Bankless - 88 - Forward With Crypto | Andrew Yang

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

Andrew Yang is a former Presidential and Mayoral candidate, entrepreneur, and founder of the new Forward Party. Seeking ways to push our democracy into the future, Andrew has championed novel ideas to improve the deep intrinsic problems of the current two-party system. We see aligned interests between the Forward Party and the crypto community, and Andrew says during the episode that the Forward party IS the Crypto party. Re-establishing legitimacy to our institutions, evolving our governance system, and upgrading our economic protocols are shared interests of Andrew Yang and the Bankless Nation. We are stoked to have Andrew on the podcast, so dive in for a fascinating discussion of what's wrong with our current system and what we can do to fix it. ✨ EPISODE DEBRIEF ✨ https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/exclusive-debrief-forward-with-crypto  ------ 📣 POOLTOGETHER | DEFI LOTTERY https://bankless.cc/PoolTogether  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha  🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger  🧙‍♀️ ALCHEMIX | SELF-PAYING LOANS http://bankless.cc/Alchemix  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 8:00 Andrew Yang & Crypto 13:20 American Democracy 17:38 A Third Path 24:51 Banking is Broken 30:19 Big Tech 34:45 Open Primaries 43:47 A More Intelligent System 51:00 Crypto UBI 57:57 Crypto and the Forward Party 1:04:19 Lobbying & Stigma 1:10:27 Clarity and Platforms 1:15:01 The Forward DAO 1:22:00 andrewyang.eth 1:24:57 Optimism about the 2020s ------ Resources: Andrew Yang on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndrewYang?s=20  Andrew's Book 'Forward' https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667341/forward-by-andrew-yang/  Forward Party on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Fwd_Party?s=20  Welcome to Bankless: https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-welcome-to-bankless-2021-edition  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front-run the opportunity. I'm Ryan John Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. David, Andrew Yang on the podcast. Can't believe it, man. What an epic podcast that was. What were some of your favorite parts? Well, he just came out and said it. The Forward Party is the Crypto Party, apparently. according to Andrew Yang. You heard it here. And so we really had a podcast about the deep alignment behind Andrew Yang's vision for the future of the world and how crypto relates to that. And not only how crypto relates, but also how crypto can actually achieve some of these same

goals and visions that Andrew's looking for, but perhaps in an easier, more direct way. As somebody that volunteered for Andrew Yang's campaign in 2020, it was an absolute honor to get him on the podcast and even just being able to talk to him about our advice for what we have for the Ford Party as it relates to crypto and his advice for the crypto industry as it relates to politics was insanely valuable. And I don't think that this will be the last of Andrew Yang on the bankless podcast. Yeah, I don't think so either. And it's definitely not going to be the last of Andrew Yang's conversation about crypto. I felt like in that episode he almost stood up and said, hey, I'll be an advocate for crypto. I'll help you guys. Like, I, you know,

And maybe he couldn't do that when he was a Democrat. Maybe you can't do that as a Republican either. You're too embedded in the existing institutions. But the Ford Party provides him an interesting platform to do that in because the Ford Party is all about, like, you can be a Democrat and be the Ford Party, you can be a Republican and the Ford Party. Just in the same way, you can be a crypto advocate and be a Democrat or Republican in the U.S. And what really struck me David from that conversation is like this.

Andrew Yang really gets it. He understands what crypto is trying to do, and he understands the existential threat or the knee-capping effect. He used the word knee-cap several times when talking about the U.S. government's interference in the crypto industry. He understands that's a real threat, and he knows how to work the process and how to navigate that threat. I think he can be a huge ally for crypto. And regardless of where you are in the political spectrum, Bankless is not a political podcast, But for crypto, we are. Crypto needs to step into the political arena if we're going to actually mainstream this.

This is sort of our next step. So it's not about being a Democrat or Republican or left versus right or anything else. This is about being pro-crypto and anti-authoritarian. And Andrew Yang gets the struggle, understands why we're doing this, and understands the benefits that crypto can provide. What a fantastic conversation, man. There are some things about Andrew Yang or perhaps some things that he's not that actually makes him the perfect crypto representative.

Well, he's no longer a Democrat. He was running under the Democratic Party, but now he is making a third party called the Forward Party. And he's also not an institutionalized politician. He's not a politician. He's a guy trying to get things done. And the way that he sees getting things done the most effectively is via politics and government.

But he doesn't want to be a politician. He just wants to see results. And in the same way that crypto is not a left, or right industry, we just care about innovation and moving forward. And so I think of all industries out there, crypto is actually the most interested in a nonpartisan party, which is itself a party that is trying to be outside of the realm of politics and just trying to do what we use on the podcast a protocol upgrade to the way our democracy works here in the United States. Yeah, I love it. You know, he's the son of a physicist, and his mother was computer science. He grew up playing

video games, right, and dabbling in Dungeons and Dragons, these things. He's a systemic thinker. He's also an entrepreneur. These qualities, I think, make him finally tuned to actually understand this industry and understand what we're talking about here. Not to mention being very young in comparison to the other politicians that are out there. Yeah, absolutely. Young of mind as well, you know, eager to dive into these things. So in this podcast, we opened up with the problem that he sees in America and the fact that the problems he sees require systemic solutions. Then we talk about what solutions he thinks American democracy needs in the realm of nation-state reform. And then I think we get to a really interesting point in the conversation where we talk about this third path, which is crypto,

which, you know, the crypto solution is basically a blank slate to many of the problems that Andrew Yang sees building a fresh new system from the ground up and building trust that way. So a lot of cool things to talk about. He also mentioned a Dow for his political party. What? What? What is this? Yeah. Guys, you're just going to have to tune into the full episode to get the digest. And also, if you are a premium subscriber, make sure you tune into the debrief that David and I recorded post podcast. It's a hot one.

Without further ado, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible and get right into the podcast with Andrew Yang. Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use Defi. And now it's live with over at 100. projects deployed. Gas fees on the Ethereum L1 sucks. Too many people want to use Ethereum and it doesn't have enough capacity for all of us. And that's why teams like Arbitrum have been hard at work developing Layer 2 solutions that makes transactions on Ethereum cheap and instant. Arbitrum increases Ethereum's throughput by orders of magnitude at a fraction of the cost of what we are used to paying. When interacting with Arbitrum, you can get the performance of a centralized

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waiting for? Go to Ledger.com, grab a ledger, download Ledger Live and get all of your Defy apps all in one space. Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce you to our next guest who probably needs no introduction for a number of our listeners, particularly those U.S. listeners. Andrew Yang is on the Bankless podcast today. He's a former presidential candidate. He's a former mayoral candidate in New York City as well. He is the founder of the newly launched Ford Party, which we're going to talk a lot about. In fact, he's just written a book on why he's doing it. We're going to go through some of the concept in his book. The book is called Ford. I've got it right on my back shelf there, proving I read it.

I see it. Look at that. Yeah, it's looking good. It's their fantastic book, Andrew. You know, two fun facts before we begin, just for our audience. Fun fact number one is David Hoffman, my co-host, actually volunteered for your 2020 campaign out in Seattle. He's a, you know, contributor. Fun fact number two, and this is for the bank list listeners, I learned as I was reading Andrew's book that he grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons in video games and reading comic books and sci-fi. So, Andrew, I feel like you're already one of us.

This is very much our clan and our tribe, people who did that growing up. So officially, welcome to Bankless, my friend. Thank you for having me, Ryan. And thank you so much for your support on the campaign, David. We had some great times. And, yes, I definitely was a bit of a geek or a lot of a geek growing up. So if that's the tribe, then certainly count me in. I think that's the early tribe of crypto adopters.

We all kind of come from that heritage, you know, and video games and geekery computer stuff. That's all us. But I got to say, it's really great to see a politician actively engaged with the crypto community because most of you guys are still scared of us, Andrew, but you don't seem afraid of crypto. And I want to start with this question, what do you make of crypto? Like, what's your take on it? At the highest level, is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? What do you think about the subject? I have a lot of friends in the crypto community and I got to know people like David when I was running for president. I am a huge proponent of cryptocurrencies as a force for innovation and democratization in the

future. I hope that we can help it realize its potential and that, frankly, government doesn't come along and do something to screw the industry because it doesn't understand what the heck is going on. And that, unfortunately, is a very real possibility. I think most people saw what happened recently where there's this infrastructure bill. And then people were like, that's fine, you know, infrastructure bill. And then all of a sudden, cryptocurrency, like, get wedged in there. They're like, what?

