Making Sense with Sam Harris - #236 — Rebooting New York City

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

Sam Harris speaks with mayoral candidate, Andrew Yang, about the future of New York City. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

I am back with Andrew Yang. Andrew, thanks for joining me. Sam, thank you for having me. This is going to be like a refuge of a conversation, I think. I mean, most people listen to you because you make us smarter, wiser, more enlightened, and I feel like I could use some of that energy. Nice. Well, I hope to provide, but I'm very happy to talk to you first but before we jump into all the uh topics of interest how are you feeling you you caught covid right yes i have covid and i was hoping for the sympathy sans the suffering and it turns out i got my share of

the suffering where i've had the flu version. So just imagine a very nasty flu bug with some added wrinkles. But I'm on the mend, and I should be out and about in the next number of days, hopefully. How long has it been? When did you first get symptoms? I first got symptoms last weekend. So we're recording this on Wednesday. So it's been about ten full days now. And the symptoms started out mild and I was hopeful that I would skate and just be holed up in my room. But then I've had about a week of real fatigue and fever and flu-like experiences yeah well i guess uh all things considered that still sounds lucky but sorry to hear it you know

i i had an oximeter sam i don't know if people know this but it's so helpful just to be able to take your blood oxygen level at any moment because when you're there, you're not sure how you're faring. Then you just check and then you're like, I'm fine. Anyone listening to this, if you want to be prepared, just get a blood oximeter measure tool. It's only, I think, $20 or so. Yeah, you can get those on Amazon. There was a time when you could get those on Amazon. Or there was a time when you could get those on Amazon. I assume they've been mass produced at this point. So Andrew, you are running for

office of mayor in what is very likely the most important city on earth. I love the idea of you being mayor of New York. Let me just get my biases on the table. And it's amazing to consider New York being a kind of laboratory to experiment in how we reboot society at this point. It seems like so many things are up for review in just how we function collectively, and the idea that someone with your creative and modern take on things could be steering the fairly large ship of New York City is just, it helped launch back in 2018 when I was an unlikely presidential candidate. And we made a really powerful case around trying to advance and humanize the economy that I dare say ended up becoming mainstream popular wisdom, where, as we're having this conversation, the last I checked, 85% of Americans are for cash relief during the pandemic and a majority are for cash relief in

perpetuity, otherwise known as basic income. And I'm really eager to take principles that I fought for on a national level and apply them in New York City around fact-based governance and trying to get bureaucracies to work in a more modern and technologically proficient fashion. I can't wait to roll up my sleeves, get some incredible people on board, and try to steer New York City in a positive direction. And this race is also different from the presidential race in that it's very, I'm the front runner, which I don't think ever happened at the presidential. That's amazing.

So there's an enormous opportunity here that I hope we take full advantage of. So what's New York like now? I mean, we're still in the midst of this pandemic. I know you're probably doing a better job than California in rolling out the vaccine, but we're still under the shadow of this thing. What's happening? New York City is badly wounded, Sam. It's been devastated by the coronavirus on multiple levels. And most of your listeners know me as a numbers guy. Some of the numbers that reflect how bad it's been in New York City, over 27,000 lives have been lost, over half a million have been infected, over 700,000 jobs have been lost.

The unemployment rate is over twice the national average, in part because the city is missing 60 million tourists who used to support over 300,000 jobs. Midtown Manhattan commercial buildings are 82% unoccupied. Subway ridership is down 70%. Violent crimes are rising. 300,000 New Yorkers have left the city in terms of filing for change of address forms and just relocated. So there's just a lot of pain and suffering right now. Over 10,000 small businesses and restaurants have closed and more are joining them all the time. This is a city that thrives based upon people coming together in large numbers, on people visiting, on people eating out every night. And a lot of those things aren't happening right now.

