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

Given the advances of AI and robotics, we're gonna have something called universal high income. I'm not sure how you get to universal high income. Um without uh major as dysfunctional as I thought. Our political system was it's even worse. This fourth industrial revolution is the most dramatic thing that's happened to our society. In history. We're here in twenty twenty six. Uh I do think the jobs are going to get

So you're gonna have rampant social unrest if we don't do something quick. DC is on a multi-decade tape delay. You have, like you said, the rate of Just accelerating all the time, and so what's gone um from an inconvenient tape delay is now a catastrophic one. The disintegration of the social contract is the most important conversation that we could be having. What's the advice for someone in college today?

or someone a junior, senior in high school. The only career path you can rely on is entrepreneurship uh and owning your own future and path. But a lot of people aren't cut out for that. Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots, another episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech. Here with my Moonshot mates, DB2, Dr. EXO and AWG, and here with a friend of the pod, a dear friend of mine, Andrew Yang. Andrew, good morning to you.

Hey Peter, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Are you in the West Coast? Uh East Coast. Uh yeah, so for me this is a better time than you guys. Well everybody else on the East Coast. That's why no one complained as a about a six AM start this morning. Um yeah, we're Excited to have this conversation. A lot going on. You know, for us this is a conversation on typically AI and exponential.

uh technologies, how we get people ready for the future. And one of the things we're talking about in the future is the changes that are coming and the potential for social unrest. How do we deal with the changing social contract? We're going to talk about UBI, UHI, a number of different subjects. Everybody, if you don't know Andrew, uh entrepreneur extraordinaire, uh 2020 US presidential candidate, which really put him on the main scene, leading advocate for universal basic income.

Founder of Humanity Forward and the Forward Party, and a national voice about AI's impact on jobs and the middle class. You know, we get a lot of conversations, a lot of questions around, you know, how does all this conversation around AI crypto, uh, you know, robotics apply to me? How does it apply to me if I'm not, you know, in the V C business, if I'm not a tech entrepreneur? I want to dive into that. So

Let's jump in. Uh Andrew, I'm gonna start with a conversation about UBI versus UHI. When Dave and I were interviewing Elon at the beginning of 26. Uh, one of the conversations that came up was his theory that no, we're not gonna have a universal basic income. Given the advances of AI and robotics, we're gonna have something called universal high income. Uh let me play this short clip from our conversation uh which which went a little bit in unintended or unexpected direction.

I how do we go towards universal high income instead of social unrest? So uh one on both. Yeah. That's my prediction. Well that will make for a lot of problem Is that your actual prediction? Yeah. Yeah, it seems likely.

Andrew, reaction to that, pal. I'm not sure how you get to universal high income. um without uh major political realignment and I'd suggest that universal basic income would probably have to come first. Uh it would be like an intermediate step. Uh and One of the things I I'd love to unpack with Elon is how he thinks we get from here to there. And also how this interacts with the person that's asking the question. Like let's say you're a 50-year-old middle manager at a

Fortune five hundred company that's worried that your job is uh going to disappear. You might have a mortgage, you might have two kids. Uh and then how does that person wind up with a robot doing all their chores uh and um money flowing in such that they can bring their family out to a nice meal at will? Uh you know, like the the path

Uh to me is what's important because uh we're here in twenty twenty-six. Uh I do think the jobs are going to get whisked away uh in a lot of these firms, and that family is real. I mean uh I grew up with Um, folks who right now are uh deeply concerned that they're gonna lose their job and they very well might uh don't have a huge safety net or or pool of savings. Maybe they they have a kid who's um uh, you know, prime to go to college. Uh and then that's another part of it is like, hey,

What's college for? You know, like if I if I'm saving up Um two hundred fifty, three hundred thousand dollars for my child to go to university. Are they gonna get a job afterwards? Are they just gonna come right back and live with me? Um so those are the questions that I hear every day. I I really got the feeling talking to Elon, like he was eager to work on exactly the question you asked until he got to Washington.

And his his quote actually was like it's a blood sport and Man, did it he scare him away in a hurry? Um, but I I think he he was eager to work on exactly the logistics of getting from here to UBI to UHI and you know, one thing we talk about on the pod is how short the timelines are.

You know, the election cycle's gonna be four years no matter what, but AI is accelerating at a rate where four years is like like forty years. So the amount of change in inside any given time window i is like nothing we've ever seen. So maybe we should just figure it out right now. Well one of the the jokes I I told just yesterday, Dave, is that D C is on a multi decade tape delay, uh in part because uh we have seventy and eighty year old legislators.

Uh and uh you have like you said the rate of change just accelerating all the time and so what's gone um from an inconvenient tape delay is now a catastrophic one. Yeah. Yeah. Salim, what are you thinking about this?

Um uh uh well I've got a bunch of thoughts. First of all, Andrew, I wanna just uh applaud you. You're the social contract interpreter for the whole world. I think that you're bringing UBI to the at a top level discussion is one of the most important things we could be doing. Um I have a quick apology for you because a few years ago when you were doing your presidential run I interviewed you for twenty five minutes.

And we finished this interview and at the end I realized I'd forgotten to hit the record button. And I said it. I'm so sorry. And you were so gracious. No no no no. You were in front of the White House right now. You you you were gracious and you said Let's do it again. And we did it again and it was fantastic. So I really want to just thank you for that deal with that. This is why I didn't win.

Um but I but I think that this is the fundamental the the disintegration of the social contract is the most important conversation that we could be having. And I think you're absolutely right. UBI has to come before UHI. The big challenge is going from a labor union tax job construct to that is such a big leap. public uh uh office and public um uh sector is not gonna get us there. So have you thought about how do we get there? Oh yeah, I think about it all the time. I think about it every day.

I'm waiting for enlightenment. that government gets its act together. Um and that that seems vanishingly unlikely, I know. Um but um I I still believe that that's more of a possibility than most. Um and and I can see some real uh outsized asymmetrical po like possibilities even in twenty twenty eight. Um then the other path is that you have a series of uh

I was gonna say billionaires, but they don't have to be billionaires. Just like well resourced individuals say, Look, let's just get this show on the road Um, I I was encouraged by

uh some of what Dario Amade and the anthropic team have put out there where they say, look, A, they were honest. They said we're gonna automate away fifty percent of the entry level white collar jobs in the next one to five years. And I was like, oh like thank goodness they came out and said it because uh, you know, like people might believe them.

Um a and B, uh they're going to get phenomenally wealthy and they expect to give the vast majority of it away and they would like to uh shore up the social contract uh and find ways to keep society whole. and strong. And so if the government doesn't get its act together, you can see a group of um tech innovators and entrepreneurs who are part of this revolution um turning around and saying, look, um we wanna make sure the middle class survives this.

era uh and here's a hundred million dollars, here's five hundred million dollars, and then you'd pick a locality and show what can be done, which itself might catalyze other philanthropy um and the government eventually. So those are two pathways I see. Everybody, you may not know this, but I've done an incredible research team.

And every week myself, my research team study the meta-trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology. And these meta-trend reports I put out once a week. Enable you to see the future ten years ahead of anybody else. If you'd like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandas.com slash Metatrends. That's diamandas.com slash Metatrends.