What does happen? And then some of like the discussion around it seemed completely incoherent. There was like a scramble to be like, good. Someone explained to these folks what is going on. And then there was this unfortunate intersection between U.S. politics and its dysfunction and the cryptocurrency community. And so my hope is that we can try to get some sanity into Washington around the fact that cryptocurrencies should be here to stay. And if we are thoughtful about it, you can do an enormous amount of good to solve some of our,

biggest problems that we're struggling with. Just really quick on the infrastructure bill, why do you think that happened? Why do you think there was that sort of reaction? Do people just not understand it? Do they feel threatened to buy it? Is it a mixture of both? It's a mixture of both for sure. I mean, the reason it happened in real life in the infrastructure bill is they're looking for money. They're just like, hey, we're going to pay for this thing. You know, I hear that if we tax these cryptocurrency transactions, we can generate billions of dollars. Ooh, let's do that. And then someone was like, well, come up with the language. and then someone came up with language that did not make a whole lot of sense

and would have roped in a bunch of folks that would have had a very hard time actually complying or shouldn't have been considered broker dealers in essence. And so then the industry did reach out to various legislators and sympathetic senators. And then there was a compromise that was broached. And then the compromise kind of ran aground because of the timing. and there was, I think, at least one senator who stood up and was, frankly, you know, against any amendment. And so we have to do our best to try and edify and educate some of these legislators because one of the functions of our leadership right now is it's kind of old. Like the average age of a U.S. Congress person is 57, a senator at 62.

And if you look at leadership, it's generally even 15 to 20 years older than that. Andrew, one of the big discussion points we want to have on today's show is how we think that crypto actually fits into a lot of the visions that you have and articulate for the future. But before we actually get there, I think it's important to kind of back up and start this story at the beginning where it should start, which is at your 2020 campaign was a campaign to drive awareness towards the coming tidal wave of all. automation and perhaps the amounts of social unrest that that promises to bring. And I would say more or less mission accomplished on that endeavor.

David, you helped make it happen. Thank you, Yang, Yang, and everyone who helped advance the case. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, unfortunately, you didn't win the 2020 campaign. You did achieve those goals. And now you have redirected your attention on towards a bigger fight, which is the reconstruction of the way that our democracy actually works. So, Andrew, can you let our listeners know why is that the fight? Why have you shifted from automation towards this new fight, which is the structure of the American democracy? Running for president was an incredible journey, and I tried to document it in my book, Forward Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, but I also try to figure out why we feel so stuck. Why is it that America does not seem to be humming or working?

And what I found was that we're stuck because our government system is essentially designed to fail us. We're at a point in American life where if everyone does the reasonable thing according to their incentives, we are sunk. Because our political incentives will lead legislators into their corners and blame the other side for failures because it turns out that some of these issues are more valuable to. politicians unsolved and solved. Like if you came forward and solved it and had this mammoth compromise, instead of being rewarded, you'd be likely to lose your job. And so nothing gets done. And so I started to dig in, okay, if we shouldn't expect it to work, how could you make it

work better? And I will say that I believe that the future of this country is very, very dark if we don't make serious changes politically. where polarization now is at civil war levels. We're seeing political violence in real life. 42% of people now regard their political opponents as evil or their mortal enemies. And so if that's the context, where does it lead if you get rewarded for extremity? So I came to these conclusions last year and thought, well, what you would need is a dynamic change.

What you would need is incentives that reward leaders for catering to 51% of us instead of the most extreme 20%. And that systems change consists in real life. And I'm happy to say you actually can do something about this. I mean, it seems impossible, but you can, is you switch to open primaries and ranked choice voting in the 24 states that allow for ballot initiatives where if enough of us get together, we can say, you know what? I don't like the fact that the party controls a primary and controls all the levers. Like, let's switch to open primaries. And so that became my mission. And I thought, okay, let's make that happen. But the mission overall is still the same.

It's just to make stuff work better and have our democracy stand the test of time. And for the cryptocurrency community, you all are whizzing along, just like, you know, creating things and like seeing how things can be so much more efficient. You're like, I don't need these clodgy bureaucracies. Like, this is fantastic. And then you look at government, you're like, what? So in many ways, I'm trying to bring the future to government. But I've concluded that the single big.

biggest problem really is the duopoly problem. Yeah, it's fascinating. And we want to get into more of kind of the duopoly problem and actually the solutions that you're presenting. Because in crypto terms, what we would call the idea of rank choice voting in open primaries is like a protocol change, a upgrade to the core mechanism of the system, right? That's really what you're doing. But before we get into some of the solutions that you're presenting, your book is as presenting with some of these upgrades. I want to dig a bit more into the problem. And one of the themes of your book, as I was reading it, I took out that really resonates, I think, with the crypto community is the problem of institutional distrust. So people no longer trust the legacy institutions. In fact,

in crypto, we've started calling them legacy institutions, Andrew. And one of the lines we often say is our institutions are failing us. So I think part of it, Andrew is like, there's institutional distrust, but a lot of it feels like it's deserved distrust. And I want to ask you the question of why do you think people no longer trust the legacy institutions? Have they failed us, or is there just a miscommunication somewhere down the road? What's going on here? Many of these institutions have failed us. And then when you look to hold someone accountable, there's no one to be found. And so then the anger and resentment builds up in very,

various ways, and you can pretty much pick an institution. I'll just use government as the big example because I talk about it in my book. The United States is now 28th in the world on measures like drinking water, clean drinking water, that is. I'm sure there's shitty drinking water, clean drinking water, quality education, infant mortality, life expectancy, 28th with a down arrow. We're like getting worse. So you look up and say, hey, why are things? going poorly and then everyone's like, oh, you know, don't worry about it. Like, we've got it. It's like, oh, really, you've got it? Like, you could look at any institution of American life and start

questioning. Like the media, and the media is actually now the defining institution for a lot of partisans at this point, where 69% of Democrats have a high trust in the media. And if you look at Republicans, it's down to 15%. So what you're seeing in terms of the two-party system is that Democrats are kind of embody and trust these fading and failing institutions. And then Republicans have this anti-institutionalist fervor, which is like that, you know, this shit's not working, tear it up, break it up. And what I'm hoping that we can provide as this middle ground of the Ford Party is say, these institutions have real problems and we need to upgrade them.

We need to try and have them get with the program. And the hope is that that actually can clarify people's sense of what the real problems are. But the institutional mistrust has been earned. Yeah, I want to talk about this, because this hit me like a pile of bricks when I was rating it, is you actually talk about the institutions. You're talking about media and education, all of these other things. But the core institution that's at the base layer of all of these other institutions is democracy itself, right? Our governance protocol, because that's the way we actually improve these institutions is through a decision-making process. We call it democracy, right? In theory. In theory.

And you said this, you said democracy itself is losing legitimacy. What did you mean by that? This past election is still in question in the minds of tens of millions of Americans. I think 21 million Americans say that force is warranted to try and restore who they believe the rightful president is. So in that environment, and again, if only 15% of Republicans, trust the media, then you can't rely upon elections to peacefully transfer power from administration to administration. I mean, that sounds dire, but we're seeing this play out in real life.

