Making Sense with Sam Harris - #262 — The Future of American Democracy

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

Sam Harris speaks with Andrew Yang about the state of American democracy. They discuss Andrew’s run for the Presidency, the humiliations of campaigning, the manipulation of politics by the media, Andrew's run for the mayor's office in NYC, the power of bad incentives, open primaries, rank-choice voting, the Forward Party, the weakness of a two-party system, inequality, the child tax credit, enhanced unemployment, UBI, worries about inflation, and other topics. 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.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Thank you. Okay. Okay. Today I'm speaking with Andrew Yang. Andrew has a new book just out today, I believe. The title is Forward, Notes on the Future of Our Democracy. And he also has a new political party, democracy. And he also has a new political party, the Forward Party. And in today's podcast, we cover all of the relevant experiences and issues that led him to write the book and found the party. We cover the obvious brokenness of our political system, the importance of things like open primaries and ranked choice voting as a means of reforming it. We talk about his experience running for the presidency and for the job of mayor in New York City. Very different experiences. And we cover many other interesting issues here, politically and socially. Anyway, it's always great to speak with Andrew, and I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

And now I bring you Andrew Yang. I am back with Andrew Yang. Andrew, thanks for joining me again. Sam, it's great to be back with you. Anytime I talk to you, something good is going on. We're going to launch you in one direction or another every time we speak. That's what I'm getting used to now. First, we should mention at the top that you have a new book. The title is Forward Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, which is essentially your memoir of being a presidential candidate, which had to be a fascinating experience, and it comes across in the book. And then basically your pitch for the ways in which we can change our politics and the role for the forward party in that conversation. And so I think we'll save that final piece for the end. But let's talk about the

nature of the problem. You say very early in the book that democracy itself is losing legitimacy. So much of the book is a look at the ways in which our system is broken. And this brokenness relates to politics, it relates to the media, it relates to a fundamental distrust in institutions that is now spreading to catastrophic effect. And it also relates to the issue that really launched your presidential run, which is a growing concern around inequality, wealth inequality in particular, as you wanted to address by UBI, but also with respect to education and healthcare and other variables. So I think there's really three problems we could talk about before we start getting into solutions. Politics, two-party politics, the media, and inequality

in general. And I thought we could just kind of track through them and get your view on them as a candidate, maybe in both as, you know, in your presidential run, and I'd be interested to hear how the run for mayor of New York was a different experience. So let's start with politics. What was it like to run for president, and what was it like, let's take it from the beginning. I know we've talked about this a little bit, but your book is so interesting on this point. What was it like to do this when no one knew who you were? And for the longest time, that was the case. presidency and the reactions of friends and people who would support you out of some prior relationship without any expectation that you could possibly get anywhere. Yeah, take us back to that, to the beginning. Sure. I do tell some fun stories in the book about how I'd go to my son's birthday party and another dad would say, oh, what do you do? And then I didn't want to say I'm running for president because I would have seemed crazy.

So I would say, I'm in policy or I'm an author. Then my evasiveness would often not work. And then I'd wind up saying, I'm actually running for president now. And then we'd have a 30-minute conversation about that. And at the end of it, they would not sign up to volunteer for my campaign. They'd be like, oh, that's really interesting. Good luck with that. And at the end of it, they would not sign up to volunteer for my campaign. They'd be like, Oh, that's really interesting. Good luck with that. So you can imagine why I wouldn't really want to have that conversation over and over again. Yeah. And during that time, I'm so grateful to you, Sam, because you and I sat down for a conversation like this one,

and your podcast really launched my campaign in multiple ways. One, the people who listened decided to take an interest in my campaign and supported and donated, which I was incredibly grateful for. But then this Iowan who was organizing something called a wing ding was a huge fan of yours and decided to invite me to Iowa to speak in 2018 on the basis of our conversation. So you were a better friend to me than a lot of others, despite the fact that at that point we were still just, you know, getting to know each other. And you said something to another journalist that I really appreciated. You said, well, you know, I don't know Andrew that well, but he seems like a fairly normal fellow who just decided to ruin his life by