So the adjustments have been really painful for many, many organizations and individuals and families here. I know it's been bad in California as well, but I do think New York City has special dependence on people feeling like they can come together in large numbers. Yeah, it seems to me that it's really a perfect storm there with respect to specific variables of density and dependence on tourism and retail and office space going unoccupied, and just the weather, right? You know, there are many places in the country where restaurants can start serving outdoors before they open indoors, and I know you guys tried that, but in the dead of winter, it doesn't work very well. Let's go through these topics somewhat systematically, because I'd like to get your take on each. The retail and office space problem, I mean, 82% unoccupied. I mean, one thing that

worries me is that there's the prospect that our habits have changed enough under COVID, with remote work in particular, that it's conceivable that that office space will go unoccupied, not because COVID has lingered, but because habits have changed. Do you think that's possible or likely? How do you view using all the space in New York if people's attitudes toward remote work have undergone a durable change? I think we're in the midst of a very significant cultural shift. I think organizations are going to change how they schedule in-person meetings and having people in the office. I do think that there are a couple of forces that have cut in different ways, Sam, where right now, pre-COVID, there was a tendency for companies to pile employees on top of each other in New York as well, because it was very expensive office space.

So you'd say, hey, guess what, guys? We're going to slam you into cubicles and bullpens and have people in very close quarters. So I think there are going to be shifts in both directions. I believe that some of this space will likely have to change its express purpose. But I do not think it would be realistic for everyone to say, look, things are going to go back to the way they were in terms of people using office space the same way. And frankly, in some cases, paying the same premium that they were paying. There has to be very significant adaptation, even as you're trying to accelerate the comeback. comeback. We definitely need to vaccinate everyone as quickly as possible and then give you the confidence that if you come to the office building, everyone there has been either vaccinated or tested negatively so that you feel 100% secure. Those things are necessary preconditions.

And then even if you do those things effectively, there will still be some changes that likely happen throughout many of these organizations and their lease commitments. I think I'm just agnostic as to how durable these changes are in the way we work. It's hard to imagine the same degree of business travel, for instance. Now that we know a Zoom call can actually fill the bill for what used to be getting on an airplane and spending two or three days round trip going to a meeting. I think that has got to have been reset in some generational sense. But I also think there's, as you point out, there are forces that cut in the other direction. And one will just be, I think people will want to have excuses to get together as well. I mean, I think if we can get COVID truly behind us, I think it will be an amazing time to be

opening a restaurant because people are going to be desperate to be in restaurants and bars. And we good luck getting a table in a restaurant in New York once we fully recover here. I guess the same could be true of certain approaches to office space and retail. I don't know. Again, so much shopping has moved online, but you've got to think a reinvention of retail is also possible because most of us are getting sick of living like somebody out of a Dostoevsky novel and not leaving our houses.

So once we fully get out from under the shadow of COVID, how do you picture New York rebooting? Well, street-level retail in New York is often geared towards some of the 60 million tourists. And I think that those experiences will still be very much desired when, if you visit New York City, you want a memory. You want something that commemorates and documents your visit. And people will want that experience in some way it could be that the makeup of the retail changes there have been a lot of very significant brands that invested in Times Square restaurants and whatnot in part because they they thought that it would be a worthwhile branding

expenditure and I think that's to New York City because the thought is that you can reach people from all over the country, all over the world, if you're investing in like a Times Square restaurant or something along those lines. So I do think that retail for tourists will be a constant. There are going to be a lot of storefronts that need to get new tenants. I mean, right now, if you walk New York City streets, there are a lot of empty storefronts. And it's unclear whether they're going to end up reopening on their own naturally. There have been some suggestions around having vacancy taxes for landlords to try and give them some sort of spur to make sure that there's a tenant trying to fill that storefront because it's going to

be an issue for a while. Well, let's talk about crime and homelessness because these are obviously not just problems for New York. Cities all over the country are seeing a spike in both. You know, the stories out of San Francisco are testifying to something like a free-fall condition there with respect to quality of life, again, with respect to both variables, crime and homelessness. Let's take homelessness first. Just what is the reality of homelessness now in New York, and what would be a response to it that could fundamentally change the picture? Well, the first thing you want to do is try and keep the problem from getting worse, because there are many New Yorkers who are in position to potentially get evicted if the

moratorium isn't extended, or if they don't have legal representation. It turns out if you have legal representation, the odds of your staying in your apartment go way, way up. So one thing the city should be doing is making sure that any tenant who wants a lawyer can have one. We should be trying to keep people in their homes. The city has had a program for a while around emergency rent assistance. That makes perfect sense where you spend a little bit of money trying to keep people in their home. It ends up saving the city a lot of money on homelessness services. And the homelessness problem is growing in New York City. Order of magnitude, you have about 57,000 people in shelters right now in New York.