One of the things that I'm going around on my book tour talking about is that at this point, everything is on the table in American life. And generally speaking, when I talk about that, I'm being kind of bleak, honestly. Like whatever crazy shit you can imagine in American life, like riots and civil war and disintegration, it's all possible. You know, I mean, we have actually seen an insurrection attempt in Washington that cost American lives. Like, whatever crazy shit you can think of, it's on the table. And so we have to try to accelerate the positive possibilities as well as the negative possibilities. You know, it's like the things that other people regard as too good to be.

be true. It's like, actually, we probably could build an alternative financial system where people have control of their own data and it's seamless and there's trust. I mean, it is fascinating, how the cryptocurrency community really is in some ways the antidote to this mistrust because you're like, hey, like, no one can even tamper with this stuff. Like, I couldn't if I tried. Yeah, we really do feel like this is a third path, right? You said, you know, some conservative Republicans right now want to tear it all down, Democrats want to, you know, bolster the existing solutions, right? And I get the Ford Party is really a third path. It's kind of this middle ground of reform. The crypto path is operating in parallel, and its motif is like, let's build a parallel system and a new source

of trust for some of these things and some of these institutions. But we'll get to that in a second. Oh, it's true. The parallels are very, very strong, you know, and I love that. I mean, And there's like a new way in crypto. And there's a new way, hopefully, with the Forward Party. I mean, that's the goal. And I will say, too, people will probably gather this, but the Forward Party wants to help the cryptocurrency community navigate this political landscape and see to it that our legislators don't do something dumb and crippling.

Well, we definitely need that help because we don't have very many allies when it comes to Capitol Hill. And so we are looking to bolster our ranks. And in addition towards what you were saying with... Well, one thing I can say just to chime in on this, David. So the Ford Party can support Democratic and Republican candidates who are, for example, pro-crypto. And we can intervene in primaries. Like, we can do whatever we want. So this is something that I want to do. Like, I want to help reform government and build the future. And so to the extent that there are different approaches that the cryptocurrency community wants to... take. I think the forward party can be one approach. Absolutely. And one of the best things about the crypto society, crypto culture, crypto people is that we generally are inherently a political. We're not ideological. We enjoy innovation as our solutions rather than tribalism as our solutions, even though the crypto world does come to be very, very tribal at times. It's the irony of it all, David, because

the forward party is kind of the anti-polarization, anti-tribalism tribe. Your point, so I get it. I get it. Andrew, in addition to talking about how our democracy has lost legitimacy, there's also a section in your book about how the banking system also you ran up against in trying to achieve your goals. And in our minds, the democracy side and then also the finance world, are kind of like the two pillars that are holding up our entire country. It's how is our country going to be run and how are we also going to allocate money towards the rest of the economy? And you had this UBI experiment where you wanted to distribute a bunch of cash towards a bunch of different people.

So you could prove the efficacy of UBI. Can you talk about the problems that you ran up against when you tried to do this? Yes. So it was March of 2020, the pandemic it just started. And I was looking around saying, what's the most positive thing I can do? And so what I came up with was giving a million dollars to a thousand poor families in the Bronx. And I thought this would have a few effects. Number one, it would enable them to stay indoors and adhere to public safety guidelines if that was hard for them because maybe they had to leave the home to get stuff or work or something.

And I also wanted it to be an emblem for what our leaders should do, which is like, look, we should just be sending people cash to stay home when the pandemic first had us isolating. And so I called JP Morgan Chase and I called Citibank and was like, hey, we'd like to identify 1,000 of your poorest customers in the Bronx. so we can send them $1,000 each. I mean, pretty good deal, right? You could probably guess what happened next. They gave us the runaround, and then we went through regulatory, and then they shot it down saying, like, oh, they're like privacy problems. And meanwhile, I'm going to guess that anyone who has an account with these banks

would have loved $1,000. And would not have had a problem with Citibank or J.B. Morgan Chase sharing their information for this purpose. But being an entrepreneur, I kind of guessed that they might not be able to, oh, the next thing I did is I said, hey, how could you just give us like $4,250 gift cards or bank cards or cash cards, like debit cards? We'll maybe be able to use those. Maybe I'll run around and like give them away or like mail them to people in the Bronx.

And they couldn't even do that. Now that one was a mild surprise. I was like, that really did not sound that hard. It's like just give us some freaking debit cards. But being an entrepreneur at the same time, I was running around trying to find institutional partners who might have these relationships. And I found one in the form of neighborhood trust that works with the working poor. And so we, they actually had the bank account information. They had a credit union. So they had accounts for a thousand poor families in the Bronx. So we

went through them. We gave each of these families a thousand bucks. And then a neighborhood trust even did a counseling session with each of them. So they knew it was coming and the rest of it. Very, very positive. I actually still run into people who got that money occasionally or someone who knows them. It's like, hey, hey, my friend got a thousand bucks from you. Like, you know, we'll always appreciate you. And I was like, oh, thanks. But you can tell, I mean, like, our banking system just wasn't up to the challenge. And then when our government decided to follow suit and send $1,200 checks to tens of millions of Americans, how did they do it? The IRS. They said, you know what? We have tax returns. We'll send checks. We'll put money in their

people's accounts. That had a lot of problems, too. I mean, there are a lot of people at the bottom end the income scale that don't file taxes. Very sensible, right? I mean, if you're making below a certain threshold, they're working out of the books. So they didn't get anything. Meanwhile, the government of Togo set up a digital currency payment system and got some, like, digital money, which translated to real money, to millions of people in one of the poorest countries in the world. So, like, we had this scrappy nonprofit. We managed to get this million dollars out. The U.S. government just relied upon these old pipes. And everyone looks up and is like, yeah, that's fine. I mean, to me, it's not fine. It's like you missed millions of people that probably could have used it the most.

Totally agree. This is actually an area that crypto can solve fairly easily, sort of air-dropping, you know, stable coins or dollars to individuals' accounts. But I'm curious because you sort of see this as like the basics of a banking system, right? The ability to send a simple payment. And then you, I think, conclude that chapter with like, if that's broken, we can't even distribute a simple payment via existence. banking system like what else is broken is the rest of the banking system broken what are these other areas in the economy that are broken i'll say another thing that crypto community often talks about with the existing banking system if you want to save money right you put it in the bank account a savings account you're earning 0.01 percent interest right how's that a savings account good old 0.01 percent interest i mean we're forced you don't even bother because you don't even bother or you just i guess

you're forced if you have any scrap of savings at the end of the month to invest in the stock market or something else, right? There are no savings accounts. So if you compare our system to China, it really does feel like the U.S. banking system is behind, is failing us. And, you know, China's doing some innovative things with their, you know, FinTech companies, but they're adding a whole level of state surveillance, which obviously is not what we want. But anyway, that's a hallmark of a broken system. I want to talk about another chapter in your book, Andrew, big tech. They seem to control everything around us, these days, right? We've entered this digital era, but we don't have digital property rights

in the digital era. And so large social media companies own all of our digital property. They own our usernames. They own our passwords. They own all of our data. We don't have any of the data. Is that a problem in your mind? Very much so. And it's bad for our mental health. It's bad for our human agency. It's appropriating more than $200 billion. a year in economic value from us that we're not seeing a dime. I actually kind of got a laugh out of this entire Facebook whistleblower stuff because she has unearthed these reports saying Facebook knows that Facebook is bad for you. And then I was like, that's newsworthy?

Like, didn't we already know this? Like, what's going on? I've seen a few documentaries already. Yeah. You know, at this point, it's common sense. I knew that I'd already seen studies saying that all these teenage girls were getting super depressed on Instagram. and the rest of it.

And so horrors, like Facebook had data saying that it depresses people. You know, like it was, I mean, I shouldn't laugh because, you know, that shit's fucked up. But it's one of the things about our data that's getting, you know, used against us. And so I believe that we should have the ability to own our own data, even if we decide to lend it or lease it to various companies for our own convenience. And the single biggest ridiculous example of where we are, are those consent agreements? We all click, I agree, I agree. It's like, what the heck is going on with those agreements?

No one knows. It's just like, it's pretty much like just sell your stuff to us and pray for the best and click this button. And then you're like, okay. And then you just move on and you hope nothing blows up. But it's not the sweet deal that a lot of people hoped it was when we came up with this as the business model. So I guess I want to zone in on this, right?

We've got these problems, and these are just two examples. You have chapters on this. That's the middle part of your book all around the different problems and the ways the institutions have failed us. We haven't talked about media and other things. But I guess to your point about Facebook, like, we all know that these social media companies are a problem. We all know that our banking system sucks. Isn't great.

Could be upgraded. But here's the thing. Nothing ever gets done to fix it on capital. Okay. So tell us why. Pretty good summary, Ryan. Yeah, why? Why does nothing ever get done about this stuff?

