The Exchanges

Q if everyone worked less to spend more time with families to take care of themselves? Let's say they only worked one day a week. And we let technology decrease the price of things. You could buy the same with only one, you know, day a week sort of income. Isn't the better question to say, how do we drive unemployment up and that automation take over so we're more efficient?

A So certainly the primary issue is the absence of cash. And so even before this crisis, you know, by, by all accounts, nearly 50% of Americans cannot afford an unexpected 500 dollar bill. And so people have You know, one, two, three, four jobs, multiple gigs, right? Um, but they don't have enough cash. So that is exactly why proponents of technology and automation like Musk, like Sam Altman, um, and many techies in Silicon Valley, um, have, have come on board with a universal basic income because they, they see firsthand what you're describing, which is we automate millions of the manufacturing jobs, millions of the retail jobs, of call center jobs. Of truck driving and transportation jobs over the coming years. That's half of all American jobs, but we, we shouldn't be focused on protecting jobs. We should be focused on protecting people and what people need to start their businesses to, um, pursue, um, their passion to, you know, do what they want to do is they need cash. They need capital.

AI assessment note: “we shouldn't be focused on protecting jobs. We should be focused on protecting people”

Q Here at Thai food house on ninth and 52nd, my favorite spot. Okay. 13 dollars for their pad Thai. If they're now, you know, having to pay an extra 10%, don't they just increase and add that? And now that same pad Thai costs 15 bucks.

A So if you look at the data on the implementation of a value added tax, again, on average in Europe of double the level being proposed, a small fraction of the increase in the value added tax does get transferred onto the consumer. But because it's at every single part of the value chain, right, so all the cost of goods sold, all the components in the packaging, um, it's a self-reinforcing tax. Because if you're the manufacturer of, uh, let's say, I don't know, the, like, Thai food box, right, and there's some metal component, there's some paper component, uh, and what have you, you have an incentive to collect and make sure that the upstream supplier has paid their 10% tax as well. So by the data, um, yes, a small fraction of the cost will be passed on to consumers, But the kicker is we're not just sending this revenue, this cash to go sit in the federal government and get lost somewhere in the pipes. We're using the most direct and efficient way of direct aid to people, which is then transferring it at turn through the freedom dividend, right? So if you spend, to your point about consumption patterns and making your dollar go further, if you spend less than a 120,000 dollars a year on stuff, Then you are so much better off, and that's basically 94% of all people in the United States, because there's money coming in from oxygen in the system, from all the transactions, all the …

AI assessment note: “a small fraction of the increase in the value added tax does get transferred onto”

Q So why did bootage, you know, you, I think Yang finished six in Iowa, 8900 votes, but bootage just did so well in Iowa. What did you, I mean, you must've come to these cattle, your point about these cattle calls, you must've come across his people as you were doing this. What were they doing differently than everyone else that allowed him to finish so strongly in Iowa?

A Yeah. So there are a lot of factors in terms of the nitty gritty of the caucus process. So, um, having been a precinct captain myself, what you saw was on the first alignment. So there's two alignments in the process, right? People kind of gather, Um, and they self-organize into different, uh, clusters in the room, uh, declaring who their favorite candidate is, and then they have a certain, uh, 15% viability threshold to allocate the delegates, um, the winnings of the, of the state. Now, after people lock in to who their first candidate is, people have the choice and the chance to realign, to say, well, oh, my candidate wasn't viable, Um, you know, let's say you supported, uh, Tom Steyer. Um, in our case, he wasn't viable. So then his God bless him. So his, his handful of folks get to decide where they go to realign. So you have the final count after the second round. And what you saw is Pete Buttigieg had the most significant gains. He was more people's second choice, um, than almost anyone. And so He may not have had, uh, you know, the vast majority on the first round, but there were many, many people who said, I'm happy enough with Pete. And so, um, realigned to him in the second round, which was the final count. But again, these are the sort of nitty gritty of the The kind of sausage is made in the weeks and months leading up to that, uh, with the press and with the debates…

AI assessment note: “Pete Buttigieg had the most significant gains. He was more people's second choice”

Q Okay, interesting. So let's, I'm gonna get into more of your pauses in a second because there's a lot more to talk about, but let's keep this really tight here for a second. August twenty-nineteenth, you announce, you go through all these things, you get the bank account, you need signatures. How many signatures do you need?