But Andrew, just to dri j dive in this a little bit, we're talking about uh UBI, every single person In the United States, let's talk about it for the US, getting a check Uh very much a stimulus check if you would, similar to what happened during COVID. You know, what do you think the right amount of capital for a UBI payment would be to every family? Do you have a number in mind? Well I campaigned on a thousand dollars a month in twenty twenty, um which if you run some numbers

Uh GDP right now is around eighty four thousand dollars ahead. Uh it's going up, up, up because of AI. So it's gonna break ninety and then a hundred thousand um in the relatively near future. Um a thousand's probably a bit low. Uh if you look at the poverty level. Um It depends upon where you are in the country. Um, but it might be um something around uh twenty five thousand dollars uh a person um in that order in that order of magnitude.

Um and that's per person. Um and so you you can see uh maybe like twice the thousand dollars a month um might be necessary. So if we give if we gave the bottom two hundred million of the three hundred million Americans fifty thousand a month Um you know that's about fifty thousand a year you mean? That's that's about ten trillion dollars uh allocated per year.

I mean the the chall the the opportunity is if in fact we start dividing by zero, meaning the cost of labor and AI, uh we're gonna one of the other conversations we had with Elon was we're gonna see the first hundred trillion dollar companies And we're gonna see multi trillionaires coming online. And and one of the points you bring up is is the money for a UBI coming from the government?

Or do humans start aligning with companies and the companies start providing basically that UBI? I wonder if that's an option you've considered. You know, company's a possibility. I actually think it's going to come from um human beings. Uh, you know, and and one example would be something like what Michael Dell and his wife recently did where they gave away, I wanna say, six billion dollars. to um Trump accounts for

generally poor kids in the Texas area. Uh was um maybe two hundred fifty dollars a person. Um but it was from an individual or their philanthropy and it was geographically centered on where Michael lived. Um and and so I I see that as a harbinger where

you just have an individual say, uh like if it was anthropic and they live in the Bay Area, they could be like, look, we're gonna do this uh for like this region. Um and then I that like that to me is more likely because if a company does it Um, a company has a hard time justifying it, you know, especially if they have shareholders and uh even if they're public. I mean if they're public

they would end up with lawsuits up the wazoo saying like you can't be giving company money away to do something this non um shareholder serving. Um so I think it it's going to have to come from human beings. Um but I and and by the way, one of the cases I also make is that look

So if if I'm a billionaire, which I'm obviously not, though I know you guys know um some some people who resemble that, um the media sometimes presented it like uh I was and then my wife's like, Where the heck is this billion dollars that they keep talking about? Um so Uh if I'm a billionaire and you come to me and b by the way I think this entire billionaire tax conversation is really

um counterproductive uh you know, it's it's uh it's um like uh I mean the the fact is if you actually had a five percent wealth tax you'd have zero billionaires the next day'cause they'd all um, you know, be uh uh in Switzerland or wherever.

Um taxes. And also any w any one time tax, it's like what are you doing? Like taking the can down the road next year. Like how's that gonna work? Yeah, no, they're saying recurring. I was like, Yeah, good luck finding someone who's gonna stick around for that. Um so so If you're a billionaire and I come to you and say, hey, we need your help to keep America from utterly disintegrating, you would say, look,

I'm into it. I'm a human being. I'm sympathetic. And I don't want my kids having armed guards around them all the time and all this other nonsense. But I'm dubious that if I send a check to the government it's actually gonna go to anything good. Um because the government is uh you know, uh just going to end up um you know like putting it towards some debt that they ran up or some bureaucracy I can't identify or some uh you know, uh uh other boondoggle.

I'm very, very sympathetic. Um, and so then you'd say, um, hey, how about we skip the government step? And we take this right to the people and people that you care about. Um, I think the Dalios, Ray Dalio, they were trying to emulate what the Dells were doing in Connecticut. Um so I think that human billionaires are going to be the first movers in this direction uh and uh they're going to center it around where they live.

That was Like you know, Peter's question is how do we get to UBI? And the answer is, well, government could get its act together and then everyone says, Not a chance in hell. Okay. Path two is through billionaires, which you you said, okay, let's call those well heeled.

people. But one of the things that came up in Davos, you know, four years ago and also again this year in a big way is the fact that this is the first time in the history of the world that those well healed AI billionaires also control all media. You know, Elon is on stage being very political in the last election while buying Twitter X, which is one of the massive media platforms, and now those media platforms have AI all over them. So for the first time in world history

You know, i the what you described is a scenario where these billionaires give a hundred million dollar check to a candidate, the candidate runs T V ads, that elevates their campaign, they get elected. But that's so four years ago, you know? Now that same well healed Dario in this case also controls the AI voice and what it says with the training data.

I mean that's it's just a very, very different scenario from anything we've seen before. Um Alexander present to you all the twenty twenty eight scenario where like uh everything speeds up. So um a and Elon was tiptoeing around this. He actually didn't tiptoe, he just publicly said, like, hey, we should start the America Party. Um at which time my phone started blowing up. Um and then he

uh um flipped a lot of people where they're like, oh, um you can't do a third party. It's like, oh wait a minute. Uh Elon totally could do a third party because you you identify the obstacles and Dave you just touched on them. So one is let's call it for sake of argument a billion dollars. You could probably do it on less, but let's say a billion dollars. Two, uh a media

platform or megaphone and he owns it. And then three is popular movement. Uh and uh you definitely have that lying in wait where right now Fifty percent of Americans say we're independent. Democrats have a 29% approval rating, Republicans have a 32% approval rating. So i if you were to light the signal, a bunch of people would come your way. And if you are a political party, um, which the forward party is, you can design a nomination process however you like. There's no magical

uh scripture that says it has to s to be in New Hampshire and Iowa or whatever. Like it's just made up. Oh really? And and so you c you could do uh uh an online vote on your smartphone independent presidential primary with me, Mark Cuban, Oprah Matthew McConaughey, America's gonna be all right, all right, all right. Um and then uh have like a series of people and by the way, the American public would be like, Ooh, this is actually interesting.

Well, what these people are gonna say. I kind of know on some level what all the dems are gonna say. what J D Vance is gonna say, but I do not know what this crew's gonna say. You have Joe Rogan moderate uh the forum and the debate. You go around the country. And the American people would then say, this crew, regardless of which of these people I prefer, this crew is trying to give it back to me.

I can tell because the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have no interest in giving it back to me, but these guys do. Um and then you'd get millions and millions of people participating in this primary. The person that wins then gets Like you know, Elon and uh like uh Dario and the rest of it being like, sure, I'm I'm I'm more into this than I am into that. Uh a and then we run it back. This is all on the table for twenty twenty eight. Um now will all of that come together?

Don't know. Um, but certainly every piece is there. Exciting, I mean that last election showed how flawed the primary process is and I I yeah, the timing is perfect for it. The amount of change between here and twenty twenty eight is gonna 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 you tromp.

across the country, uh to Iowa and then you I I thought that was just sort of written into law somewhere, but I I had no idea you could just do it any way you want. A thousand percent no, Dave. Um As a matter of fact, there are people that are trying to change the order right now um within the DNC uh and the RNC just demoted Iowa uh sorry, the DNC already demoted Iowa, so you won't see Democrats going to Iowa anymore. Um uh it it

It's carved in stone in that it's a DNC rule that um, you know, they fight over uh every four years. Um but there's no magic to it at all. And if you think about it, um there are forty-two 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's gonna be, um, California or wherever, they'd be like, Oh, I never get to do that because by the time it gets to California, it's already settled.