And in some cases, New York is spending tens of thousands of dollars a head per year on providing shelter to folks because of the overburdened shelter system. In some cases, even buying hotel rooms because that was the only shelter that could be found. So this is a situation where you want to try and keep the problem getting worse, number one. And then number two, we need to develop more sustainable, affordable housing, which has been a constant problem in New York City because no one actually has wanted affordable housing to be developed in their neighborhood when the proposal comes up. They're all for it in the political abstract, but then when it was like, hey, how about your district? And people didn't like it. So one big opportunity here, there are a few things one can do. One is we should be expanding something called safe haven beds, which are beds that are provided by

nonprofits, in some cases, religiously affiliated nonprofits, that in many cases, homeless people prefer to homeless shelters. Some homeless people really do not want to go to a shelter, but they'll go to a safe haven bed. So any of those beds are worth their weight in gold, and we should be trying to expand capacity. But the other big move would be to quickly repurpose some of these vacant hotels that are going out of business right and left, frankly, right now in New York City. If you can imagine being a hotel operator right now, you're looking at 90% of your business drying up for, at this point, 10 months in a row. And so a lot of hotel operators are throwing in the towel

and the city should actually be catching that towel and saying, we'll take it off your hands and then repurpose some of those hotels to become ongoing affordable housing for folks. They're actually in many ways, ideally set up for it already. They have the plumbing, the fixtures, the infrastructure. So this is one of the only golden opportunities of the pandemic age for the city of New York. There are many of these hotel operators that actually, at this point, would take a deal just to walk away. Interesting. How do you stop a hotel like that converted to affordable housing from becoming a kind of circus of dysfunction of the sort that I imagine explains why homeless people often don't want to go to shelters because they're either perceived to be unsafe or they're just many of

the reasons why people are homeless are, you know, now concentrated in a building, right? Mental illness and substance abuse being the primary ones. I mean, obviously people become homeless for other reasons of the sheer bad luck of economic emergency or illness, plus eviction. But there's so many people who are on the street or chronically on the street due to substance abuse or mental illness. How could we make these places places where people can get the kinds of services they need and have the result be something like a remedy for the problem of homelessness? Well, number one would be to have a mixture of types of residents and families so that you could have people who just would be really thrilled about an opportunity to live in a repurposed hotel alongside maybe some folks who are struggling and so you wind up without a very high density

of folks who might be struggling with substance abuse or other issues there's also something called supportive housing where you actually have some of those services built in. And so you could have social workers or addiction counselors actually even staffing some of these centers so that there are some countermeasures in place. in place. The goal would not, frankly, be to turn these hotels into shelters in the way that would be a concentration of some of the issues that shelters right now face. It would be so that there's a whole mix of families. And people have found that actually to be a way for folks who are struggling to have a social context and be in better position to improve. Right, right. So what about crime in the city? What's happening there? I mean, there's a spike in many cities of 50% or so in the last 10 months. It's a bit higher here,

unfortunately. And also discouraging the rates of resolution, which is that the perpetrator gets caught, have been going down. That to me is a very nasty combination. You want the rates of resolution to be going up or staying constant, worst case. So we need to invest resources in trying to stem the rise and also catch perpetrators. One of the things that I always have this working theory on is that if there are, let's say, 10 robberies, that might not be 10 robbers. That could be like two robbers who just are going around robbing multiple people.

So when I see these rises and the fact that many of the crimes haven't been resolved, I think to myself, well, there are some very bad actors who are in position to strike again. And that to me has to be where you focus your resources, is that a relatively small number of people being apprehended could end up being like a significant factor in some of these rates i'm going to tell a dumb story but like it was you know this is just an experience i had um i ride my bike around new york city a lot not not a motorbike like a normal bike i've not i've not you're campaigning on harley i have i've not enough of like an 80s action hero to be riding around on a motorcycle so being safety conscious i bought a