running for president. I heard that. I was like, oh, I'm so glad that came through. But the early months of the campaign were like that, where I had a vision for what the campaign could be. And that vision slowly started to grow thanks to people like you and the people who worked on my campaign. Yeah, this is one of the points you make in the book, which was a genuine surprise for me. I mean, it shouldn't have been. I've certainly noticed this process. I mean, it was all on the surface. But until you pointed it out, It was all on the surface, but until you pointed it out, I was someone who, along with I think most people, assumed that there is a kind of egocentricity and narcissism and just a search for ego gratification that is informing many presidential runs. And, I mean, that may be the case in certain candidates,

but what you make clear, again, which really should not have been surprising, but you make it so vividly clear in discussing the experience of Marianne Williamson and Joe Sestak, that the process for most people, unless you already happen to be a frontrunner for some reason or another, the process is just ego-annihilating. Maybe you can talk about that.

Yeah, you show up. My first trip to New Hampshire, there were literally two people there waiting for me. Maybe one, and one person just happened to be there and politely pretended they were there for me. And that was an entire day. I went to a rally in Iowa Labor Day in 2018 that drew 12 people maybe. And none of them were there for me either. And these were everyday occurrences. And keep in mind at this point, though I was a very, very anonymous presidential candidate, you know, I'd still done some things in my life. I'm still like a person who values his time and has a family and stuff.

So you would do things all the time that weren't positively reinforcing. And the media, as I write in the book, is a huge part of this dynamic where the media will completely sideline you if you're not one of the major candidates. And when they do mention you, they will mock you. It really is the way it goes, as happened with many other candidates and happened to me to some measure. And so when you talk about the problems I outline in the book, the media gauntlet was such a huge part of running for president. And I'm now convinced that that's core to our problems. It's core to why we can't seem to make any real progress. much. And when I think about the mocking part, I do think about Marianne Williamson, who,

as you point out, in her own life, you know, had a, you know, a very successful career. Lots of people loved her. She made a lot of money. She had a very big platform. She ran a successful charity. I mean, she's very accomplished in her world. I mean, you might not agree with her metaphysics in the end, but she really had a very comfortable life that she didn't need to screw up. And then she runs for the presidency and is immediately framed as a kind of punchline. And I think you could have predicted it with something like 100% certainty that that would have happened. But that version happens.

But then there are the people who have a fair amount of gravitas in terms of their biographies where there's no obvious joke to make at their expense, but they're just utterly ignored by the media. And for you, you fell more into that bin. And there were some egregious, I mean, the example of, maybe say something about Joe Sestak for a second, because, you know, I wrote in the margin of your book, when you mentioned him, I literally wrote, who? Question mark. Because I have never heard of Joe Sestak, right? So... Did you then Google him and look him up?

No, I haven't yet. I'm a blank slate apart from what I read in your book. Give me a little color on Joe for a second. Joe, as a PhD from Harvard, was an admiral in the US Navy, was entrusted with thousands of lives, and was a two-term member of Congress from Pennsylvania. So he's a very, very serious person who had spent decades in service and had put his life on the line for the country. When he decided to run for president, it was like he didn't exist. And it was somewhat mystifying.