Alex, you have any opinions in this conversation? Sure, many. Uh so Andrew, first of all, fun to be chatting. I 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 the optimal policy versus say one of many alternatives. In in my mind, alternatives would be universal basic services, where the cost of energy and healthcare 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. So universal basic services could be as much uh i s somewhere in between free and say like an amazon superprime that offers everything that one needs to survive for a hundred dollars per month. Which by the way is the subject of something called the Abundance X Prize.

250 bucks 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. Wha how do you reason what what's the thinking process? But behind UBI versus lots of other policy alternatives. Uh uh I'm on all hands on deck. Uh any solution that improves people's

Lives uh is a win. Um and so right now, and I think Peter knows this, but um I started a company called Noble Mobile that's trying to get Americans wireless cost down closer to what Europeans pay. So the average American spending eighty three a month on their wireless. I have a hunch that all of you are spending twice that. Um I I I was spending a hundred fifty a month on Verizon.

Um the average European spending thirty Five a month, that delta of forty eight a month comes to about six hundred dollars a year for the average American, then multiply it times all the years they're gonna be a wireless customer. um uh and the people in their household. Um, by the way, Verizon gave its shareholders eleven billion in the last twelve months. So um So you have a hidden tax about a hundred billion on the American people, Alex, uh in terms of our wireless connectivity?

Um and so I was inspired by what Mark Cuban did with generic drugs, where he bought generic drugs of bulk and tried to make them available to the American people at a low markup. Um you could frame that as universal basic services, maybe. Maybe that's not enough.

Um but I love it. You know, if we can get energy cost down to zero near zero, freaking sign me up. Um like the i if you look at the cost structure of the average American household right now, it goes in this order. Um number one housing. Two health care, three education, four, food, five, fuel, six, transportation, seven, um, entertainment and media, and eight, wireless.

Um so I think we should be trying to attack each of those. Um but the fact is like the highest line item one is housing, which uh, you know, like is reliant 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 gonna build seven million new new housing units because wealthy people um

Uh, get very conservative when someone's trying to build an affordable housing um complex in their neighborhood. Um so I I'm totally down with trying to attack the cost structure at every turn. Um and uh you know, you identified uh fuel which is um you know on the list at like, you know, um but it it's not the main thing um uh for Americans. Um If we can get housing and healthcare um and like hopefully education um under control, then you know then then you'd be making real progress.

But m maybe just to press on that point a bit, so for housing, healthcare, and education, there there's an alternative universe perhaps where we create an overabundance of supply rather than juicing demand with stimulus checks.

So w w in in your mind, how how would you morally weight, say, creating special economic zones where housing is overabundant, filled with skyscrapers, or where healthcare is driven to zero with uh effectively municipality level AI or education is purely AI, basically trying to solve the this perceived problem from the supply side with overabundance rather than from the demand side with stimulus.

Uh I'm I'm all for it. Um I I just think that Right now, if you say, Hey, which is gonna be faster, um, I have more confidence in our ability to to transfer money into people's bank accounts um very, very quickly.

Um than than I do uh designing some of the solutions you're talking about. Not one or the other. Right. It's not one or the other. And and 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 um realistically months or years uh and that's if everything were magically in place.

Yeah, Elon's point was we're gonna 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. We can get into that. Selim, you were gonna add? Yeah, two two things. I think the UBS the the most constructive thing I've heard about the UBS

commentary. I think Andrew makes a valid point that if we want to just give money it's the easiest model. And uh the on the affordability and how much do you think the 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, etcetera. Entrepreneurship explodes under this model.

Uh one just an observation. Uh the in the nineteen seventies Manitoba and Canada, the province, uh gave a UBI out and they p implemented this program and it was staggeringly successful And after two years they realized, oh my god, we they don't even need government to exist if we have this incidence. And they cancelled it instantly because government wants to exist. And that's the immune system. I think that's the d 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 l uh jump for governments to make. Uh th I would really enjoy that. Uh and and w one of the the the the things that made me sad When I was campaigning was that like there was a woman in Iowa

Who said, um, hey, I'm afraid to volunteer in my community because I might lose my disability check. Um, 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 for both her and the the people. So that there's a a a lot of um

uh bad incentives in this system. Um, a lot of paternalism, a lot of stuff that makes people feel uh like they're subject um to the bureaucracy um of government in a way that's really um stilling uh like the even the most basic forms of entrepreneurship. Andrew, I think your answer is right on target because the the timelines, the small timeline differences are gonna matter a lot. Job loss is a twenty twenty six thing and then have a huge twenty twenty seven thing.

And then building, you know, low income housing is a multi-year j just getting it approved is a very long, slow process. So you're gonna have rampant social unrest. During that two year window if we don't do something quick. So giving out Stimmy checks is is quick. Subsidizing employment. Yeah, the problem with stimulus checks is when you pay somebody to not work, they lose the work motivation very, very quickly. 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 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. Well yeah, but but but put the d you know, like the Cape Cod Canal to me was a massive public works project with one boat a day and ten million cars trying to get over the bridge. Just like he created a huge hole in the ground that is more of a problem than a solution. Um

So you don't you don't want the government decide it. You want 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. Um,'cause in Canada they do a lot of this where they sub uh subsidize, but the problem is they put so many

rules and l um uh procedural barriers it becomes uh nonsensical to try and get it. So that's the problem there. Alex, over to you. Yeah, I 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 of the supply of available power. And in 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. Um so I I guess m maybe to put that in in question form, Andrew, uh Going back to UBI versus UBS versus universal basic equity versus whatever's 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 at 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? Yes, I I think that That that's in the portfolio, Alex, of things that um could be helpful solves. I I wanna underscore just how uh far along in this process we are. I mean, you all remember when the um the

The healthcare CEO was shot in the street, and then um his killer is lionized. Uh and that was X months ago. I think things Just continue to deteriorate. Um, where young people today, and this pains me. I was just speaking to a group of CEOs.

yesterday when it's like young people now regard a lot of successful people as bad, you know, and and uh you look at that and be like, wait a minute, like Like that that's uh obviously like a very troubling characterization where, you know, it's like, oh, anyone who's done well um must have uh stepped on people or done something um negative or or malignant.

Um and so we're you know, you can characterize what inning we're in of the di the deterioration, but it's one reason why Dave said it's like, Oh yeah, like we gotta 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, okay, capitalism bad, socialism good.

You know, the average age of a first time home buyer is like forty years old now. So if you're twenty eight, you're out of luck, it you know, you're gonna get a college degree that is valueless. The underemployment rate for recent college grads is now over fifty percent. You're gonna be at home with your parents, you still owe these loans. Like like the the anger is really, really

um high and rising. And then on the right it's taking this other form, uh this um uh Uh kind of reactive um uh like hyper um genderizing of various like roles and conversations and and um things that also don't in my mind you know like solve the problem. Um and so I'm all about trying to to get there as quickly as we can, even recognizing that.

People are gonna slip through the cracks. Like even if we were to do a lot of good things like that, there there's I mean, this is where Elon's I I predict universal high income and social unrest.

It's like the unrest is unfortunately much closer than we'd like to think. Andrew, let me throw out an idea that I've been uh you know, 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 that growing because the future is a terrible place. uh to face from a position of fear.