blinker to attach to my to my bike because my blinker had run out of juice and i was kind of lazy and decided i'd just buy a new one even though there was a way to recharge the original and so I bought this blinker very nice very shiny and I put it on my bike and it was actually taken off my bike within a day like I you know I parked my bike and locked it and so my bike was locked so you know it was a little bit difficult to just take but someone saw the blinker and decided to take it off my bike like that that was the kind of thing that i don't think necessarily would have happened in another time in new york's history i think right now is like a time when people are feeling kind of desperate and so if they just something as dumb as like a blinker on a on a bike like that they might take it now when they might not

have before. Obviously, the topic of law and order brings us up against issues of social justice here that are both understandable and I also think are deeply misconstrued by many people, you know, on both the right and the left. But I do think we're, you know, post-George Floyd, so now coming on, I don't know what that would be, nine months or so, we're living through the kind of aftershocks of a kind of moral panic around policing, police violence, issues of lingering racism, notions of equality in this space that don't actually make sense when you're talking about the demographics of crime, a belief that in particular the black community is over-policed, whereas if you ask members of the black community living in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods, that's

certainly not their perception. Arguably, they're over-policed with respect to petty crime and under-policed with respect to serious crime. And in the starkest case, you have the problem of murderers just going free, crimes being unsolved, the worst kinds of crimes being unsolved disproportionately in certain neighborhoods, and yet any seemingly rational approach to fighting this sort of crime, you know, directing cops preferentially into places where more of the crime happens, can be spun as racist or, you know, otherwise optically horrific sort of any time you want. And people are so sensitive to this that I think we're right to fear that in many cities, I don't know if New York is an example, but in many cities there's something like a Ferguson effect that has happened here,

which is where cops kind of stop policing in areas where the inconvenient YouTube video leads to the reputational destruction of the cops involved or the police force that's supposed to be solving crime in these neighborhoods. So it's a hard problem to solve, and just from a PR point of view, whatever is rational to do in terms of fighting crime and improving people's lives. And as you know, Michael Bloomberg had his own adventures with Stop and Frisk. How do you view solving this problem or ramming through it or ignoring it? I mean, what is the approach to fighting a resurgence in crime in New York in a way that actually fights it as efficiently and as sanely as possible? I mean, the NYPD has had a number of real issues that predated George Floyd in the summer.

that predated george floyd in the summer there was a gentleman named eric garner who was publicly choked out and lost his life and i don't know if you remember this was a number of years ago but that there were nba players wearing like i can't breathe a number of years ago for Eric Garner. That was New York. The NYPD spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year settling civil lawsuits against it, which I take as a very, very terrible data point on so many levels. One, because if you can imagine the city of new york spending hundreds of millions on anything like the last thing you'd want to spend it is on settling lawsuits against cops who've done something wrong the the second thing is that if you're losing a couple

hundred million dollars worth of lawsuits a year that probably means that the level of harm might even be a multiple of that, because a lot of the times I'm sure no one's actually getting sued for something that they're doing wrong. So there is a genuine cultural problem where the NYPD is concerned that I think extends to some and not all of the officers. When I talk to officers on the street, some of them, frankly, seem like exactly the kind of people that you want policing their community. When I was in the Bronx, there was a team. It was like a Latino woman and a black male cop patrolling.

It made you feel like, okay, these are people that actually even represent this community. There has to be an ability to focus on lowering rates of violent crime and bringing up resolution rates and simultaneously not incurring hundreds of millions of dollars of lawsuits for civil rights abuses or having well-publicized issues where your officer did something that people would find objectionable. And I do not think that it is impossible to do two things at once, which is bring down violent crime rates and try to address and reform a culture that has definitely demonstrated some excesses. And the excesses have been demonstrated very, very recently. You know, like there were issues around NYPD responding excessively

to various protests just a number of weeks or months ago. So it is a complex issue, but you have to be able to tackle both the things at once. And I think they go hand in hand, because if the public knew that police were bringing down rates of crime and catching perpetrators, I think public trust would improve. Yeah. I mean, there's just so much confusion on this issue that it's very difficult to sort out people's intuitions here. I mean, you just take the Eric Garner case. The thing that was so obscenely wrong in that instance was that the cops were trying to enforce that law in the first place, right? I mean, just the effort to enforce a don't sell cigarettes on the street law led to an escalating violence that he was

absolutely resisting arrest. I mean, once you try to arrest somebody and they say, you're not going to arrest me and they're going to physically resist, well, then the cops are all of a sudden in this escalating use of force scenario where things can obviously go wrong. And if somebody just reaches into his pocket at that point, then you have a cop having to make a split-second decision whether this person is going for a gun or a knife. It's chaos.