A Yes. Um, so every single Different type of campaign, and this may be more to New York, because the laws and rules here are particularly onerous, particularly, um, corrupt, just frankly. And so, for our congressional campaign, so we got Yang on the ballot from the end of December to the end of January, and the window for our congressional campaign was February 25th, and supposed to end April second. No, COVID came online exactly at this moment. So we needed by law, before the rules were changed, 1250 signatures from registered Democrats on the west side of Manhattan and South Brooklyn to get on the ballot. Because of the way the systems work, everyone knows, or if you watch the, uh, I think it's Bring Down the House, that documentary on Netflix, um, About the AOC win.

AI assessment note: “we needed by law, before the rules were changed, 1250 signatures”

Q hamburgers. What you instead have Are unions and Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats arguing for higher minimum wages, which will only accelerate people looking to replace human, more expensive humans with robotics. Why can't and why isn't the Democratic Party united, you know, around ignoring spending energy and time and all this on minimum wage and instead focusing on how to get a program like the freedom dividend in place?

A So this is a great question and it's not even conjecture. It's not even theoretical where McDonald's formally committed and invested in the AI, um, to essentially do that, just that, um, with drive drive throughs with, um, automated, um, uh, machines to, to order and take orders and not even just on the front end, on the backend, even in the food production and the burger flipping. Um, so this really is, One of the fundamental challenges, but historically, to kind of unpack why this is the case, the base of the Democratic Party was the, um, unionized labor manufacturing base, and this was the case for nearly a half century, um, and to your point, I mean, there was really only one voice in the, in the presidential race who was, you know, perhaps even calling out the reality that You know, it's not about, um, bringing the old jobs back. There's, there's no going back. Um, and, and we're seeing this now, more people are, are catching on, is that the firms that are, you know, laying off and furloughing, um, tens of thousands of workers, um, they're not going to rehire them, unfortunately, at the end of this crisis. And I think, I think your question is apt and it's the reason I'm running. It's the reason there's a wave of, of the gang gang running, because again, you might think, well, reason is on our side or the facts are on our side. That is not enough.

AI assessment note: “historically, to kind of unpack why this is the case, the base of the Democratic Party”

Q So, I mean, walk me in terms of corporation center. I mean, just sort of headline action on Twitter, like Elon Musk is a Tesla's performance looking at a seven hundred million dollar, essentially payout from equity. I mean, talk to me about CEO pay. Do you feel like this is contributing to inequality?

A Certainly, if you look at the data over the past number of decades, the returns to capital and the returns to C-suite has outpaced, and the gap has outpaced the returns to labor. There's a lot of reasons for this, but part of the whole message and the driving impetus behind the Freedom Democrats and the Yang Gang is we're trying to raise the floor, not lower the ceiling. The emphasis is on a universal basic income, an idea that was supported From the likes of Milton Friedman and has been in effect in Alaska for almost four decades in a deep red republican conservative state supported by Greg Mankiw, George Bush's chief economist, supported now by Anthony Scaramucci and even Steve Mnuchin at times. Um, and so it is bipartisan, um, because the kind of really, um, conservative economic value of Um, not having government bureaucracy decide and make choices for you, but empowering people with their own agency and liberty to live the lives they, they, they, they choose to lead, um, is both, it's simultaneously a progressive principle. This is what Martin Luther King was fighting for in his last, um, days before he was assassinated. Um, but also, again, what Milton Friedman, um, argued for, and a thousand economists, um, argued to haunt Congress. This actually passed the U.S. House of Representatives twice in 1971 and almost became law under Nixon.

AI assessment note: “we're trying to raise the floor, not lower the ceiling. The emphasis is on”

Q Why'd they, by the way, for my audience that doesn't follow politics, why'd they do it? Why'd they do it?