I spent time with Joe. So that's another thing that happens on the trail, Sam, is that I have hung out with virtually all of the other candidates in union halls and people's driveways and at the fair and the steak fry. So you do get a sense of people. And I have spent time with Joe and Marianne and many others. But Joe is a great guy, a great man, a real patriot. He does have a lot of gravitas where he's commanded thousands of people. The media treated him like a non-entity. And because he's a committed individual, he even walked across the state of New Hampshire as a way to try and generate attention for his campaign, completely ignored. And when it was mentioned, it was mentioned as kind of a look at the crazy person sort of thing. I thought that was deeply unfair because, you know, again, if you look at Joe's record, he's a very serious individual

who should have been given a fair hearing. Yeah. And in your case, there was some fairly stark and egregious efforts to ignore you, literally like fundraising, if memory serves, there were like fundraising graphics where you're showing the candidates who had raised a certain amount of money or gone up in the polls enough to make debates, and you were left out where people who had raised less money and were ranked lower than you were left in the graphics. This happened most on MSNBC. How much of this, I think you uncovered at one point that there was a policy that you should just not be talked about, you know, how much of this was inadvertent and how much of it was actually an explicit effort to disappear your campaign. It happened consistently enough where you really

could not chalk it up to neglect or incompetence or omission. I think the exact count was a dozen times. And we heard later from a producer, Ariana Picari, who was at MSNBC during that time, that she was given a list of candidates not to ever invite on the show or interview, and I was on that list. So there was definitely a decision made at some point. And if you wanted to hypothesize, I believe that there is an ownership structure at MSNBC where you could draw a pretty direct line to people who were backing Joe. But at the time, I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. And it was only later in the campaign when I had just gone through a debate that MSNBC had moderated where they clearly wanted nothing to do with me, where I decided to say, look,

I'm not going to appear on MSNBC unless they start actually treating us fairly. And at that point, they completely omitted any mention of me from the race for the following month plus during really the final stretch of the campaign. So it was an important time. It was most stark when I actually made the seventh debate stage, which was a very significant piece of news. I was the last non-white candidate to make the debate stage. And MSNBC decided not to mention that, even though that was mainstream news for just about everybody. So there's going to be more to say about the media in a minute, because it's just an enormous problem on many fronts now. But going back to your presidential run before, well, really at any point, what was the most surprising part about this process to you? I mean, you must have had some expectations of what it would be like. In what ways were those expectations violated? It was around my treatment by certain types of institutions where I kind of

imagined that maybe some people would be excited to have a conversation about the automation of jobs and technology and AI. And some people might even be interested in or excited by my being the first Asian American man to run for president as a Democrat, like some people who really love to talk about the firsts in various categories. And neither of those things was true. It turns out that what I think of as journalistic organizations of fact did not seem to care about the decimation of millions of manufacturing jobs and the ongoing automation and dehumanization of the economy. And what it made me realize, Sam, and made me more grateful to thinkers like you, is that there is a particular discourse and language in media. There's a particular discourse and language in politics. And they aren't the discussion of fact in the way that you'd hope.

And they aren't the discussion of fact in the way that you'd hope. And I thought they were going in. And so my relative success and performance ended up being based upon all of these behaviors and adaptations that I adopted in order to try and compete. But it was very discouraging to me that it seemed like when I was talking about economic facts and figures, it was like I was speaking a foreign language. Yeah. So yeah, that's something that you go through in the book as well. I mean, just the hacks you found for a system that really didn't care to hear from you on substantive issues, but could be exploited by a dance video or a workout video. What did you begin to think, and what do you think now about this system by which we pick our leaders? We're going to get

into the political reforms you recommend, but it had to be bizarre to see that the way to get traction, I mean, the classic moment of this from years past, which has been much remarked upon, but like the moment where Hillary Clinton's campaign was transformed when she shed a tear in a diner over whatever it was. It's like the fact that the attention of the media can be swung by, I guess, the human interest component of a story without any substance. And it really can't be swung by substance, it seems. Yes, I characterize it as a reality TV show at one point during the debates. But there are narratives and characters that the media in particular is interested in enhancing and elevating. And that's really the crux of the coverage. or physical activities or whatever it was, ended up being positive in terms of our coverage and the energy. But Ezra Klein said something about how we're collapsing systemic issues into personalized narratives.

