing the surgery. And so the question becomes, we're going to have to be data -driven evolution. And I think we're going to see it's not going to be a little fuzzy. It's going to be the AI is making the right diagnosis 99 times every 100 compared to to the human.

1:07:09And one of the biggest problems is humans make a lot of mistakes. Yep. I mean, your entire had a fight with their partner or got drunk or something. I mean, that stuff's real. It's not like our physicians are superhuman or whatnot. I mean, they have problems. And their problems do not keep them from coming in and operating on us or whatever the case may be. So we're going to have, I hope, the cost of living is going to demonetize. I mean, it has tremendously, right? But we don't count those things that have demonetized. We don't count the fact that our communications are world -class as good as the president of nations had, you know, decades ago.

1:07:56And it's free video conferencing on FaceTime or Zoom. I mean, that's insane. We don't count that. We don't count the all of the free entertainment. We have the free knowledge, even free AI. we have, but the things that we do pay for, there's going to be demonetization pressures. I agree, Peter, and in many ways, so someone once described me in a flattering way as wanting to be America's wet blanket. Like I just want everyone to chill out while we make this set of transitions. And right now Americans are getting the opposite of more chill. So shall we say? Yeah, we're getting stressed down and flamed and polarized and scarcity is taking over and more and more insecurity as Giselle put it.

1:08:47So I see my role as trying to make it so that we can actually enjoy the bounty of this amazing time to bear with. Yes, it's extraordinary. You know, one of the other ideas that one of my 8 360 members has spoken about, I think you've spoken about this as well, is basic living as a service, you know, a community where for 250 bucks a month, you get housing, internet, water, food, what else do you want to throw in there, right? So a fixed cost and entertainment. entertainment, sure. Which I love that idea because at scale this is what technology can do. It can give us a constantly demonetizing meeting all our basic needs and allowing you to earn living that allows you to put away money and reinvest it.

1:09:40Yeah, I joked Peter at one point. It's like we have to enter the era of terrible artwork because we just have people who are able to chill out and paint terrible paintings or whatever Remember the heck it is, you know what I mean? Some of them will be awesome, I'm sure. But also, it's not terrible. Yeah, side guru, I don't know if you know side guru. I was on stage with him years ago in St. Petersburg, and we had dinner afterwards, and he said something that has never left me, he says, technology allows humanity to finally take a vacation from survival, right? He's totally right. And we've been operating under this resource constraint mindset and institutional setup and everything else where it's zero sum.

1:10:30And we're about to hit a point where a lot of these goods will have essentially zero marginal cost. And then what do you do in an era of abundance? What does that become? We're not set up for it and in many ways I feel like the challenge is trying to prepare us for abundance in a time when scarcity actually unfortunately is the lived experience of many of our fellow Americans and humans. Agreed. I mean, one of the last points I want to touch base with you on here because I think it's fundamental to solving UBI in an actual functional way is that of purpose. I think as living a human experience, as a biological individual, we need purpose.

1:11:27And just surviving is not that and just being given money isn't that. Any thoughts on this? When I was running for President Peter, I had visions of an American exchange program where when you were graduating from high school, you'd go to another part of the country and live with a family who by the way, would send their kids someplace else too, so they'd probably be nice to you. Maybe you'd even trade a great way of creating globalization and peace, right? Yeah, so then you'd be like, hey, when someone says something negative about those folks in the red or blue zone, you'd be like, I actually hung out with them, and they're perfectly fine.

1:12:03And they're just like us. I had notions of various types of national competitions, not because it necessarily had economic value, but because people need structure, purpose, fulfillment, goals, community. If you were to rewind to an earlier point in in life. Maybe your church or religious group served a particular role in your life. Now that has gotten replaced unfortunately by this is going to per hurt you in your heart, but it's been replaced by politics in some people's lives. So we do need to imbue more communities with the sense of structure or purpose, fulfillment, goals. And one of the big misconceptions about me has been that I was somehow unmindful of that.

1:13:00I mean, I like to work honestly. Now, I'm very, very fortunate where I get to do very, very meaningful, purposeful work. And I genuinely feel like, hey, if I weren't here, something wouldn't get done. So that's a good feeling. And that the goal has to be to try and make it so that But more people have that feeling, and even if it's not something society -wide, like maybe you or I am working on, it can be something as simple as today I'm going to be very important to helping my neighbor clear their garage or care for their children or what have you. One of the things that people hopefully realize is a lot of the jobs, not all, but a lot of the jobs that robotics and AI will take are jobs that were not the jobs people dreamed of doing when there were kids.