And so you can't have idiotic laws that put cops on this continuum where decisions are being made about whether to effectively kill someone. And the war on drugs generally has put us in this spot for now decades, where cops are executing no-knock raids, and sometimes they get the wrong address. And you probably don't have this problem as much in New York, because I would imagine the rate of gun ownership is, you know, legal gun ownership is almost non-existent.

So there's not the same problem with people, with cops kicking in the wrong door and then getting into a shootout with somebody who thinks he's defending himself. But it really does start with having some bad laws being enforced in many cases. Why can't we simply focus on the problems that are totally uncontroversial, like violent crime and including things like robbery? I mean, it has to be at the top of everyone's list of things that need to be enforced. And that is something that I believe I'm going to help

effectuate as mayor, that we can decriminalize or frankly relax enforcement around certain forms of recreational drug use. I've already targeted opiates as an example of something that I don't want to be prosecuting. I've also championed decriminalizing sex work because to me, like police should be dedicating energies to more serious crimes that actually concern the public to a higher level. And so you're exactly right, Sam. I mean, these are things that we may be able to make happen in New York City as early as next year. Yeah, it would be amazing. Again, it's useful for people to consider how much bigger than a city

New York is, really. I mean, it is a... Well, one of the things I tell people, Sam, all the time is that if New York metro area were a country, it would be the 11th biggest economy in the world right after Canada. So the amount of impact that we can have is really vast. It's important to get right because, you know, the failure of New York, you know, for that very reason would be a very bad sign, right? I, because the failure of New York for that very reason would be a very bad sign, right? I mean, the failure of New York on some level is the failure of civilization, given how important it is culturally and economically. A proper renaissance in New York, where we connect all these dots correctly and reboot as quickly as possible. That would be amazing. It would be amazing to generalize those lessons to other places.

Where does UBI fit in here? People will be familiar with, I think, your campaigning for president on this plank. Perhaps you might want to say something about it for anyone who isn't. But is there a scope for a UBI experiment in New York? A universal basic income, I think most of your listeners are familiar with as a policy where everyone gets a certain amount of money to meet their basic needs. I was championing $1,000 a month during the presidential campaign, which now doesn't seem like enough given the pandemic. I think people are now advocating for $2,000 a month for everyone, which now doesn't seem like enough. Given the pandemic, I think people are now

advocating for $2,000 a month for everyone, which seems very reasonable to me. New York City is going to be facing budgetary shortfalls for the foreseeable. So we're going to have to be very targeted. I've proposed a cash relief program to alleviate extreme poverty among the half a million or so New Yorkers who right now are at that level and we can lift them up out of extreme poverty and do so in a way that I believe is going to end up saving the city hundreds of millions of dollars because of the expenses that the city incurs when people end up in our institutions in various ways, whether those be shelters or other forms of safety net that sometimes people find themselves in worst case scenario,

you know, like a prison or another institution. So this billion dollars in cash relief, I believe, could serve as a template, because it's going to be the biggest program of its kind. And my hope is that we can augment it with private philanthropic resources among folks who are looking for innovative ways to fight poverty. I also want to take some of the monies that we put into people's hands through something called the IDNYC program and have it be funneled through locally owned small businesses because of the scale of the New York City economy. I think that there are ways that we can actually have more of the value flow through the hands of folks that we're also trying to help recover or in some cases stay open. Yeah. What is the role for philanthropy here? We were talking about a winner-take-all kind of economy before COVID,

but COVID has certainly accentuated that in ways that I guess are unsurprising but were probably unforeseeable because no one was really thinking about the consequences of a pandemic. So, I mean, we've seen some businesses absolutely decimated through no fault of their own. As we've mentioned, restaurants, no matter how successful they were before COVID, just got crushed. But there are people who have made tens of billions of dollars, individuals who have made tens of billions of dollars, even hundreds of billions of dollars in a couple of cases over the last 10 months. in a couple of cases over the last 10 months. And I'm just wondering, it just seems like, again, New York is a singular place. I think you really could make a pitch to some of the wealthiest people in our society, whether they have roots in New York or not, to make a major