And I think that's like a reasonable characterization of a lot of the political coverage. Though there is a real agenda behind a lot of it where the media just decides to elevate certain characters and ignore others. I think ignore is their main weapon of choice when they want someone not to get anywhere, I think. And then kind of like slightly mocking snide ridicule

might be like their second weapon of choice. And then among the approved characters, then they'll constantly be trying to characterize people and talk about something around their relationships, behavior, emotions. One thing that happened to me a lot on the trail and this is very true of this process is they are constantly digging for vulnerability 99 times out of 100 if they find a vulnerability it's not going to be good for you like they're not going to be like oh this person's really human and vulnerable isn't that nice they'd be like oh look at this so that that that's one of the things that unfortunately makes politicians into automatons over time. So how is running for mayor of New York different? I mean, one is a different office, although unlike most mayor races, it does have a national

lens on it. But it strikes me that one big difference had to be that by the time you ran for mayor, you were pretty famous. You were, I think, naturally viewed. I certainly viewed you as a frontrunner without even looking at the polls because of your national platform at that point. How was your experience of being a candidate different? It was a completely different dynamic to your point, Sam, where on the presidential trail, I was continuously trying to build up energy and race against oblivion. Whereas in the mayoral, I was the center of attention essentially from day one. I will say that the media coverage tended to be quite negative or questioning, and they would chalk it up to my like the frontrunner

who was continuously under attack by other candidates through the press often because that was their best way to try and win. Yeah, and so what do you make of the fact that you didn't win? Maybe if you had to ascribe it to a couple of most important causes, what happened? front page of at least some of the papers every day. And that being the number one concern heavily favored Eric Adams because he was a police officer. Earlier, the main narrative was around

reopening and economic recovery. And those were things that people saw as a strength of mind. Right, right. I think everyone agrees that there's something less than optimal about our system as it exists. What do you ascribe the main dysfunction to at this point? How is it broken? And this is the heart of my book. The deeper I got into the machinery, so to speak, and now at this point, I would consider myself either friends or friendly with dozens of political figures, most of them on the Democratic side, because I ran as a Democrat. But you know, all of these people, and you start to get a sense of the environment that they operate within, why we're stuck, really. And so I do want to go back to some first principles, because I've been learning myself about some things that I'd taken for granted. But the core argument in my book

is that people will do what their incentives demand. And if you are a political figure today, your incentives are to generally cater to the most polarized and extreme points of view in voters in your district, because that's who's going to vote you back in. One numerical contrast that I cite is that Congress has a 28% approval rating nationwide right now, which probably doesn't surprise anyone listening to this. It's like, yeah, three out of four of us don't think things are going well. The individual re-election rate for members of Congress is 92%. So even though seven out of 10 of us are really, really sad with how things are going,

you're almost assured of re-election if you decide to run, which most of them do because they really like this job. The people that will decide whether you come back are not the mainstream public, but the 10 to 20 percent most extreme voters in either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, because 83 percent of the congressional districts are now safely Democratic or Republican. So your incentives are to be less reasonable and more ideological. And unfortunately, that's what we're seeing on both sides, which is leading us to this historic level of polarization that we all can feel that is resulting in political violence and could end up being a new civil war that ends up bringing down our democracy as it currently exists. I just want to reiterate your opening point about the power of incentives, because when

viewed from outside, there are so many institutions and so many human dramas where it's very easy to believe that the people involved who are doing these inexplicably stupid, heinous things either are sociopaths or malignantly selfish or total morons, and it's very easy to believe the worst of the individuals involved until you have some insight into the system in which they're forced to function. And if it's a system where the incentives are terrible, even very good people, very competent people, very smart people, wind up doing disastrously stupid, destructive, and even seemingly evil things. It's not to say there aren't narciss part, a story of decent, fairly competent people incentivized terribly by the system that's in place.