I'm gonna move us to a conversation around jobs. This is uh Oh Peter, I have a joke for you. Um to lighten the mood a little bit. Sure. Um so I was a CNN contributor and a number of years ago they pitched me a T V show called The Future of with Andrew Yang. It was gonna 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. Well th and and this is this is something we're gonna be announcing at the Abundance Summit. I don't know when we're gonna 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, you know, dystopian AIs. So if that's the future you've learned You know, why would you want ex machina or black mirror or terminator? Uh 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 we need more Roddenberry and and less Cameron in that regard. I used to have a slide, Peter, saying like it's either Star Trek or Mad Max. Yeah. Uh and you kind of veer towards one or the other. Yeah, we have two we have these two futures ho in superposition and we need to

I mean, we're going to be able to do that right to Alex's point that we're speedrunning all the time. And and and also I I want to reach for some sort of Strauss Howe generation hypothesis type theory that it's cyclical with somehow after World War Two.

tail fins are getting added to cars in the fifties and sixties and people w were reading the golden age of science fiction. But now people are watching Lord of the Rings and fantasy rather than science fiction. Like fantasy is completely overwhelming. science fiction words if if you look at trends over time. I I guess maybe a Andrew to put that in question for him. How how much of

generational pessimism do you think is actually generational? Uh how much of it is cyclical versus periodic trends that'll just peep people will eventually cycle back to optimism after something bad has happened. Well, I I'm a numbers guy, uh, Alex, and one of the the numbers that really haunts me is that young people socialize uh and get together about fifty percent less than we all did in our twenties. as optimistic events. Like even if you decide to have a little party at your house

Uh you have to assume that uh people will wanna come. You have to assume that they'll like your food, you have to assume that, you know, your house can accommodate them. Um, you know, they won't trash the place. Um uh and and so to to me like you could go hand in hand with like in real life social gatherings and how good people are gonna feel. Um and um right now, unfortunately, we're getting together less and less.

Yeah. All right. I am going to move this conversation towards jobs. So here is a comment from the uh 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. Uh second one here, the Fed Governor uh Waller highlights unusual growth without jobs.

Historic anomaly where GDP is expanding while labor market is fragile. GDP grew one point four percent in Q4 of twenty twenty-five, despite the weakest job creation since twenty twenty-two. And the third st uh story here to weave in Comes from Jack Dorsey. Yeah, so Block, his company shares were twenty four percent after four thousand employees got laid off. So this is what Wall Street rewards uh higher profitability from lower cost. So let's paint this picture of uh the growing loss of jobs.

There's a lot of conversation out there from uh other people in the tech community saying, no, no, no, we're gonna increase the number of jobs. I think people get confused about entry-level jobs versus, you know, more advanced jobs. CEO of a publicly traded tech company.

And he said unannounced, he said, We're gonna fire fifteen percent of our workers and then two years from now we're gonna fire another twenty percent and then two years after that we're gonna fire another twenty percent. He's like after that, don't know. Um and I take him at his word. You know what I mean? Um uh especially after this block. illustration where CEOs

um are going to have to be ruthless on headcount if they want to keep their own jobs uh 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 those And then you'll tell us a joke. Yeah, then may I tell you a joke. But if you've been inside one of these uh large corporations, you kind of sense instinctively that forty percent of the people uh aren't really indispensable.

Shall we say? You know, it's like uh because I I mean I I've worked in startups. And in startups, uh like everyone is I mean, you know, even in startups, like, you know, not everyone's indispensable all the time. Um but but there's a much more of a culture of uh of making of finding problems and solving problems in a in a company versus laying back.

Oh yeah, and I mean it's one reason why I I love startups so much, you know. It's like I I find them to be uh pure utilization of uh the soul, like energy, talent, um, optimism, etc. Um so I think publicly traded companies are going to fire white-collar workers uh very, very quickly. And the easiest people to fire are the people you haven't hired yet.

You know, so that they're 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. Um, I do think that uh 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.

And then our CTO came and said, Hey, I don't think we need to hire for that role because the I AI tools are now good enough. Like if you have uh uh like a strong managerial type. Um the the comparison I make is that used to have pyramids Uh and someone said I would hire three juniors for every, you know, senior. Uh and then now um you have columns, maybe. So you have like a senior and then one junior.

And you're good. You know. And so uh, if you're a young person, then uh you never make it into one of these environments. to get trained and learn and uh develop and ascend. And 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.

Yeah, like you know, the the steps three and four are gonna be um harder and harder uh to find. And that's gonna 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 you know, and can't have a family, uh that is what causes social unrest and anger towards those, you know, tech companies uh or those investors that made that future, destroyed the American dream that we had.

So w let's bring it back. 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, it's working for yourself. That

what I would like for my kids, it's not cut out for everybody. What advice are you giving people? You know, it it's similar, Peter, in that uh the only career path you can rely on is entrepreneurship, uh, and owning your own future and path. But A lot of people aren't cut out for that. Um and I'm I'm actually going to look at my two boys, one of whom's thirteen, one of whom is ten.

Um, one of them is definitely not cut out for that. Um, you know, and and so you're you're trying to guide people on a path that isn't gonna be right for in my opinion. 80% of people because entrepreneurship's really, really difficult. Uh and Um so what one thing I say to parents is the success factors for our kids are the same as they ever were. Uh it's great.

It's perseverance, it's coachability, it's sociability, uh, it's caring about something, um, it's hustle, it's believing that your efforts can actually pay off. Um the one of the single biggest factors in whether your kids have have those attributes is screen time. Like you give them too much screen time and their uh self-control goes down, their ability to focus goes down, like all this stuff.

Um, so you know, the the shorthand for parents is try and keep your kids off of screens and social media to the extent you can uh and try and train them to be an awesome ass-kicking human being regardless of circumstances, and then they'll have a chance. um knowing that their course of study might not matter. That's like the big thing is to be like, look.

Um, you know, the 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 uh, you know, learning and and development. Um, but the actual subject matter, it could be anything.

Um and and knowing too that to the extent that some of our kids can be channeled towards the trades, uh and Um, jobs that we're gonna 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 gonna have a robot plumber anytime soon. We're not gonna have a robot HVAC repair um person anytime soon. Like all of the old buildings will still need electricians, of which there's a massive shortage.

So if if you have like a young person who might be handy. Um and let's say they're a guy. You know, like it it it Like it's not a bad thing. I mean, you know, like you you skip the indebtedness, you skip a lot of things. Yeah. This is awesome. So all the women become entrepreneurs and all the men become plumbers and the other things. Like statistically. Um and and what we've done is we've stigmatized the trades for everybody. Um and then we we should be saying

Um to men in particular, trades are cool. Uh you know, really good, solid, steady job. Like don't worry about it. Well if you're a data center builder, you have a hell of a uh 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.

If even if it's eight years, right? I mean we s the the progress we're seeing in robotic software and robotic agility and progress is stunning. Uh well. So data centers, yes, I can see robots building them um i in like a you know some foreseeable time frame. Plumber no. Like uh it's just that because like the human

is just gonna have an easier time knocking on your door being like, Hey, what's the problem? Coming in, like doing the thing. Can we talk time frames? Andrew, yeah, please. The challenging time frame uh 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 bringing universal basic services

I think is, you know, starts coming in maybe in three years to the five, eight year time frame. Right. I I I've always viewed that. Uh 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 time frame, that layout? Hey Peter, I love your time frame because it's actually very, very optimistic. Uh, you know, I mean you're talking to the preeminent

um proponent of UBI and if you were like, yeah, UBI next one to three years, I would take it a hundred times out of a hundred. Uh, you know what I mean? Like uh e even as I'm the guy who's saying like we should do this and it's totally possible. Um, so I hope you're right. I I hope we end up heading down this road over uh the timeline you laid out.