Well, the main reason is that nothing will happen to anyone if nothing is done about this stuff. So Congress's approval rating nationally right now is 28%. So three out of four Americans don't like what's going on or not going on. They've noticed. The reelection rate for individual members is 92%, which is a pretty freaking high reelection rate. You can't get much higher than that. And so you have essentially near permanent job security for these legislators, regardless of whether or not these problems get solved. And again, if you did try and meaningfully solve a problem, you'd be much more likely to lose your job because it probably would have involved some compromise, maybe you reach across the aisle.

Some people will accuse you of being ideologically impure of working with the enemy. You know, you're not the true warrior that I wanted. And one of the reasons why the incentives are so polarized and extreme is that the folks who will decide whether or not you come back to office in two years are not the everyday voters in your community, but they're the most rabid extreme partisans on either side. Real oddballs. Like people who are just super plugged in to party activities and will be there and just yell and scream at you if you deviate from. orthodoxy. So in this system... The people that shift the Overton windows against the people in the middle. Yes, that's true. They're just saying, don't do it. Don't do it. Be ideological, be extreme. And so in this environment, you're actually more surprised if something does get solved than if it

doesn't. So, Andrew, we have this broken democracy. And we have so many other things in our nation that are also broken that we would love some effective regulation for. Yet, nothing seems to get done about it. And so this is perhaps the motivations behind why you've created the forward party because you think that like if you try and fix it from the left, well, then you are ultimately fighting the right. And if you try and fix it from the right, well, then you have to fight the left. So you need to make something in the middle, which you've labeled the forward party, which I think is a great name. And one of the big platforms that the forward party is standing on is this idea of open primaries and ranked choice voting. And as Ryan said in the beginning, this is in crypto terms

what we consider a protocol upgrade, where if we have these systemic problems, the only way you solve systemic problems is with systemic solutions. So, Andrew, why are these the systemic solutions that we need to go after? Why is this going to be the thing that helps fix everything else? So this has happened in real life in the state of Alaska. Love you, Alaska. I don't know how many listeners are in Alaska. So last year, Alaska switched to open primaries and ranked choice voting. which means that the current legislators can take their case to the entire electorate and not does the 20% most rabid partisans. And there was an example of what happened here where Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted to impeach Donald Trump, the only Republican senator to do so who was also up for reelection next year. Her approval rating among Alaskan Republicans now stands at 6%.

So it genuinely was political suicide that if she had to go through a primary, she loses for sure. But because of the protocol upgrade, she doesn't need to go through the gauntlet of the 20% most extreme. She can just say to all Alaskans, look, you know, you like me, give me another shot. You know, I'm an independent person. Like, I have my own judgment and opinions. And so what we need to do is flip the switch in states around the country so that the reasonable middle actually gets rewarded politically. that people who are willing to do work and compromise with the other side get rewarded. And it's doable via ballot initiatives in 24 states around the country.

It happened in Alaska. It costs $7 million to flip that switch in Alaska. And I'm going to suggest that liberating two senators and probably the same number of members of Congress from perverse incentives was like the best investment of like $7 million that a lot of us can imagine. So imagine running around to another 20 states and doing that. say that costs, I don't know, 500 million or something like that. Because the last is a pretty cheap media market, so it's not like they'll all be seven. You know what I mean? Like some of the states get pretty expensive. But if you were to make our government more rational, more reasonable, more productive, more prone to compromise for 500 million dollars, I mean, that'd be like the best

investment of all time, given that, you know, the direction we're heading now is dysfunction and eventual civil war, in my opinion, not to be hyperbolic, but it really is on the table. I don't know if people sense that. I think crypto senses that for sure. Like, we're right there with you. I bet crypto does sense that. It's true. Crypto folks would be like, yeah, I can see it.

Yeah, we can totally see it. All right, so let's stick into the mechanism here, right? So I understand that this is a very practical solution. Good ROI, right, can be done in a lot of states by ballot initiatives. But guide us through for somebody who's not politically minded and some in cryptic, aren't, right? They're part of that middle. I bet a lot of you aren't because you're too busy making shit happen and you're like, why would I give myself brain damage by looking into politics? I mean, some people in crypto just kind of stay away from politics as a matter of fact.

Well, also because politics is all this like tribal bullshit and like that's not your jam either. I get that too. Okay, but open open critical upgrades are our jam. Okay. So we want to understand them. I agree. I agree. Probably all upgrades are your jam. What's an open primary? Like so what was it like before? was it only Democrats and Republicans two parties could run? And with an open primary, does that mean basically anybody can run unaffiliated? And anyone, you don't have to be a Democrat or Republican-registered, anyone can vote for them among the population? Is that what that looks like? That is what it looks like.

But I want to take it back to first principles, because I think so will be interesting to people. If you look in the Constitution, you won't find a word about political parties because the founding fathers weren't fans. They actually try to warn people against political parties. John Adams said the worst nightmare would be two political parties because they would just smash each other into oblivion and nothing would happen. I mean, you know, imagine that. And so all of the mechanics of these elections are decided at the state level. And the political parties are not official fixtures of government. They just happen to run everything.

They are, you know, depending upon. which one you're looking at, something like 150 years old, that sort of thing. And so a closed party primary is the norm in most of the country. And what it means is that if you're a Democrat who's registered as a Democrat, you can vote the Democratic primary. And if you are not a registered Democrat, you cannot vote in that primary. I can use an example, my own race, the New York City mayoral primary. About 900,000 people voted in the Democratic primary, all of whom were registered Democratic.

Now, this city has 9 million people or so in it. So 10% of people voted in what was almost certainly going to decide the next mayor of this city. Independence and Republicans who were registered to vote had to switch their registration four months before the election in order to vote in the prime. Who the heck is going to switch your registration four months before the election? So they'll come up to me four weeks ahead of the election and be like, I want to vote for you. What do I do? And I'm like, you are three months too late. So that's the norm in most of the country is a closed party primary.

And what you want to do is exactly what you just described. Make it so that you can run under any party line, any affiliation. Raise your hand. Like, Ryan could show up. I don't encourage this, Ryan. Maybe I do. Ryan could show up and be like, hey, I'm running for Congress. It's under the bankless party, the forward party, the crypto party.

I'm all about it. We might actually do that at some point. Who knows? You know, you should. Yeah, you'd have a. a great set of stories. So you put your party next to it and then everyone just votes for whomever they want. And then the top five vote getting candidates go to the general and have something called a rank choice voting final general election. So the rank choice voting is a

system where you can rank up to five candidates by your order of preference. So if you just love Ryan, you can just be like, Ryan is my guy number one and just walk out. But maybe you like Ryan first and then David second and then Andrew third. So you go one, two, three, you know, Ryan, David, Andrew. And Ranked's voting is incredibly powerful because it eliminates what's called the spoiler effect. It also can make it so that if you had two Republicans and one Democrat in the final five, the two Republicans don't cannibalize each other, which is everyone's concern. And then somehow make it so that the Democrat wins. Because let's say I was a Republican.

I came in and there are two Republicans and one Democrat. I could vote for my favorite Republican first and then my second favorite Republican second. And then there isn't like a vote splitting that happens. You get rid of the spoiler effect. It discourages negative campaigning because if I trash you, then we both look bad. And then the other candidates look better by comparison. You can end up building interesting coalitions because even if you're, I don't command 51% of the vote.

Let's say I have an issue. Let's call it crypto. Let's say I show up it. It'll be like, hey, I'm a one issue candidate. I'm the crypto candidate. I don't have 50% of support, but I've got 10% of support. And then someone else is trying to build their coalition. They'll look at you and be like, what is your issue?

Well, how about I adopt that issue? And then maybe I can have your support. And then they can try and get their way to 51%. So it empowers dynamism. It empowers minority points of view. It gets rid of the party dominance of everything because right now you have no chance of winning if you don't have a D or an R next year name and the machinery has to anoint you essentially in a lot of these places. So this upgrade combination of open primaries and rank choice voting would introduce genuine ideological and political diversity and innovation and dynamism. Andrew, I want to check this mental model against your beliefs and see if this is right.