1:13:55Right? It didn't dream of being a waiter or cleaning apartment buildings or whatever it might be, but that was the job that you could get to put food on your table or get insurance for your family. And so the question really is, fine, let tech take those jobs that are dull, dangerous, or dirty, you know, and how do we enable that individual now to level up to what they dreamed about? How do we allow people to dream into a bigger purpose? And I think AI as their co -pilot to help them educate themselves and do things they didn't think they could do is critical. And I think it's almost we have to split what you do for a living to make money, separate for what you do for a purpose.

1:14:48Yeah, and one thing Peter that you suggested just now is that there's a distinction between how men and women or boys and girls experience this phenomena where then studies have borne this out by the way that if you have an idle man, they volunteer less than an employed man, even though they have more time, and their consumption of drugs and gambling and some other things go up. So, the sense of purpose and usefulness that you're describing is vital to staff off both personal and community self -destruction. And one of the things that Americans are experiencing at higher levels unfortunately are those things, deaths of despair continue to rise.

1:15:44And there's an asymmetry in terms of how men and women are fairing in contemporary American life where now only 40 % of incoming college students are men as an example. and so there has to be a massive investment in things that help men in particular find a way forward. In the absence of these kinds of measures, many men will go down dark rabbit holes and roots, and that's where the negativity takes over. Yeah, and unfortunately it is also the case for younger men and their teens when hormones hit And they're not fighting the lions on the Savannahs of Africa Yes, and this is something I feel very deeply where you know again I've been very fortunate by remember as a young man when I started a company and did not work out and my Asian parents Frankly pretended to their friends that I was still a lawyer and doing well

1:16:52But you know, you feel like this challenge to yourself worth. Now I was again very fortunate in my case I joined another startup and then... Which is what makes America great. Yeah, yeah, it's what makes America great. But there are lots of young men in particular who don't have this set of opportunities. And then for them, they kind of shrink inward. I'm also the parent of two young boys, so it's one reason why I feel this as a mind. Oh, yeah. So you feel this too. Yeah. And, you know, I mean instinctively, like your kids will be fine. My kids will be fine. One of my boys on the autism spectrum has particular challenges.

1:17:35But I see American boys in different circumstances, and a lot of them, you know, if they don't find a productive direction, it'll turn inward in ways that are not positive. I want to thank you, Andrew, for having the courage to run for president. It is something I will never do, not for me, but not even in an independent primary where people can vote on their smartphone's Peter, where you can actually talk steds. If logic actually rules, okay, it's a non -zero, but it's still, I'd rather spend my time solving rules. In many ways, my goal will be to make it so that awesome people like you have a higher chance of You're out of the ring that is currently the case currently.

1:18:23I would totally You know get it All right, but listen I love the idea of Mark Cuban versus Tony Robbins versus Kim Kardashian as in on the on the independent Spectrum for election it would be a fun fun election I mean, we could actually pay for the entire thing with just the reality TV rights. And we would run the table, Peter, genuinely, because so many Americans would look up, I mean, two thirds of Americans won't turn to the two -party system. If you had that battalion, everyone would be like, okay, we're totally doing that.

1:18:58We would win. I mean, you know, and this is something we should be building towards as quickly as possible. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you for your moonshots, my friend. Just to remind folks again, it is to reinvent and fix the democracy, no small challenge, and then to help birth the UBI as a program that is recognized, understood, and rolled out. Not just here in the United States, but through an example in the United States, I think around the world. I'm looking forward to a time when kids are dreaming of the types of moonshots they had when I was a kid, right? Being asked to not go to the moon and moon shots that really make the world a better place.

1:19:41So, where do we find you on social media, Andrew? Well, what a vision, Peter, will fight alongside you to make it real for kids around the world. You can find me at andreeang .com, andreeang in most social media platforms, or you can go to forwardparty .com, but let's actually build a version of the future we know is possible. It's not going to happen without us. I love it and watch out for Andrew's new book, The Last Election. And remember, the hero is Mark Cuban. But don't tell Mark that. Paul, thank you for your vision and I'm going to help spread your word because I believe in what you're saying it makes a heck of a lot of sense.

1:20:26Well, thank you Peter. It's about abundance, my friend.