Um, because the truth of it is that uh and this is like the Buckminster Fuller quote, uh that uh the race between utopia and dystopia will be decided in like the very last moment, um kind of thing that that um you know, that there's like a race on And um the dystopian March is uh is going on along at a pretty nice clip, sh shall we say. And then the Utopian March, it's like uh um fits and starts.

uh in in my view. Um but it it's one reason why I would urge people who have the capacity to do to do more, to do what they can, uh to do what we can, um, because Like yeah, Utopia is like a deliberate choice, uh, and it's going to require like a a group of innovators like you all and the folks that we collectively know um to do what we do and and build.

But may 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? 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, uh like the the rest of it. It's like, you know, um you'd rather send a human. And the human's not that expensive in uh in that context. Whereas like a data center, the whole thing is controlled and controllable. Then you you know, uh like you'd have humans still in there, but like you'd also have a ton of robots. And I think people sense that.

Uh can I persuade you to put a number to the not for some time? Is it like ten years that that you think we get humanoid robot plumbers? Twenty years? What's the the precise time scale you envisioned? I think human plumbers are safe um, for at least ten years and probably significantly longer.

Wow. Well isn't that then the solution to i in your mind at least to technical technological disemployment? Let 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? Oh, it's part of it, Alex. And unfortunately there's gonna be a lot of competition for those jobs. Um, but like uh the numbers don't work out, uh, to your point. It's like you have a certain number of plumbers per uh like

capita and then you know you can't have like ten X that number. But but look at the look at the sectors with Balmall's cost disease, like healthcare. Like why can't everyone have one or or not everyone, but uh the the wealthiest a policy prescription, have like one or two personal healthcare assistants as one of several classes or, you know, personal plumbers, personal assistants, and absorb the labor surplus that way.

You're certainly going to see a significant proportion of Americans uh whose job it is to serve the top layer, the top twenty percent. You're going to see nannies, you're going to see um personal assistants, you're gonna see personal trainers. You do now.

Uh you know, and and uh but I I will say if you look at home health care aids as a profession, um the turnover is rampant because it's very difficult isolating work and the average compensation is thirty-five thousand dollars a year for a home health care aid. So i if you say, hey, that's gonna be the job of the future, like none of the people listening to this right now want to be a home health care aide.

Um like it it's you know, and one of my jokes and one of my books was like I was a home health care aid for one day and I wanted to tap out. You know, and and so if if if you were to ask like millions of people to be like, hey, bathe grandma and and that's what you're gonna do as like your job forever, like you know, that it's very, very few people are cut out for that.

And the people that are doing it right now often are doing it because it's the only job on offer. They have to do it, yeah. Hey, uh Andrew, you had a book come out last month, uh uh Tell us about it. And I love the title of it. I'm sure. It's very aptly named, Hey Yang, where's my thousand bucks? Um you can see the image. That's me with some money. Um the the alternate title you'll enjoy even more. It's uh Hey Am I Racist or Are You Andrew Yang? Oh no. So what's the book about?

Um uh the the books about the ins and outs of um 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 lighthearted and humorous. Um while also trying to get some ideas across. Um uh so it it was uh a really fun process, a lot easier than writing my other nonfiction books.

Um and I'm happy to say people are enjoying it. So if if you're if you want like a a laugh that'll make you think, um I I think it's a good choice. You know, Andrew, you're gonna be joining us at the Abundance Summit uh this coming Sunday. Excited. Can you bring a couple of books with you? Um I I think I'll have a whole crate or your team might have already ordered a crate. Oh great, then I'm so happy. I every by the way, this is uh this is funny. Peter, have you written a book?

I have to do that. 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, uh like get to them when they have a book coming out. Because then they're just like, Oh, I haven't really thought. You know, it like I wrote them down and then uh if you're like I wanna hear your thoughts, then they'll be like, Ooh, someone wants to hear my thoughts. It's like a very vulnerable to like

Alex is uh bringing six hundred copies of Solve Everything, which is a bookslash paper that uh we co authored mostly under Alex's genius. So Excited for both of your works of uh of art

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I wanna take us forward to a uh tweet you sent out that went viral, um, which is the end of the office. Um 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 a sharp hit and now a a double tap to the head. Yeah, uh so i if you play out block times

10,000 blocks,'cause there aren't. So um, but uh there are going to be private companies again making choices. um that are quite similar. Uh and so you're going to have fewer workers who head to an office. Uh 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.

Um uh and uh it it's going to get nasty and dark and and I do rely upon some of my friends who are more normal than I am. So what do I mean by that? It's like one one friend my age, I'm fifty one now. Um, and one of my jokes is like I'm lucky not to get dumber in any given month. uh where while AI just gets uh, you know, twice as smart. Um so like uh eventually we just have to uh raise our hands and say, you know what? Like asking us all to compete against uh

Um AI is probably not gonna work out. Um but my my friend is uh is 50 years old, has three kids, has a mortgage, has a corporate job at a bank. And uh and he uh was recently laid off. Uh and so then like what's the next move for him? Um, you know, and and so I've been very encouraging. Um but Uh that 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 uh the burb.

Um and Um, and then you imagine him losing his job and then not being able to find another one that pays him the same, uh, and then how how that plays out in his town um uh and the surrounding suburbs where some people are going to start selling their houses. Um and one of the things I put in this note, which uh it was not just a tweet, it was a blog post that went somewhat viral at uh like I have a substack.

Um I said you might want to put your home up for sale first because you don't want to be last. Like you know, if if if you live in Westchester County or some of the peninsula suburbs, Like people are gonna be selling uh so if you can get a reasonable price um at the front of the line, uh you'd m much prefer that than trying to win one later. Everything starts unwinding.

Um that's you know and of course we we w one one quick follow on there, we've seen in fact uh the bankruptcy rate in colleges uh 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 the group with the highest unemployment rate is college graduates. Yeah. Debt delinquency rates rise, mortgage delinquency rates rise. Like the personal financial distress is uh is ratcheting up.

Uh and you know, we you probably seen a lot of the stats where, you know, significant proportions call it half of Americans. I have limited savings, uh 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 like press a little bit.

And they're super stressed because they borrowed money to send their one kid to college. And I was like, Oh my gosh, like th th this much like I thought you were it it just goes to show too. I mean, you know, it's like uh I'm 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. Um, and and so uh you're seeing the distress pick up.

by the numbers. Uh you know, you can look at any of like the credit card rates, like all that stuff. Like it it it's it it's starting like people are less and less able to meet their um obligations uh financial or otherwise. Don't you th don't you think though, Andrew, th 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. Everyone sits sits in yeah, hundreds of depending on how you count, uh s 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 twentieth.