A Yes. So again, a fantastic question. Now, if you, they have many reasons, um, they want to allegedly save the resources. They want to just hand the nomination to whoever they would like to without having a primary. Um, and I'll walk through these reasons in just a moment, but, um, we had Michael Sandel on, um, our dialectic about a week ago. And without even having context about this lawsuit and this decision, he's, by all accounts, our country's greatest moral philosopher. He said, the most dangerous precedent that can be set is anything that enables the president, our president, to postpone or cancel the election. And the New York State Democratic Party, the Board of Election Commissioners, did just that. I'm not a mind reader, so to your question, I don't know what reasons they had. I do know they just lost. In federal court in the Southern District of New York, and the judge said, this is false pretense. The governor of New York had already passed an executive order making voting safe by mail. So any narrative or story otherwise that this would put anyone at risk is just bullshit.

AI assessment note: “they want to allegedly save the resources. They want to just hand the nomination”

Q decouple regulatory change and crisis? When people are in a state of status quo that they feel is good enough, there's no incentive to do anything. When the headline is 3000 new people dead every day and nine 11 every day, regulators are very incentivized to do something right now because they look very bad if they didn't their constituents. How do you decouple a crisis with real regulatory change?

A Yes, so this is what we've been doing, what we've, what we've been going through the past week in particular, and I'll highlight a couple of instances. It involves holding people's feet to the fire, holding them accountable, and offering an incentive and a vision that, again, doesn't vilify them, offers them a way in, but holds their feet to the fire. Now, very concretely, you may have seen Andrew Gang, myself, and dozens of other delegates Filed suit because the New York State Board of Elections, the New York State Democratic Party, and all of its leadership decided to cancel the presidential primary. Now, this was one week after our presumptive nominee Joe Biden warned, we have to be very wary that President Trump may use COVID as false pretense to postpone the general election.

AI assessment note: “It involves holding people's feet to the fire, holding them accountable, and offering an incentive”

Q So paint that picture for me again. You, you show up in Iowa. Are you also, besides your own precinct, trying to recruit other precinct leaders? What'd you guys end up with penetration wise? Did you have a precinct leader for all 1600 precincts?

A So this, so going, so this goes back to, again, the like fall of 2018. Now at this point, Nathan, uh, you know, none of, basically, I think we were one of maybe a handful of people who had declared in the field that ended up growing to 29, the largest field, um, in I think, democratic presidential history. Uh, so, you know, people you think of, like Kamala Harris, Kirk Kirsten, et al, had not even declared at that point. So I remember, um, you know, it was, um, Yang, myself, and another, um, team member, and we were at the Progress Iowa event in December of 2018. It was Andrew Yang, Pete Buttigieg, who had not formally declared, because everyone sort of declares an exploratory committee or They, they, they share some, uh, you know, public speech indicating their interest. Uh, Pete Buttigieg, uh, Jeff Merkley, and maybe one other, um, at that event. And Right after we got our first one percent in a national CNN poll. Um, and I remember driving back in the car with Andrew, and again, we are, this was the scrappiest, uh, campaign by, by any measure, but he's just elated after this one percent at the end of December for 2018, because he says we have found product market fit. We spent a year and a half, um, sort of building the foundation, getting this, um, Really businessman and entrepreneur from anonymity. Um, and Rogan was on the calendar for early of 2019 and Um, yeah, it was re…

AI assessment note: “at that point, there were no such thing as precinct captains.”

Q political world is a very strong online organic game. You see, some people would argue potential candidates. It's bot driven others. You can tell it's truly organic. I want to know what you guys, cause this is relevant to someone building a business or to someone running for candidacy. How did you guys build the infrastructure to basically allow anything Yang wanted to trend on Twitter to trend almost instantly?