One of the metaphors that really helped me understand how our democracy and our political system ended up being the way that it is, is that we have the Republicans and the Democrats. And these are kind of two monopolies that are trying to consume everything, right? They want, and because there's only two of them, that's what stretches the middle and pushes the middle towards the fringes. and a lot of the behaviors or the incentives that we've seen, such as like actually registering with a party, not being able to vote outside of your party, are efforts in continually to monopolize more and more of the voting base.

And so when I see these two protocol upgrades, I'm seeing something similar along the efforts of some antitrust efforts or a little straight-up anti-monopoly efforts. And so these new mechanisms allow for people to express, like you said, a greater diversity of opinions without being confined under these monopolies that the Democrats and the Republicans have established upon our democracy. How do you feel about that take? That's very apt. Right now, 62% of Americans say they want an alternative to the two major parties.

60% say both parties are out of touch. And so imagine if you were an entrepreneur and you arrived on the scene and there was a marketplace with two companies and 60% of people said, hey, I want a third choice. Like, wouldn't you rush to start a third choice? Though people have been wanting an alternative for a long time, but the two parties have tried to suppress any real competition. So that's the world as it stands. Everyone wants a choice, but the two parties don't want to give you that choice.

And I have a feeling that the crypto community is going to look at that and say, you know what? I think that eventually the duopoly is going to give because that's not a sustainable situation. I think that's what most of us would think. And it's been really interesting. I started the Forward Party officially to the public, you know, maybe 10 days ago or something along those lines. And there's just so much both enthusiasm and they're not going to let you win kind of thing. It's like the duopoly is going to like try and crush you in various ways.

And I have to say that's energized me. I've kind of enjoyed it, where I'm like, ooh, like this is like the reflexive resistance of the machine where they're trying to squash you and suppress you in various ways. But I have a feeling most people listening to this would look at this and say there's no way this duopoly is just going to keep on lumbering on. Yeah, and I have a feeling it's not going to work, Angie. I have a feeling they're not going to be able to squash you and suppress you. They've been saying that about crypto for years, right? And the resilience is when you have a bunch of.

bottom-up movement that is by the people for the people and you have the support of the people, it's very decentralized. It's very hard to crush. It's very hard to choke off. I want to, you know, in one of your recent interviews, I think you used this term that also perked my ears up, and I think the crypto community probably resonates with, is you said these protocol upgrades, that's open primaries, ranked choice voting, is actually anti-authoritarianism, right? It's like protection against authoritarianism. It really is. What do you mean by that? Because we're all about that in crypto, right? Not left but right, but we are definitely anti-authoritarian. What do you mean by that? How does this protocol upgrade help that cause? Let's say hypothetically you had a really, really bad leader of one of the major parties. They got control of the party. And then everyone in that party all of a sudden falls in line or they lose their job. And that's a situation. Now, this is a situation of the founding father is,

would have been trying to prevent at all costs, but they never imagined that there'd be only two major parties at this scale. And so the safeguards institutionally are pretty weak, where if you have one major parties to come to authoritarianism, they can run the government fairly seamlessly. I mean, our government's really clunky and clodgy, so it's not like they can make some things happen. But they can exert authority over a lot of the government fairly autocratically.

Now, that's just a poorly designed system. One of the things I'm saying is that the duopoly is poor design. And again, the Fatic Bathers would have looked up and been like, this is the stupidest design of all time. If you were going to try and resist authoritarianism, because it's like one point of failure, like you just get through there. Then all of a sudden, they're like, oh, runs one of the major parties. Only two of them. Like, you know, they have a lot of brent, like a lot of levers. And so if you had a more intelligent system, which, by the way, most other democracies have, the UK has five parties, Germany has seven, Sweden, eight, the Netherlands 18.

And so there, if you have a party that has really bad leadership, that's a problem, but that's not like an existential problem where you get an authoritarian that rules a country. It's like you have one party that loses its mind for a while. and then the other party's like, well, I hope they get it together. But that one party can't convince three other parties to just fall under their thrall. It's one reason why this duopoly is just so dumb. Like this duopoly is almost set up to allow for authoritarianism. It's so dumb. It incentivizes it, right?

It's a logical conclusion. It kind of does incentivize it. It is a logical conclusion. And that's one of the things I'm trying to open people's eyes to, where it's like, look, this system is going to fail. First, it's going to fail to deliver for the people. And second, it's going to fail to stop an authoritarian from taking control of the whole thing. So what we have to do is upgrade the protocol and design it more intelligently as quickly as possible.

And by the way, we won't have a whole lot of time. And then you make that case. And then people just start, you know, lobbying partisan accusations at you. And you're like, you are not hearing what I'm saying at all. Andrew, we discuss about how the banking system failed to adequately deliver the UBI that you wanted to give out to the people of New York. And recently on Twitter, you also tweeted out a tweet when talking to some crypto folk. UBI doesn't have to be denominated in Fiat. So has your experiences trying to get UBI out the door and into the hands of people?

Have you thought about how crypto would relate to this subject matter and helping serve UBI to the people? Oh, yeah. When I talk to people in the cryptocurrency community, some of them love the idea of alleviating poverty through cryptocurrency. You can get the resources in the people's hands much more seamlessly, as we've discussed. And you can do it via different digital currencies or tokens. And so there are a lot of people who are working in that direction. And I tweeted earlier, I guess it was a couple months ago now, I said cryptocurrency is one path to universal basic income. because I believe it is. You know, there's absolutely nothing saying that it needs to be denominated in U.S. dollars or Fiat. Now, if I'd gotten control of the government, like I would have done it via U.S. dollars, so I'm not going to lie. I mean, I totally still want to do that. But if we can do it via other currencies, I'd be equally excited.

I just talking about the subject of UBI because I think of the six sort of solutions that you go through in your book, These are the two almost like closest to the protocol upgrades, right? The like rank choice voting and open primaries and also UBI. These are direct things that can be done. And just relaying maybe what the crypto community might think about this, I think a lot of the crypto community is sort of supportive, right? You know, they see that the wealthy have had sort of quantitative easing, asset price inflation for the last 10 years. And so like some getting some money to the non-wealthy and equalizing things kind of balances things out, right? And obviously, you mentioned the ability to do this via crypto, crypto platforms, crypto rails, you know? Ben Bernanke says you could open up a Fed account and you could distribute that

via your crypto mechanisms, for instance. But there is an aspect that some people in crypto, I will tell you, are uncomfortable with Andrew. And I'm wondering if you could address some of these concerns about UBI. And that's, some in the crypto community are very worried about manipulation of, let's call it the money printer, okay? That is the power to mint coin. Because this power generally ends up in the hands of the wealthy elite, as we've seen in the past, who end up using the money printer to benefit themselves. There's also the concern about inflation, maybe either asset price inflation or just plain old CPI, you know, prices go up at the grocery store. What are your thoughts on these two criticisms coming out of some of the crypto community? I understand. I have friends in the community. So we have conversations about this stuff.

to me, we're already putting the money out there. We're just doing it poorly to the wrong parties. So what do I mean? The CARES Act that was passed last year was 2.2 trillion USD. A very, very small fraction of that went to people and families, 17% by one account. So 83% went where? Airlines, banks, like big institutions were just like jammed money into their pipes. and then there were a lot of people who were suffering in various ways,

even though we actually did engage the printer, as you said. So to me, right now we're in the worst of all worlds where we're like engaging the printer and the people who need it most are getting it. So I'd want to invert the ratio where if you're going to put out $2.2 trillion, I'd want to see 83% of it go to people and families who are strong. struggling during that time. So that's the point I make to folks is like, look, we're doing it. We're just doing it really, really badly and poorly. Now, the second aspect is like, does that end up pushing prices up? It would push prices up in certain categories, you know, that you can see it.

One of the major problems we have, and I've dug into what's making people the saddest, where if you look at the primary sources of inflation in the U.S. economy, it falls into three categories, education, health care and housing. And education and health care are particularly dysfunctional markets. People feel like they don't have any choice but to pay. And so the firms just say, well, how much are we going to raise prices by this year, this much? Then everyone's like, what? But then just like, well, what am I going to do, not send my kid to school or not like, get that medical treatment?