Twenty first 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, uh at least more ergonomic for for most people to be doing something other than this like really cliched life story. You know, uh uh Alex, I agree that it's something of a modern invention that's about to get uh uninvented. You know, uh the the problem is that all of these people came of age.

um made life decisions uh based upon something that was true um during their lifetime, um that's going to become untrue. And and so again, I'd put you uh in the shoes of either a young person or a parent trying to decide am I gonna go to college? And it's like, well, um shoot, like traditionally going to college, I mean I'm gonna guess all of us went to college, just to guess. Uh and and so then Alex has like a half dozen degrees.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. And and so then um you know, so if someone comes to you and says, Hey, uh guess what, that entire path got deinvented, 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 I wrote a another substack 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. Yeah. Build building a network.

Five years ago. Yes, but then yes, that that's what I said, Alex. I said my strongest memory of going to Brown was Uh my college girlfriend leaving me for another guy. Uh and then being sad for a semester or two. And so like my major learning from Brown was how to deal with a breakup, which I'm gonna suggest is a very important life scale. It served me very well. Like On the other hand, i s simulating a a breakup at the tender age can probably be afforded at a much lower cost than the same.

Than brown tuition. Probably. But but again, like, you know, we're in a circle where I, you know, like, and I was honest, it's like, look, I'm not going to be 'Cause I think it's disingenuous to be like, hey, don't do the thing that my kids are totally gonna do. Like you know what I mean? It's like I I was honest, like, look, my kids are gonna go to college and like, like, so um, but

It's just a much worse value proposition for most families than is being sold to them. And and so like I both of those things are true. Um so that that's really what uh you know I'd I'd like to suggest to folks is that um, you know, it's like these paths are still going to be there and lots of people are gonna take them. They're just not going to lead to as steady ground.

I'm gonna move us to another fun and important subject. We've sort of danced around this. which is the impact on of AI on youth and on populations, so here we go. Population decline in China uh is extraordinary. China's birth rate reported at seventy five year low. Uh the democratic uh the this demographic shift is fueling uh the 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 boyfriends Snarky attitude. And one in eight teens are seeking emotional support from AI chatbots. Sixty four percent of teens use chatbots, twelve percent of them for emotional support. Andrew, thoughts on this? Um yeah, one of my kids resembles this, where he he um doesn't interface very readily with other people generally. Um and so he already is joking about having an AI girlfriend.

Um and then his mom and I are like, No, no, real girlfriend And then he's like, nah, AI. Your AI girlfriend will not leave you. Um, yeah, so uh like this trend is playing out in my household. Um that this is part of My sadness for the death of partying. Um, because uh, you know, like if if you're at home on your screen, uh it's hard to meet a girl.

And um easy to meet an AI chatbot because AI chatbot's right there. Um so uh I see this trend unfortunately growing um more and more and I I wish it were otherwise. Well uh so I have to I I guess press on the the point. Andrew, it it sounds like in in some sense you're concerned about uh it using I I think Peter's language, a growing abundance or overabundance of romance. It's it's artificial romance.

But it it's it's an abundance of romance nonetheless. Uh i I at the same time I I I look to to China. There's this notion in China of I I think it's pronounced Tong Ping lying flat. uh where due to pressures of society many youth are again this sort of the the cliche, but choosing to opt out of the the so-called rat race uh and instead staying home as

as shut ins or in Japan the Hikiko Mori again, similar concept. But i isn't this in some sense a a reflection of an abundance of entertainment and artificial romance and it in in in that sense, uh w why wouldn't you reasonably expect that as we achieve abundance if you think we're we're going to achieve abundance in other sectors as well, not just sort of the personal lifestyle type sectors?

that uh again w we come back and have this conversation and now we're drowning in abundance in all these other areas and No, I I I Andrew, I'm encouraging my my children to stay away from abundance because I want them to to work hard and experience a traditional, in some sense, scarce scarcity based lifestyle. Um, you know, the word that popped into my mind, Alex, is friction. Um, I'm married, have been for fifteen years, uh, and it's far from frictionless.

Um now uh the AI chatbot uh is there and ever present and ever supportive and all all that stuff. Um and so you have to have a tolerance for a certain degree of friction to get married and have uh 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 uh societally. I see them as positives for the species. You know, I think reproducing is a good thing. And And it it's uh you know to to be uh husband and father and and the rest of it.

um or uh oh you know, wife and mother mean uh you just have to put up with a lot of bullshit. Um and our young people uh you know, I think are not used to putting up with tons of bullshit like in in their entertainments and interactions. Um a 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 it's um

U and so that's what I w 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 uh settle down, have a family, have kids.

Um, I don't think that's gonna be easy at all. Uh I think what what we're talking about now with work, um for men, if you don't have a steady paycheck and path, then you don't feel good about yourself and then you don't think you're worthy of uh partnering. Um you know, and by the way, some women might agree with you.

uh vision for for the role of post-scarce economics. W one last question, if I may. I'm curious about the n neither the 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 should the AIs have a a say or rights in this entire discussion? Um right now I'm pre-AI personhood, um, but I'm open minded. Salim, I want to go to you on this on this subject of AI companionship in in youth.

Uh you know, the dropping birth rate is not just China, it's uh Japan's at an all time low. South Korea, much much of the world, other than Africa, uh and parts of India, is uh massive decline. But, you know, you and I both have boys at age fourteen. Uh how do you think about about AI and uh in normal relationships?

So keep uh take into account that I have a radical positivity bias in my 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 gonna be stuck to the ear, 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 a kind of hangout 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 cellphones not talking to each other at all. And we're like, oh my God, this was a driving Lily to do this uh teenager mindset uh uh workshop that she's doing The uh 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 uh uh uh biggest uh trauma that we have to the surface and process it in that intimacy of a marriage over a number of years. And if we um stop having that type of a ki of relationship as adults. then that burden of processing uh that will go to somewhere else. Uh 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 uh human experience, uh partying, uh falling in love, going through that hassle, etc., is the essence of all of this. Uh, I for years was convinced I wouldn't get married and wouldn't have kids. Um, when I got married by half the people came just to physically witness the fact that it was actually happening. Um And the the uh but the but the grounding and the the reality of being a human being that it brings you to deal with a spouse and deal with kids and deal with the

the uh process that they're all going through and watching that is such a a powerful one. I can't imagine now not doing that. Right. And so what does it look like? If a somebody marries an AI and then just switches AIs over time, et cetera, we'll just have to adapt to that. That's what we tell our son. It's like look, AI girlfriend can't have kids, unacceptable. Uh, you know, we need grandkids reprogram. Need grandkids reprogram. Or no college tuition for you.

Uh we don't go that far, but uh so pro pronatalism and also pro UBI. Yeah, yeah.

This program here, you know, our focus, you know, is one of the top, you know, if not the top AI and exponential tech podcast out there. Isn't about politics, it's about technology typically. But given the fact that we have you and uh the forward party, the American Party, whatever it might be, I'm curious about your thoughts here. So pro and anti AI regulation groups are amassing a war chest.

uh for lobbying, right? Uh war chest of two hundred sixty five million dollars. Lobbying spent by AI companies surged two hundred percent in the last twenty-four months. Hundred and seventy million were contributed to the twenty twenty four election cycle. Um Your thoughts on this uh on this topic here. Yeah, um I'm not really seeing the the money from the anti AI groups. I like I I I I see a lot of money from the U.S. Yeah, yeah, right. Exactly. Um but by by the way.