A Well, so what's incredible, Nathan, is that, again, we, our, our candidate literally started fundraising from his Gmail address book. Um, this is a guy who, you know, first generation American, son of immigrants, um, had started out his career in entrepreneurship. His businesses had flopped until one took off, and then he, his, like, lion's share of his career was building Venture for America to help Promote entrepreneurship in, um, cities that needed a boost after the financial crisis. And so we didn't really have a whole network of connections and donors and, um, and capital and relationships to work off of. So really the innovation was born out of the necessity, um, where many of the people who were drawn to, to Yang and to the campaign Came, came to it from, again, these long-form substantive one, two, three-hour podcasts where, you know, we would dive into the data and the fact that American life expectancy had declined for three years consecutively before Trump, before COVID. Uh, the data that we saw this great divergence between GDP and the increase in the stock market, um, and the returns to labor or even life expectancy itself. And so we had this really high need for cognition, um, audience that then to your point about having, um, a brand identity around it, um, so much of being yanking and being, um, uh, math and data friendly is Is kind of wrapped into people's iden…

AI assessment note: “really the innovation was born out of the necessity, um, where many of the people”

Q rent to your rent's going to go up because they just took more debt, right? Cause money was available and they have to cover that. So things like you just saw food and rent go up and other things get cheaper. So the question is, How do you do both? Like, how do you make sure prices keep coming down while also giving people a stronger base to start from?

A Yeah, so this is such an important question, and your, your take on it is very perceptive, because we, we use inflation as this kind of catch-all terms, but to your exact point, actually, if you look at the core drivers of inflation today, it's education, housing, and healthcare. These highly broken, highly regulated markets, and if you take education as an example, where, um, the increase in tuition has, um, outpaced, you know, inflation by, and it's, you know, a, Really shocking order of magnitude going up, I think, 250% over the past, just even, uh, two and a half decades or so. But has the value of a college degree, has the quality of the education really gone up? Um, that's, that's questionable.

AI assessment note: “if you look at the core drivers of inflation today, it's education, housing, and healthcare”

Q Did he do something in the weeks and months leading up to that to make sure he, I mean, was that the strategy to be the best second choice once all these other people filtered out that didn't meet the threshold?

A So yeah, Again, ultimately, you know, this, this didn't, uh, bear out, um, in a, in a win in the primary process, and so we're kind of seeing a whole re-evaluation of the Iowa caucus as this decisive factor. Um, it really came into our consciousness because of Jimmy Carter, um, sort of coming out of nowhere and being bolstered by it, um, and also with Barack Obama, um, and being able to prove to voters, um, in later states in the process, particularly voters of color, That you can bring, um, the Iowa voters around you. So, you know, in this case, it ended up being that neither the winner of the Iowa caucus, nor the New Hampshire primary, nor the Nevada caucus, um, ended up becoming the presumptive nominee. Um, and it just shows you how hard it is to extrapolate from any of these events because We're running against Donald Trump. And so, um, there are a lot of other factors at play. Um, but certainly Pete had an incredible ground game in Iowa that led many, many people to be comfortable with him as, um, as their second choice or what have you.

AI assessment note: “Pete had an incredible ground game in Iowa that led many, many people”

Q interview to go write us down on Facebook. How do you like, I buy this house. I get a deed. I post a Facebook status update. What does Facebook now say, Nathan, can we pay you 50 cents? You know, before you post this update, we're paying you to own this data so we can use it to target you with ads later. I mean, how does it actually work?

A Totally. So right now, so I think it's important to offer, um, the, the contrast of basically how it works now, right? So Facebook is a great example, right? So you log in, we all agree with, you know, without having read any of the click wrap agreements we've signed and provided our Consent for our data, um, to be sold and resold. We saw this happen in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where if even a friend or a friend of a friend, um, they're, you know, sixty million people, um, and we, and the way we interact with our data is as such. I got a push notification from Facebook saying, hey, we apologize. We're so sincerely sorry. You were one of the sixty million whose friends or friends of friends' data may have been breached in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Sorry. And in any other context, any other sector of the economy, um, that just would not hold. And the reality is data is the new oil. And Yuval Harari put it best. He said, whoever controls the algorithms is the government. And so there are many ways to fundamentally rethink. So, um, So people like Tristan Harris and other design ethicists, like this goes into the fundamental architecture of the apps and how we interact with the software. So right now we just assume we're going to get a freemium service, right? We're going to get the free service, whether that be Google Maps or the search engine or Facebook or what hav…

AI assessment note: “I think it's important to offer, um, the, the contrast of basically how it works now”