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So, Andrew, we've covered, I think, two main things, some of the problems, the institutional problems that we've seen, the problems underlying the American democracy. We've covered some of your solutions. You've got some more embedded in the principles of the Ford Party. But, you know, the two big ones are open primaries and rank choice voting, then also UBI and some other things. I want to talk to you a bit about crypto, right? Let's have that conversation. Because in reading through your book and digesting all of the information that you're put out and your goals and your initiatives, David and I, and I think many in the crypto community, can't help but see a ton of alignment. Okay. So here are the base core principles that we might be aligned on, Andrew.

First, we see the same core problems, institutional problems, systemic problems that aren't going to go away by just electing another new shiny politician representative, right? These problems are deep. They're embedded in the system. Both crypto and I think the Ford Party are super bipartisan. Crypto is not an issue that the left or the right have taken up. Or nonpartisan, you could say. Nonpartisan, yeah. Nonpartisan, exactly. There is really no allegiance. It's also a popular movement that's on the fringe. And so I remember like when you started talking about UBI in like 2017, 2018, how much on the fringe that was, right? Like everyone thought that was just over wacky town. Well, we've been there with crypto. They used to think crypto was totally wacky town, just, you know, drug dealers and, you know, shady things going on. And so we've been there and we built that from the bottom up. The other thing is we want to upgrade protocol. and we want to build new institutions. Crypto is not an industry that is trying to tear down existing institutions.

Just want to build it better over on the side. Be like, let's stand my way. Yeah, on the side. We've got these, totally. Exactly. Just please don't freaking come and shoot us in the leg or worse. This is what we want. This is what we want.

And you said this recently, which really resonated with me is, I think you were talking to Crystal Ball or somebody about, like, media. And you said, I have a theory that in the new world, people won't trust institutions they'll trust people, not institutions, they'll trust people. That is crypto, okay? So I guess I want to ask you, do you see all of these alignments? And what is there for the crypto community in the forward party? I want to make the forward party, the crypto party, truly, because I do see the alignment is very, very deep. The parallels are so strong where you have this system, you could say the political system or the financial system, that you see that it's failing and flailing in its various ways.

And then you say, okay, maybe we could do better. Maybe we, in my case, I do want to try and help the political system upgrade itself and modernize itself. One of the thing I'm for that people I think will appreciate and I referred to it a little bit earlier is term limits for our representatives, which by the way, 75% of Americans are for. And that would keep it from being such a gerontocracy where you have, you know, like folks who have been in DC for 2530. That's another protocol upgrade. And I want to make the case to legislators

that the cryptocurrency community is a force for progress, a force for innovation, a massive provider of jobs. You know, I think I tweeted something where I said, rule of thumb, if you face a trillion dollar industry that could define the future, like, don't screw it up. You know, it's a pretty simple message. It's like, guys, like, please, please, please. please, please, like, take a bit of time to figure out what the hell you're doing here, because, like, this is a very, very significant generator of jobs and value. I think that's pretty common sense. I will say to folks who are listening to this that some people listening to this are like,

oh, like, we shouldn't be regulated at all. Like, I do think that there is going to have to be, like, some kind of sit down and kind of official, almost like a detente, like a, you know, but I don't think it's realistic to say you're just going to do your own thing entirely. Like there will have to be some regulation, but, you know, you want to do it the right way. You want to do an intelligent way. And I will say to everyone listening to this is that at root politics is about incentives. And we have to just make the incentives stronger to be for crypto and understand crypto than just be someone who's like, oh, they're like these crazy dudes who are like building this like parallel financial system.

We're going to screw them while we can still screw them. We're like, we're going to like freaking kneecap them while we still got the crowbar. I mean, there are 100% of people who are thinking in those terms. You know, I think we've run across them. Yes. Yeah. So what we have to do is just make it in people's interest. You know, like it's pretty straightforward.

So if the forward party has a set of resources, let's call it millions of dollars, and then we go around to party primaries and like there are Republicans running against Republicans and Democrats running against Democrats. And that is the practical reality. Like, you know, like I'm a practical dude. It's not like they're like forward party candidates running around in these races. Not yet. And so then not yet.

I mean, you know, you got to start with what's going on out there. And so I'll call someone out. Like there's a guy named Brad Sherman who's. like a very anti-crypto. Oh, we know, Brad. Oh, yeah, yeah. There you go. Like, he's a Democrat and he, you know, hates crypto. It's like pretty much said. Like, I'll do over there Ken to destroy it, I think. I forget what his words were. And then his opponent is a woman I'm friends with named Erica Rhodes. And it's Democrat on Democrat. And so we should support Erica and say, like, hey, check it out. Like, you know, you like crypto. You get resources.

you have a better chance to win. And politicians respond to resources and incentives. Like, if they figure out, wait a minute, if I'm actually sympathetic to this industry, like, I'll get some resources, then you'll see their attitude shift. So that's the game we should play. You know, if this sounds positive, the people listening to this, give to the forward party, and then we'll give to the politicians who understand your industry. Andrew, we are increasingly finding that the crypto folk really, really care about crypto. In fact, I would say that there's an increasingly high percentage of them, that that's kind of the only thing that they care about. They're a single issue voter and very happens to be extremely well capitalized.

I also will say beyond helping candidates, which I totally want to do, like we also need to have a very high-level Washington lobbying organization that can talk to congressional offices and the rest of it. I'm here to tell you all that lobbying really works. Like, it's one reason why these industries do it. Like, these industries go in there and And sometimes they can make things happen, but more often they can keep things from happening. That's like now the Washington arrangement. It's like, I can't do anything, but I keep you from doing it too. And so this is something where the cryptocurrency community needs to play catch up.

So support candidates, yes, but also talk directly to congressional offices. And they do, again, respond to resources. I mean, you know, if you go in and say, look, like you just said, David, where you're like, we've got resources, we care. It's not enough to have resources and care. We have to do what we do, which is be smart. Go in and be like, okay, what are the pressure points? Where can we apply resources?

Where can we apply influence? And then you'll see results. I just want to share my experience in lobbying for cash relief. And so this is one of the things that we can do together, or the cryptocurrency community. And if there's someone who represents the cryptocurrency community, they can get meetings with legislators, I believe, or at least their staff.

And the staff is just as good because the staff control the policy levers very much. Like the legislator will look at the staff and be like, where am I on this? And then they'll ask their policy director for a brief. But when I was lobbying Congress for cash relief, one of the things that was interesting was like I would get, you know, my team would reach out. And like we had a lobbying operation and which we still do, by the way. And so the lobbying operation would reach out to these legislators. And one of the things that we found made life easier was like, hey, will you take a call with Andrew? Yang. And it turns out that legislators are very happy to talk to Andrew Yang because I'm

famous and they saw me on TV and I've got like a couple million followers and the rest of it. And so they imagine that if they talk to Andrew Yang, then like some, some like social media magic might rub off on them and like will, you know, like I'm like I'm someone they recognize. So my ability to get a meeting with the legislator is very, very high. And that was something that I learned, you know, like I didn't know that. But like I had calls, mainly Zoom, because it was 2020, with 65 legislators or whatnot, where just like have a Zoom with them and just like talk through things. And then their policy person would be on the Zoom. And so we'd talk through in that case, it was like, hey, you know, like cash leaf, like a lot of people in your district really like it.