Um, the folks who are dubious of AI, like 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 and one joke is that there are more regulations to uh open a hot dog stand on the street of New York, definitely New York, um, than there are of of launching like a large language model. Um Uh now all the money's on the other side. Um and if if you had a

Like in my mind, a nuanced intelligent conversation. You could be like, Okay, guys, we want to do this, 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 gonna do what we want. Um and then um m the vast majority of elected officials are right there with them.

because this is where all the money and the growth is. Uh, you know, if 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. Um 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. Very few Democrats want to pick it up yet.

But it's where most Americans are. So so that you're gonna 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 gonna 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 of this one. I want to bring this back before we uh we go to an AMA section, back to the conversation earlier about this idea of an American party.

Um what do you imagine might unfold over the next few months? Uh I think that uh there's going to be an independent candidate and they're going to get an outsized amount of support um despite attacks from one side or the other. Uh and then the rubber's gonna hit the road as to whether there are multiple candidates, a primary, a process, like a a genuine competition. Um I have those conversations Um all the time. Uh w what's what's fun is that among Andrew's projects, so like I I'm for

Alleviating poverty at scale via universal basic income. Um, I don't foresee that happening without some kind of political realignment, um, which then makes me pro political realignment. Um Have you been having these conversations with uh Scaramucci as well?

Yeah, yeah. Anthony uh and I are in touch and friendly on it. Um uh some of the other figures that you'd imagine. Um but it the ranks are growing all the time. Um even folks who were uh In one party or another now have this thrown in the towel.

said like I I I'm out. Do you think do you think Elon I mean, have you had a conversation with Elon about this or or DM'd with him? Um Elon and I DM'd, I talked to his team. Um I get the sense that right now Elon's um on board with uh the administration um and that there are a lot of people in a circle that are saying, look You know, we need the administration. We've got like too much stuff. Um but uh I I also think that folks kind of know that he loves his own person.

Yes. And uh and and if he were uh you know, if he had his drrothers, um I think that, you know, things might look a little different. Amazing. You know, the the big conversation here is can AI fix poverty? Uh you know, the vision uh that I painted, God, fourteen years ago with my first book, Abundance, and new book that's coming out, uh, 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 of this technological uh challenging societal period uh where we people are godlike and they have access to everything they need. Um

You know, the biggest challenge on that front on on the flip side of this is gonna be purpose. Can you use that technology to do something purposeful? Can you be a creator versus a consumer? Right? A couch potato is the consumer and the creator is the entrepreneur out there.

It's uh Star Trek versus Mad Max as as you said. Um do you think that AI can in fact uplift every man, woman and child? I think it's uh certainly a possibility and and my goal is to try and get us there. Um 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 uh who wins in that world and who doesn't? Um when you say can AI fix poverty, that suggests that.

people who are currently poor um will not be. And uh that's where I think we should try and go. Um, right now the path of least resistance. is that of the trillions of dollars of value that get generated, uh, it's going to be in the hands of the firms. And then the um stakeholders in those firms Um and and then and you know if you do the math like that, that's a very small slice of the population. Um and so the question is how the value gets from within those uh

confines out uh 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. Um the so for for me, um, you know, like I take shots at uh what's happening in America, but I I think there's a chance that AI does um fix poverty globally. Amazing. Um, you know, if you can ha use AI to reduce poverty of access like education, healthcare, et cetera, faster than you can fix uh uh the poverty of power, like rights and ownership.

then you uh then you win. If AI boosts productivity while concentrating ownership, then you get worse. And so poverty gets worse. And so you can you can solve it by having AI go for poverty of access. So solve for that. And that'll help. Maybe I would so much of this discussion in my mind is focusing on redistribution rather than growing the pie. I'm I'm curious, Andrew, what is the you you talk about Star Trek versus Mad Max?

What is the most Star Trekan type scenario that you envision realistically happening over the next ten to twenty years that radically grows the pie beyond just the separate discussion of how best to redistribute wealth? Oh I mean, Alex, shoot. Like everyone can see the pie's gonna grow uh like very, very quickly because A AI is gonna 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 uh enhance the discovery of life saving drugs, uh material sciences, like uh you know, like e everything is going to so the the pie is gonna grow. I mean it it can't not grow in in that scenario. Um and so uh you know, like the most Star Trekan thing I can imagine is that and this by the way is the vision I'm gonna talk about at abundance.

Is that so UBI is like a piece of the puzzle, but to me it's not like the answer because Individuals, families want to be a very important thing. Purpose, community uh values, development, training, like all these things, 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. Like if you or what might have been Dave, like if you put money into people's hands, of course people are gonna start.

all sorts of new businesses initiatives, or's gonna, you know, get out more. Um, but this most Star Treking thing would be if you had um a caring and nurturing economy and a health and wellness economy and an arts and creativity economy and then people uh got to do various things on various um Um like wavelength.

And then get rewarded, get recognized, like self-organize around these things. Like to me, the utopian path is a multivariate economy with multiple currencies around different pursuits of human flourishing. And uh I I played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid um and role playing games, so maybe it's like uh 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 uh you know like live a great life.

Um so that's the most Star Trekan thing and I I do think Uh we can get there because it's one of the only um paths that make sense to me in terms of people living the lives they want to live.

So you want to j just j just to be clear on that, this is this is fascinating, by the way. Your your sort of Star Trek scenario is for different verticals of the s of the economy or different sectors like health and wellness versus education, i d 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. Uh, you know. But not b between fungible between sectors? Like could I trade a gym credit for an education credit? Maybe you could. And so th there are a couple of really fun things about this, Alec. I have 300,000 American Express points right now. Uh 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 a hundred percent did. Um and 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.

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 that there like the way that right now military veterans get honored um, you know, at the game. So that there are things that we can do that

Make it just like make it social credit. Yes. I mean no so what what's funny, Peter, is that I was prohibited from saying the word social credit because I'm Asian and uh 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 it's not like that. It's like doing stuff that people want to do and enjoy and want to self-organize around.

Um but and then some some sort of centralized multivariate credit based scheme for shaping human behavior. But it doesn't need to be centralized to your point. I mean like you you could put it in the hands of Like local municipality. And and there, by the way, there are communities doing a version of this right now.

Um and they tend to be religious communities. 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 uh as our guest. I'm gonna ask you to go first. Uh Where do you want to hit? Well, geez, I have to pick number three. Okay. Um, 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. Uh Oh right now. This is at this is at La and uh Deli Deletier. Yes.

Um so so the best thing you can do is become an individual advocate, like uh put it on social media to say, look, like I think we should a adopt universal basic income. Um and then to the extent that there are a couple of organizers and organizations around that, um, you should follow them. A guy named Scott Santins, S-A-N-T-E-N S. is excellent. Big fan of Scott. Yeah, yeah. Uh big fan of Scott. And and also me. Um, you can come to uh andrewyang.com and I have uh

um a substack with hundreds of thousands of members um and I'm pushing in this direction. Uh 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. Uh, and to the extent that you know folks in your community that might be able to help others, uh, you know, like uh push them in that direction. But thank you. I totally agree. Dave Blender. Okay.

Uh Professor Blunden, your question, please. I'll take uh question number one'cause 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 Sassier Jr.

Uh yeah, really, really tough time. Actually, I I feel for you and specifically because do you guide your students to go to college or not? It's a really Really tricky question, but the one hard and fast answer is encourage them to use AI as much as you can and get them into groups.

You know, as Andrew said, there's way too little socializing going on between people. So get them into groups that are also experimenting with AI. You know, the new thing is open claw. 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. 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.