philanthropic push to do something amazing there. Yeah, that's very much the vision and the plan where if you want to try to address poverty in the biggest city in the country, in one of the most important cities in the world, and you want to work hand in hand with the city, then this is your opportunity. And the city is going to put forward a billion dollars. But in my mind, that should be just the beginning. And you can easily imagine individuals stepping forward and saying, I want to demonstrate that poverty is something that we can defeat if we decide to do so. And I have a number of other anti-poverty plans that are related. One is trying to get people high-speed internet. 29% of New York city residents don't have high-speed

internet right now. And so you can imagine some of them trying to have their kids learn from home. 12% don't have a bank account. So they're subject to check cashers, moneylenders, and pawn shops, which sometimes charge you serious rates. So there are different ways that we can combat poverty. And I hope to make New York City the proving ground for a lot of these ideas. You said before, Sam, that New York's comeback is vital. I don't have any illusions in that. There is no guarantee that New York comes back the way that we want it to. I think there's a lot at stake. I believe that I can help dramatically increase the odds of New York coming back. But one of the ways it's going to come back is if we're willing to invest in innovative ways and programs that get people excited and that we're able to access resources that don't fall directly under city agencies.

That's one reason why I'm excited to run for mayor is I want to present a vision of New York City that different types of people will get excited about that, frankly, would not ever set foot in City Hall. Yeah, innovation is really in your DNA. So it's great to think about taking a non-standard approach to so many things here, and non-standard in a way that's not the mere wrecking ball of, you know, being a Trumpian outsider, right? We've tried that on a national scale, but non-standard in not being captured by, you know, all of the kind of the legacy code that is making it impossible to innovate, to have a truly fact-based and well-informed discussion about how we move forward on all these fronts. I think you're the guy to do that. And yeah, so wait, when's the election? Is the end of June? This is the primary? June 22nd is the Democratic primary, which is

essentially the whole kit and caboodle, given that it is New York City. And we are in great position to win, but we could certainly use people's support. This is a very fast race. It's a sprint. And we need to raise as much money as possible by the March 11th filing deadline, which is when we're going to file our first fundraising. So if anyone wants to support,

you can go to andreyang.com, which will direct you to the campaign website. Any contribution would be enormously helpful. We're in a very fast fight for the future of New York City. And I got to say that anytime I'm on your podcast, Sam, which hasn't been that many times, but like it, it does feel like another, another benchmark or another chapter. It's like, I feel like I'm this political figure that you helped cultivate and create. And,

and I'm still fighting, you know, it's like the, the vision is still very similar, even if the context is changing from the White House to, in this case, Gracie Manchin in New York City. I certainly hope that when you become mayor of New York, that you take advantage of the national spotlight there. Because again, the success of New York, this really is a unique moment. We have been

success of New York, this really is a unique moment. We have been reset so fundamentally as a society and are just grappling with what that means. And New York is the fulcrum of our swing into a full recovery or into the failure of that, I'm old enough to remember that it was possible to have a New York that was really screwed up. I mean, back in the 70s and 80s, and I forget what year New York really turned around with respect to violent crime and just kind of infrastructure sanity. I mean, just like, you know, picking up the trash. But there were years there where New York really had just fallen off a cliff and you have these bad movies, Charles Bronson movies, being inspired by how grim urban life had become there. So it's possible to screw up and there's no question this is an inflection point.

So we need smart people like yourself to figure out how to reboot from here. And so, yeah, I wish you the best of luck, and I hope people will support your campaign immediately. Before we close, Andrew, I want to ask you a couple of big-picture national global questions just to get your take. Because I went out on Twitter and asked for questions, and we got a long list. But there were many on the point of just what you think we should do with respect to big tech now. I mean, how do you view regulating big tech and our public conversation and all the anguish we've experienced pro and con on that topic? I think that we need to regulate big tech much more intelligently. And I've been very frustrated that a lot of politicians have just gotten accustomed to

grandstanding and trying to score points for cable news, while the essential issues just remain completely unaddressed the the insanity of having at this point like a near trillion dollar industry being regulated by section 230 of the telecommunications indecency act that was written in 1996 before Facebook even got started. And then in DC, they're still looking at it, like fighting over what it means. And it's like, no one could possibly have known what the internet was going to look like in 1996. You know, it's 25 years later. Instead of yelling at tech companies for not doing something you like or