It's like very helpful. Like we should probably do it. And so that is like the blocking and tackling of this stuff. But I found that having someone who they recognize. who they think has some clout, who they think has some resources behind them. Like, it makes it a lot easier to get the meeting. I want to unpack this because I think this is really, really important. Andrew, in your 2020 election campaign, you completely shifted the conversation with regards

to UBI, but more about money, shifting the conversation about money and also society. And that is something that we in the crypto world definitely need to learn how to do because crypto generally has a pretty negative stigma of with people. people that don't know about crypto. And yet it is something that everyone in crypto sees as beneficial towards society if we could just figure out how to explain it. So what lessons from your 2020 campaign about shifting the conversation, shifting the Overton window about who thinks what about UBI? What lessons do you have to teach us in the crypto world about how we can do the same? The single biggest lesson I'm going to give you, and this is in my book, is that

people listen to other people. And it was what I said to Crystal, too. So when I started my presidential campaign, it was actually called UBI 2020 because I was like, you know, I don't want this to be about me. I want this to be about the ideas. And that was a very dumb idea on my part. UBI 2020 would have been a total dud. Really. And part of it, I will confess to you all, too, is my self-consciousness at the time as like just a fairly regular guy. I mean, there was some discomfort being like, you know, yang for president. Like, it just felt a little bit uncomfortable. But I realized that was exactly what I needed to do. So if you want to try to convert people's perception of the crypto community, you're going to need a human being. You're going to need an

ambassador who then goes out there and pounds the message and can convey the qualities that you want conveyed in a way that will humanize both the community. and industry. And that's a tall order because who wants to be that guy? You know what I mean? Like, what a drag? And also because of some of like the misconceptions, people will probably be like, oh, like, look at this person. They're like out to like protect theirs and whatnot. You know, so it's, but that is genuinely, I think, what it would take. I don't know if that's helpful. Well, I mean, Elizabeth Warren just labeled us our entire industry as a bunch of shadowy supercoters. So we definitely have an uphill battle to get after. Wow. That does sound very sinister.

I guess it could have been worse in the scheme of things. It's okay, Andrew. We put it on T-shirts now and wear it proudly. It's kind of cool, actually. You made it cool. Turned into a cultural meme. Yeah. Honestly, David and I thought in this section we were going to have to pitch you on a few

things that solutions crypto could do for kind of the Ford Party platform. But here you are at the outset saying, hey, the Ford Party is the crypto platform. So maybe, you know, we get- The Ford Party is just about making things work. better, which I'm going to suggest is a crypto platform. It is. Yes. Yes. So let's talk about this. Here's what we've been looking for as the crypto community is, number one, a politician with some legitimacy and call it like, you know, clout, I guess. The kids are calling it these days. To actually talk positively about crypto, but not in a way that's like pie in the sky,

actually know about crypto enough to talk about the key talking points, right? Being able to use crypto, being able to go into detail on why crypto is good for society, not just number go up, not just a small pool of people benefit, but like the pros of crypto, because that story is not getting told in mainstream. Like, number one, that's what we want. Yeah, there needs to be like an implementation where you can frankly show the politician around the community that has been impacted in this way. Like that's the kind of shit that would work. Yeah. And the second thing we want is some policy, some ideas, like a platform on crypto. So there are all of these unresolved things, Andrew, in crypto. Like, we don't really have clarity on our taxes. No. And there's a little bit of

clarity, but like we don't really know. We don't have clarity on what's a security and what's a commodity, all right? And Hester Purse, a commissioner at the SEC, has proposed things like a sandbox for crypto. Fantastic idea. Why is no one adopting SEC Commissioner Hester Purse's idea from two years ago to create a sandbox for some of these tokens to let innovation thrive. We need that. We need some clarity from the CFTC on what's a commodity. And whether smart contracts are regulated the same way intermediary institutions are regulated. We need some clarity from FinCEN.

What we're really looking for, I think, in the crypto community is not like no government intervention, stay away from crypto, is a partnership with the U.S. government. because like we really feel like the U.S.'s adoption of crypto is like adoption of the internet in the 1990s. It's like the U.S. could be home to the next Silicon Valley. A ton of the top decentralized finance engineering teams are U.S. base. They're here, but they're getting driven out right now, Andrew, because we have a anti-crypto regulatory regime going on. And the U.S. has not proved itself yet to be a home for crypto innovation. So we'd only need a spokesperson and kind of party alignment behind this, but we also need like a policy, some like ideas to actually implement.

Like a few things to say to them, look, let's have the sandbox that was recommended. Let's give some clarity on what coins are commodities versus securities. I mean, like these things are. Exactly. Yeah, these things are relatively common sense. And the partnership you're describing, in my mind, my needs to exist because the last thing you want to do is drive this talent, this ingenuity out of the U.S. I mean, like there is a capacity here to do something really important and

profound, but there's going to be reflexive resistance on the part of regulators, really. If you're a regulator, you look at it and be like, oh, like, what are my choices here? Like, they're, they're naturally going to land on stuff that I think is going to be onerous and obtrusive, that that's going to cause problems because they'd rather do that than in their minds, like, leave all these holes. But right now, they're just not even being decisive. And if I'm you all, I think the major problem, I mean, obviously, you'd rather than be indecisive than decisive in a bad way. But like the thing that you don't have really is any kind of clarity or transparency or, like, timeline. You're just like, what the hell are we doing? We're in like this weird holding pattern.

And again, a weird holding pattern is better than them fucking it up. But at some point, particularly when you're talking about the level of value that we are now, it's like you need an intelligent approach that gives people clarity. Andrew, we've been talking about the number of ways between how the forward party and the crypto people are aligned. But I actually want to take this a step further because there are a number of drums that you've been beating, policies that you've been advocating that I actually think that you might. not be able to do without crypto, or at least it's going to be significantly easier if you do it using crypto infrastructure. And one of the visions that you've had for the world I want to tap into now

is the concept of a social currency or social credits. Can you talk about your vision for what a social currency is? There are a lot of problems in American life, but one of them is that jobs are disappearing. And people would all the time come to me when I was talking on the presidential campaign. They're like, look, you know, a job isn't just the money. It's community, it's structure, its purpose and fulfillment. I would be like, I know, I know. Like, I want those things in the worst way. And so the problem we're going to face is that there are going to be more and more Americans

that are on the outside looking in. And if you are brutally honest, you would say, look, if we're just going to judge this person based upon the monetary value of their time, like, they're going to be more and more people where you're like shrug, look, like, I can have AI. do the call center job you used to do. And so, like, you know, what choices are we going to have? And if we just let the market take it to the extremes and you're going to wind up with like some very, very, like, terrible situations. And so one of the things I wanted to do, I still want to do, is create more touch points in the economy for people who do things that we're excited about,

that paying them dollars for, you know, could be one approach. But maybe we can also reward them with some new currency that they can cash in in their local businesses or at their local nonprofits. And it gives you, you can think of it as like an Amex points for like volunteering or something along those lines. There was a practice called time banking where if I do something for you, then I get like essentially an hour that I can then pass to someone else to be like, hey, like do this for me and then they get the hour. It's really cool.

And so the goal is to create new opportunities for people where they're able to help someone in the community based upon something that they can provide that might not be like the highest order activity in the world. Honestly, it could be like babysitting, like lugging crap out of your house, like whatever it is to try and create more touch points for people. And I think there are ways to do it that don't involve money because a lot of these things that you are asking people to do, I think it would actually work better if it wasn't. just cash, you know what I mean? Like, where if someone's volunteering in a nonprofit or tutoring, you don't necessarily want to be like, here's, here's five bucks. Whereas if you give them some new form of currency, then it would serve the same impact, and then people would both value it and monetize it in different ways. So, Andrew, I think that this same exact vision for the world is being executed by what in the crypto world, we're calling the world of Dow's, which are

Decentralized autonomous stories. Yeah. I love it. They're working on a forward Tao as we speak, I think. Wow. Where some folks are coming together to say, where they, you know,

I mean, they ended they're very fast. So they've already read my book and we're like, hey, we should make this happen. And oh, by the way, Yang,

we don't really need you to do anything because, you know, like that's the beauty of the Tao. Right. Right. So that is absolutely phenomenal. And for listeners who are tuning into this show

and have not heard yet of Tao's, like Andrew said, it stands for digital autonomous organizations. I kind of think it's a terrible name. I think that really they should be just called digital organizations. But the power behind these digital organizations is they all centered around a token that they minted, a new currency that is an internal currency to that organization. And that internal currency can be passed around as people contribute towards the organization. And so we are using this crypto infrastructure to mint new coin.

and that coin is a collectively shared currency that people pass around as they contribute and then in theory the value of this currency also reflects the value of the organization. And so in the crypto world, we actually think that we found a way to make sustainable wealth generation that is human-oriented

rather than like corporation or like, you know, monopoly-oriented. And I think that this actually, this blossoming Dow ecosystem, which is generating a ton of excitement inside of the crypto world, hopefully we can find a way to export this same infrastructure that we've created, this wealth generation infrastructure

towards the rest of America and the rest of the world. And it also represents kind of a form of UBI. If we can mint new coin, that's not the dollar, and actually send that to people's wallets using these very efficient crypto rails and then have the value of these things be associated with the power of the organization that they represent. And these organizations are permissionless to enter because anyone that feels like they can contribute can enter them, we think that this very much aligns with a lot of the drums that you've been beating for the past few years. I couldn't agree more.