Oh in aggregate in in macros. So keep them hands on thing for Ralph, which is uh Please, please, please, and you're encouraging your students to use AI, it's not to do their ninth grade homework or their tenth grade homework. It's to do something that they would consider impossible to do. It's like give your students the objective of, you know, 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 they're blown away by their ability to solve. This is about uplifting uh the capabilities they have. All right, uh Alex, over to you, pal.

I'll I'll take the softball question, Peter. So question number five, how is debt going to be paid in a hyperdeflationary AI economy if scarcity disappears, earnings collapse, but debt remains? And this is from poetry to song. It it it's such a softball question. The answer is obvious. Will hyperinflate w we know how to do it.

If if the cost of everything goes down to zero because or near zero because we've solved everything, we start printing money and everyone becomes billionaires or trillionaires. We we have The state capacity, both as a country and as a world, to to hyperinflate to compensate against the hyper deflation. And that's probably the easiest numerical way to make everyone billionaires. Salim.

Uh I'll also take the softball one number uh two, uh which is um UBI who decides how much? Only for citizens, is it scale to wealth? Is human effort no longer a criteria? And this is from Quiet Us Six. So uh we've talked about this already. UBI is not really kind of a moral prize, it's a stability protocol, right? And you you find the amount that is enough for people to survive but not be happy.

Okay. Um citizenship is a political choice, but the economic logic is that whoever participates in the economy needs a floor to prevent that collapse. uh when you have this type of a demand uh destruction. Um so you can do it implicitly through taxes rather than a means testing the b the the benefit side. But r uh the real the scarcest resource these days is not effort, it's human coherence.

And UBI buys human coherence, it buys stability. All right, I'll take uh number four Salim, I approve that message. I'm your biggest super fan. Well thank you. I saw the president. Salim for vice president under Andrew Yang's uh next Yes. All right. Uh from uh at Steve Trisha Wilson uh quote, uh 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. Uh I think you should be looking at what you do next. Uh, 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? Uh retirement is the worst thing for your longevity.

But what should be prepared for next? Well, first of all, have you saved enough money if we hit longevity escape velocity? Right. Uh if you're if you're sixty five, say, and and you're you've saved enough to get to eighty, the average US lifespan today is seventy nine, health span is sixty three. What happens if all of a sudden uh you know, new protocols hit and you can make it to a hundred and twenty?

Uh so that's something to think about. Uh the second part of this is we're going to see rapid inflation uh and then rapid uh deinflation as the cost of things begin to drop towards zero. The rapid inflation in the near term is gonna come from the government just printing money. uh around the whole UBI side. I mean, I don't know if you agree with that, uh, Andrew, in terms of this cycle, right? We basically have a ton of money being printed like we did during COVID.

And then as AI and robotics come in and and provide oversupply of product and services, the prices begin to drop dramatically. Thoughts on that? Um that makes sense to me. All right, we're going to do a second round here of one question each. Uh Andrew, uh do you get to go first? Wow. Wow. Oh, wait. I have to take in the questions. I have to choose one. Yes. Um I'll do number eight, why not?

Um if I if AI replaces CEO shareholders, shed a major cost, means of production ship to capital owners, isn't that the extreme version of wealth concentration? Um you know people um make jokes about CEOs being like, oh the CEO is firing all these people. Why not just replace the CEO with AI? Um like I I I think this

Um questioner, MGP Star is actually hitting on something really important, um, which is what I was suggesting too. It's like, look, if you look at these large corporations, they're overstaffed, uh, and you 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 uh, you know, that that's um like the decision maker on that. Um I I I think that in most Um places the CEO will be the last to go.

Um a and th this is within private companies and public companies. Um and one reason why um CEOs are expensive um uh is because you kinda need someone um and in the scheme of the uh like the enterprise that that cost actually makes sense. Um so I I do think though that wealth concentration will pick up um because these firms will have fewer workers. Thank you. Dave, over to you Bell.

All right, I'll take uh number seven then. Uh many Americans rely on gig work like Uber for income. Once AI eliminates those jobs, four hundred dollars a month is gone. Who's addressed this impact? Yeah, I I Really from A. Joe Kingstown. Yeah, Joe King Joe Night Town. Night and Nighttown.

Yeah, I I would uh y you have to take agency. Like nobody is thinking this through for you. The 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 in politics.

Uh, so we we meet with governors all the time. The uh rate of motion is near zero. 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. Your corporations are gonna be cutting these these jobs. They're 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. I think it's Joe King H Town is and he's in Houston. So if I'm right, Joe, thumbs up. But I I agree with Dave. Nice. Uh I will go with um number nine. So FSD, um full self-driving, will tip because of insurance costs.

Once people can afford EV insurance, adoption stalls. Isn't affordability the real point to discuss? And this was from JSBG MC sixty six thirteen. Um, so insurance for now is absolutely the hidden uh governor on autonomy adoption, but it's transitional, right? Because as safety data improves, the under uh writing drops and you flip from driver risk to systemic risk. Okay. Now we uh there's a huge shift coming in this because we won't be purchasing cars, we'll be uh 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 you had seven or eight music studios selling you the cassette, the C D, the DVD, selling you scarcity. Okay? Then we digitized music and now you have iTunes and Spotify delivering abundance on a subscription model. That transition uh that we've seen fully in music we expect to see in transportation, healthcare, education, energy, anywhere, everywhere, right?

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, A W G, over to you, Belle. Uh that leaves me with number six, which is a fun question. So uh six is what's the role of nonprofits in the AI economy? How can they safely adopt AI when the lack when I think when when they lack the tech and financial resources. And this is from G N U S four five. Okay. So the elephant in the room.

The very center, the beating heart of the AI economy was until very recently a nonprofit, open AI, and it's worth nearly a trillion dollars. So I I would question the premise of of these pairs of questions. The the A 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 it is essentially a public benefit company.

And I I would again i in the spirit of questioning the premise that they lack 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 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. 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 because right can't wait to have that conversation with the presidents of universities.

You know, I I'd love to to I I 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 uh employed at a nonprofit. They're they're handicapping their ability to spin out companies that would be societally valuable. Why? Because many universities, Stanford is is

sort of a quasi exception, but certainly Harvard and MIT are doing their best not to look like venture capital firms. And I think that's 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. Yes. Yeah. It's amazing. I mean Yeah, universities turning in incubators and and v uh venturous um studios is absolutely the only way it's gonna go.

And survive. Amazing. 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 uh any outro music that you want to send to us.

Send it to media at diamandis dot com and with that one of my favorite parts of the show, uh we have an incredible piece of outro music called Moonshots twenty thirty five by Manos and Seka. Uh Andrew, enjoy this. I think uh this one is especially apropos for our conversation today. We got a moonshot. Was that you Peter in that? It's all of us.

Oh 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. We got a moonshot. Well I I for one Yeah, yeah That was super fun. 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. Yes, for sure.

Well thank you all. Um thanks for having me and look forward to seeing you uh out at abundance before. Yeah, it's gonna be incredible. We're on together on Sunday. Yes. So much appreciated. See you all soon. Thank you in particular. Thank you, Sleem in particular. Bye guys. If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did.

I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, Please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called MetaTrend.

I have a research team, you may not know this, but we spend the 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 Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandas.com slash Metatrends. That's diamandas.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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