That's exactly right, Sam. And a result of understanding this is that we should not expect it to change or get any better. If anything, the incentives are higher now than they've ever been. And the political incentives toward the extremes are now compounded by the media, which at this point is separating us into ideological camps and ginning up support for the good guys and hatred for the bad guys. And then pouring gasoline on the whole thing is social media, which obviously is going to reward the most inflammatory and aggressive language and behavior. So we're being set up, we're being set up to turn on each other to eventually end up disintegrating in terms of the society we

currently regard as, you know, like a normal safe environment. And that's what I concluded from my journey into this, which is that these people are not bad people. Some of them are not great people. But like, for the most part, they're reasonable people responding to perverse incentives. And so then the great project becomes, how can you in real life improve their incentives? And I do want to give a shout out to you. And this is something that is a major theme of the book is that, to me, you represent the antidote in many ways, Sam. It's like, what are the, you know, media incentives for you? I mean, you're just like a highly reasoned individual. Like you don't have the same, you know, I don't think your producer is

giving you a list of people not to talk to or anything like that. You know, there's like a search right now. People are groping for trusted perspectives and voices more and more. And I just want to thank you personally for being such a huge figure for people who are looking for wisdom and truth, really. Oh, well, it's great to hear. And I happen to be in a spot where there are almost no incentives that aren't of my own making. I have consciously designed my life that way. And it's not that it's impossible to be badly incentivized even in this space, but it's much harder. And that's why I'm here. And it's a relief, frankly, to be able to say whatever I want to say and to talk to whoever I want to talk to and to not be calibrating any of that against any kind of outside pressure, even pressure from my audience.

And I don't know how much you followed me down these various byways, but whenever I've discovered that a significant percentage of my audience really disagrees with me about something, that's the one signal for me that I need to take pains not to be trained by in any way, because I notice other people being captured by their audience in various ways. I just have never wanted that. So when I discovered that a significant percentage of my audience, I never really drilled down to what it was, but it seemed like something like 20% favored Trump for reasons that I still cannot fathom. I just made it a point to not care how much pain I got from them every time I wanted to trample on Trump because it just felt important. And so it is with the equally large percentage

of my audience that is very far to the left and hates everything I have to say about wokeness and identity politics, the pain I get from them I have decided to take as noise rather than signal because it's just very important for me to preserve my freedom to say what I think is true and important rather than to be course-correcting based on what's rewarding me from my audience. And what you get on any of these pain points, and this is obviously amplified by social media, is there's so much more energy from the haters than from the people who agree with you that you can really get blown around by the noise. It's highly disproportionate. If someone's virulently opposed, it just seems like the most prominent thing in the world, even though there could be a hundred people who just silently nodded. Yeah. So we're living in the system where less than 10% of any population can really steer

the conversation on a polarizing issue because they just have so much more energy. I mean, so we've got these various activist groups on the left, and we've got, you know, all the noise that comes out of Trumpistan and, you know, the most extreme voices over there. You do get the sense that on many points, you have a lot of reasonable people that have been cowed into silence and therefore aren't influencing the conversation. And the media doesn't seem to care. I mean, the media, they just keep amplifying the extremes. Well, again, that's where their incentives are. I mean, they've figured out that their ratings will be higher and their ad revenue will be higher if they cater to a particular point of view and then reinforce it.

There was an anecdote about a cable TV producer who said, look, our people don't even regard us as news. They regard us as comfort, which then will justify all sorts of things that you might do journalistically if you're like, hey, it turns out we're not even reporting the news here. And the fact that you have to take such great pains, I mean, you're acutely aware of the kind of pressures that some of these media figures and organizations would be under. But in their case, they don't have to self-regulate to that extent.

They'll just be like, oh, what? My people like this? Let me give them more of that. And then you'll be thanked for it and paid more for it. Yeah. At the political level, what are the reforms that you think will really change the system and the pressures that are on all of the various parties here? I'm happy to say that I can use a real life example that you're going to love, Sam. This isn't my book because it didn't happen yet. But there was a handful of Republican senators who decided to impeach Trump. And only one of them is up for reelection in 2022. And that is

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. She decided to impede the Trump administration. Thank you.