It's such a wonderful vision. It's perfectly aligned with this social credit that I described in my last book. Yeah, let's make it happen. You know, one of the things I do want to try and close on for people is this is like the realization I had. Like hopefully after listening to me talk for a while, it's like, oh, Yang reminds me of some people I know. Like, I'm like, you know, I don't think I'm that dissimilar from a lot of you. And I made the ridiculous decision to run for president a number of years ago, in part because I had this very strong conviction that some of the problems that were coming down the pike, you would actually need the government to get a handle on.

You know, and you can be anti-government. Totally get it. But one thing I'm going to suggest to folks listening to this is like, you can't ignore politics anymore. And there may be, you know, a sign of that. The basic one is like, well, we can't ignore politics because they're just going to come and, you know, like do something really dumb. Like, that's a fine reason not to ignore politics. You know what I mean? Like, there are both unsolved problems and also interventions you want to try and make more intelligent and rational.

So whether it's through me and the forward party, whether it's through some other mechanism, you're a massive community and you're going to have to do something. I know that you haven't relished in the past, which is kind of stick your head in and figure out what the hell is going on with government. Certainly, I'd love to be an asset and an ally in this, but I do want to suggest to people that, you know, I think now is a time. Like, you know, like it's been played out over a particular period of time, but like now, now we're going to have to do it. And it's part of the maturation and modernization of the community and the industry, in my opinion. I agree. Now is the time for crypto to get a bit more political. Now's the time for politicians to get crypto, I think. Both are true. I like that. Crypto get more political and political politicians get more crypto. That's a very

fine recommendation. Well, on that note, I guess maybe this dovetails into one of your chapters and something we've been discussing earlier, one of the problems is big tech kind of owns your data, right? And the idea with crypto is you own your data, right? Ethereum, for example, is a digital property rights system, and all of the digital data that you generate on Ethereum is yours as a user. And I guess in the spirit of politicians getting a bit more crypto, we actually had, we heard right before a couple days before we recorded this podcast. People found out that Andrew Yang was coming on bank lists. And there was one member of the crypto community who was super excited. He'd actually purchased a, you might call it a domain name, Andrew.

So, you know, in the internet world, this would be like a dot com. In the crypto world, we have these unstoppable domains called dot-eith domains, an E&S. Love them. Okay. I think, did someone get me? Someone got you. I'm going to show you this. Someone got you a sweet, a sick.eith.

I'm going to show you this. Andrew Yang. ETH. This is the Ethereum Name Service. I'm going to do a search on this. This is the individual that owns it right here. We only know this address. Actually, we're

in touch with the community. And he said prior to this meeting, hey, if Andrew Yang comes on the podcast, I want to give him Andrewyang.eath as a domain name. Thank you. I love this so much. I'm really grateful. I have

historically been a little bit slow to get various domain names. So I had to get Andrew Yang.com off of another Andrew Yang because there are a lot of us. So this means a great deal to me. I realize how special it is. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This is reserved till 26, Andrew. And we can coordinate off the call with some of your people and find out a way to make sure you get this your eth address and can connect. I want it real bad. Yes, thank you. Andrew, this is your passport into Web 3, instead of having an email and password to log into Facebook or Twitter. In the world of crypto, this is your login information, and this is how you retain rights over your data.

And also, if you want to play in the crypto-twitter games, this is also if you're an Ethereum person, you put a .eath at the end of your name to signify your tribe. You know, I'm so grateful. I feel like you guys just gave me the keys to an internet castle. Well, this is awesome. It's not us, Andrew, to be clear. It's not David or myself.

Somebody from the community has stepped up. who he believes in the platform. Thank you. Thank you, community. I love you. Shout out to Brantley Milligan of ENS. That's who. Absolutely.

So, Andrew, I guess as we bring this to a close, I mean, this has been super exciting to talk to you about. I think there's a kindred spirit here in the forward parties platform and the crypto platform. And I see lots of opportunity for collaboration moving forward. I guess we've talked about some dark things, though, throughout this conversation, right? You use the term even civil war, you know, political violence. I've heard you say, and these are very real threats. But I think you are an optimistic person by nature, or you wouldn't have written the book, you wouldn't have run for president, you wouldn't have

talked about solutions to some of the problems you see in the future. Leave us with some optimism here, Andrew. What makes you optimistic about the 2020s? The cryptocurrency community is an example of something that does get me excited, where no one could have imagined it arising. to this size and scale and impact over this last number of years. And I do think that you all are something of a sleeping giant, that if you decide to get involved in a particular direction, you can do just about anything under the sun. And I want you all to use that ability,

one, to make sure that your industry stands a test of time and the government doesn't do anything dumb. But that also to build a version of the future we'd be excited about. I mean, I am very, very concerned about the future, certainly, of the U.S. I mean, you can see signs of degradation anywhere you look. But I'm also someone who's seen incredible things arise out of nothingness. You know, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I saw a national company to start out as one tutor in a Starbucks.

I started a national nonprofit with nothing but a PowerPoint deck and, like, a bit of resources. And then it became a multi-million dollar organization that touched thousands and thousands of lives and created thousands of jobs. So, like, I've seen the magic. You've all seen the magic, too. Like, you've seen things created out of thin air that have immense value and have changed lives. Like, you know that this has a potential to change hundreds of millions of lives. So let's do it.

Let's get it done. I mean, it's not going to do itself. That's for a damn sure. So it's like the spirit that you all embody and are channeling, that's what gives me hope, truly. Well, Andrew, I think the last aspect of alignment between the crypto world and the Forward Party and what you've been saying for the past few years is that everyone in the crypto world is extremely optimistic. And I think it's because of the future that we are trying to collectively build here gives us reasons to be optimistic. Let's build that future. Let's do it.

Yeah, I love it. Let's build that future. And I do hope that everyone gravitates towards optimism. And Andrew, I volunteered for your campaign in 2020. And I am extremely optimistic about also helping support the Forward Party in 2022 and beyond. Thank you, David. Thank you, Ryan. You two are tremendous. And yeah, let's make this conversation, like a bit of an historic occasion. I got Andrew Yang.e. The crypto community and the forward party have linked up. Hopefully we'll be able to look back on this as something that helped shape our future for the better. Thank you both so much. You're welcome, Andrew. Thank you for joining us. And of course, whenever you have a historical occasion in crypto. You have to make an NFT out of it. So maybe some listener will make an

NFT out of this historic occasion and commemorate that. I love it. The three of us go like putting our heads on like this and like, you know, it's like some freaking spotlight shining down. Let's do it. Let's do it. Absolutely. Andrew Yang, thanks for joining us on bankless. We appreciate it. Thanks so much, guys. Action items for you today, bankless listeners, number one, go check out Andrew Yang's book Ford. I've got it sitting on the back of my bookshelf. Fantastic read. if you're into some of the things that Andrew talked about today. You can also check out the Ford Party platform. We covered two of the core tenants of the platform. There's six total. You can check out the platform policies. If you're feeling the vibe, you can donate.

And who doesn't want to donate to a party that is going to get behind crypto? So we're looking forward to seeing that from the Ford Party in the future. And of course, if you are new to bank lives, you're just listening to this for the first time. I'm Ryan. I've got David here's my co-host. You got to subscribe to YouTube. You got to subscribe to the podcast. You have to listen to episode 55 where we talk about the bankless journey. This will get you on the right track in understanding crypto. Ping us on Twitter if you want more advice at bankless headquarters, of course, HQ.

Risk and disclaimers, guys, this is the part where I tell you, none of this was financial advice. It wasn't even political advice, really. Eth is risky. Bitcoin is risky. DFI is risky. You could definitely lose. what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but thanks for joining us on the bankless journey.