don't like, try and come up with a genuine regulatory framework that balances what you think the public's interests are. One aspect of that should be trying to respect our data rights as human beings. Because right now, our data is getting sold and resold for hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And that cost is not just economic. It's actually in human agency. It's in public trust. We're getting packetized ourselves and sold to various advertisers in ways that also undermine

the public good. And our government has been completely absent on this. I think California's privacy laws are some of now the best in the country, that the newest rule is for there to actually be a dedicated privacy protection agency in California. It's almost like some kind of data cops. It makes me very happy. for there to actually be a dedicated privacy protection agency in California. It's almost like some kind of data cops. It makes me very happy. I hope they get a really cool uniform and sigil.

But other states should be following suit, and the feds should be following suit. California actually is ahead of the curve on this. And what about with respect to our politics? How do you think we could improve a system that is now, it's hard to characterize how ramshackle it appears? First of all, the fact that we can't seem to hold an election that the country can trust the outcome of. national conversation about improving our politics and the actual infrastructure that allows us to deliver political results going forward. Sam, I'm so glad you asked this because I actually worked on a book that's on this topic that's going to come out in the late summer. Oh, nice. But I'll send you the manuscript because it's been on my mind. But I'll let your listeners Oh, nice. reduce polarization. It will free legislators up from the fear of being primaried, which right now is guiding some very extreme decisions. Right now, over 80% of elections are predetermined in terms of whether it's going to be Democratic or Republican. And so most voters don't actually

have a genuine choice in their representation. If you have ranked choice voting, it decreases negative campaigning. It gets rid of the spoiler effects so no one can be accused of wasting your vote. Andrew, maybe explain how ranked choice voting works because I think many people won't be familiar with the logic of it. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. I got so excited. Yeah, yeah. No. New know, New York's mayoral race is ranked choice voting for the first time, too. So this is very relevant. But the way ranked choice voting works is that the winner has to get over 50% of people's votes, which use that as like a starting point. And the second thing is that you can rank more than one candidate as someone that

you'd like to see win. So use the mayoral race as an example. Let's say there are seven candidates. You can rank me first, and then Scott Stringer second, and then Maya Wiley third. And then what happens is when they count all of our votes, if no one gets up to 50.1% at the top line, then they get rid of the bottom most candidate. And then they reassign that candidate's votes based upon that person's second choice or that that candidates, you know, second choice votes. So then that person's votes get reassigned and you repeat the process over and over again until someone gets past 50.1%. So in this way, you can actually vote for whoever you want as your first choice and have no fear that it's somehow going to result in someone you detest winning because you can just rank your second choice person. And then if your person ends up being one of the bottom performers,

your votes will just flow through to your second choice. Right, right, which is a huge deal. I mean, because the Ralph Nader effect is a problem. And to be able to completely circumvent that issue of there being a spoiler and a wasted vote would change a lot, you know, if nothing else changed. And here's the wild thing, Sam, is that in 25 states around the country, you can actually activate a referendum for ranked choice voting simply through a ballot initiative that requires a number of signatures. And in some states, it's actually a relatively modest number of signatures.

Two states have already adopted ranked choice voting and open primaries. And those two states are Maine and Alaska. But there are another 23 states that have valid initiatives where all it takes is some animated citizens and a bunch of signatures, and you could actually transform democracy for the better. It's very exciting. This, to me, is something that has enormous potential to decrease the polarization that is making us less and less functional. Well, Andrew, I will let you go. I wish you a swift recovery from COVID and a thoroughly successful campaign. And I look forward to, on the other side of a vaccine, being in a crowded restaurant with you when you are mayor of the city of New York. It's a date. I will host you. We will go to whatever show that you had a hankering to see. We'll have the best cuisine in the world. And then we'll have the after-dinner drink at Gracie Mansion to celebrate the renaissance of New York City.

This is a beautiful vision, Sam, and I'm definitely going to fight for it. Nice. Wouldn't that be something? Yes, I will, sir. Thank you so vision, Sam, and I'm definitely going to fight for it. Nice. Wouldn't that be something? Well, yes, I will get it. Thank you so much, Sam.